What I Dislike About Living Abroad (After 20 Years in 60 Countries)

Sneak Peek:

Kristin:    00:00:00    You just realize that Murphy's Law, everything that can go wrong, will go wrong and it can go wrong more than once. If you have a 10% chance of something happening, it could happen still 10 times in a row. <laugh>

Introduction: Welcome to Badass Digital Nomads, where we're pushing the boundaries of remote work and travel, all while staying grounded with a little bit of old school philosophy, self-development, and business advice from our guests.

Wise

Kristin:    00:00:31    If you've ever had to send money abroad or pay someone in a different country, you know how expensive wire transfer and foreign exchange fees can be. That's why I've been using wise, formerly known as TransferWise for more than seven years. Now, sending money internationally with wise is between five to 13 times cheaper than traditional banks. It's also fast and easy with a Wise multicurrency account. You can manage your money in 50 plus currencies and send money internationally directly from your phone in the app. No filling out paperwork, no calling your bank branch, and most importantly, no outrageous exchange rates. Sign up with Wise today to join more than 10 million people in businesses who are managing their money across the world. With Wise, you can get your first transfer up to 500 British pounds for free by using the link in the show notes or by going to travelingwithKristin.com/WISE to learn more. That's travelingwithKristin.com/W-I-S-E.  

Kristin:    00:01:49    Hey there, Kristin from Traveling with Kristin here and today is part two of my two-part episode on what I love and hate about living abroad. So on the last episode, we started with the positives with 10 things I love about living abroad. And today we're gonna break down 10 things that I hate about living abroad. And I don't like to use the word hate. I'd rather say strongly dislike, but we're gonna go with it <laugh>. And you know, one of the things that you'll learn when living abroad or really as just as you're getting older in life, is that everything is what you make of it. And so when whether things are negative or positive, life is just a series of pros and cons and decisions and trade-offs. And so the good things that I mentioned about living abroad and then the quote unquote bad things about living abroad, uh, it just depends on what perspective you wanna take and whether the risks outweigh the rewards or vice versa.  

Kristin:    00:02:50    Whenever you're making your decision to move abroad, nothing is going to be perfect. No country or destination is ever gonna be perfect. No decision. Like there's always gonna be trade-offs in life. And so keep that in mind as I talk about the things that I hate living abroad because some of these things fall into a gray area or some of them simply compliment the good things about living abroad. And you know, you can't have the good without the bad. You can't have the dark without the light. The polarity of the world is what allows us to give meaning to things <laugh> and, and and you know, at tribute meaning and give context to the things that happen. And so you can't have the good without the bad people. Before we get started today, thank you to George from Russia who left a review for the podcast. He says, this is amazing. If you're looking for inspiration on changing your lifestyle for one of a digital nomad, Kristin's podcast is the one to pay attention to. Highly recommend. Thank you so much George, and thank you to everyone out there listening, subscribing, sharing, and leaving reviews.  

Solo-cast

Kristin:    00:04:13    So let's get into it people, we did the good, now it's onto the bad and the ugly about living abroad. So item number one, these are in no particular order except the first one. The worst thing about living abroad has to be the physical distance separation from your friends and family. I'm not the kind of person who gets homesick. In fact, I actually talk about this life changing moment when I was on a field trip in fifth grade when I was 10 years old and all the kids were lined up at the payphone to call home because they were already homesick and we'd only been gone for a few hours. And I was the one who wanted to go swim with sharks in the pond. And so this was in Key West, by the way, <laugh> for context. So I'm not the kind of person who gets homesick.  

Kristin:    00:05:06    I used to go off on adventures and running away and climbing trees, going to forests and then as soon as I was old enough getting on airplanes and going to different countries and islands and things like that. So even if you don't get homesick, it does suck to be hundreds or thousands of miles away from your friends and family, especially during a really important time in life. And actually the pandemic has driven home the significance of this point because when I was living abroad, I was not present for the death of three of my four grandparents. In fact, it was only this year that I decided to stay living in the US during the pandemic that I was within a few hours of my family when my grandma was put in hospice. And I was able to immediately drive there the same day and be with her on her literal deathbed.  

Kristin:    00:06:10    And when my first grandparent died, it was my granddad and I was driving down the road in Nicaragua to Grand Pacifica and it was at sunset. And I remember getting that phone call and just stopping and pulling over in the car and just feeling so helpless because I couldn't be there with my family. And, and so <laugh>, we were gonna start off really depressing <laugh>. I don't wanna be depressing, but yeah, it does suck to be far away if something important happens. And actually just a couple days ago, my brother got in a severe snowboarding accident where he very easily could have died. And I'm really happy that I am close and can go and help my family and help my brother during this really difficult time as it's gonna take him many months to recover. So living in foreign countries is amazing. Living abroad is an experience that I recommend to everyone, but being far, far away from friends and family when they need you or you need them really sucks.  

Kristin:    00:07:18    And it also sucks when you get homesick. The second thing that sucks about living abroad is that you miss other people's life events. So not just deaths but you miss weddings, you miss birthdays, and this is how it typically goes first, you're living abroad, it's very exciting. People back home think that you're only going temporarily, that you think that you'll be back soon, but none of you guys really know yet how long you're gonna be staying abroad. Typically it's longer than you initially plan. And so at first you might even start to see receive honorary invites to things because people don't want to exclude you from important life events. But eventually people will start asking like, when are you coming back? And like wondering if they should be inviting you to things that you're not going to come to. And then eventually they'll just stop inviting you all together.  

Kristin:    00:08:15    And this is really like really sad actually because your friends from home, they'll, you'll still be able to talk to them. Obviously you can call them, you can FaceTime them. But what I noticed in my experience is that it's like out of sight, out of mind. And so if you don't make an intention to keep in touch with the people back home, then their lives are getting busy, they're having kids, they're working. And so you have to really make that time if you want to maintain the relationship because it's gonna be more difficult for them if they're in their daily life. And then you just exit that loop and you're in another country. So this one sucks because it can hurt your feelings and people don't mean to, it's just that you're not there and you're probably not coming because you might be halfway around the world and so people don't wanna bother you to come or they just feel like you know, you're too busy or you're too far away and you can't go.  

Kristin:    00:09:17    And so even when you really would make the trip to fly back and spend thousands of dollars to go to a thing, uh, you might need to communicate that with people because they might not invite you just assuming that you're not gonna come. This also means that you won't get things like Christmas cards in the mail because nobody will have your address. I mean I don't know that many if that many people send Christmas cards anymore, but I remember uh, when I moved abroad and those E-invitees or E-invites got really popular and I started getting some of those because I never really got physical mail. Number two, you miss important life events back in your home country. And the third thing that I hate about living abroad is saying goodbye to people. So this falls under the category of temporary new friends. So one of the good things about living abroad is how many new people you meet, but the part that sucks is when they leave or when you leave <laugh>.  

Kristin:    00:10:21    And so you might make a lot of lifelong friendships but you might not see those people very often in real life. So it becomes this series of hello and goodbye. And even if you decide to live in a country for a really long time, so let's say you're not a digital nomad, you just want to semi permanently relocate to another place for a year or five years or 10 years, you might have stability in that country, but that doesn't mean that the people that you meet there won't be just passing through. So there's this whole transience of living abroad where you might be leaving or the people that you meet might be leaving or all of you might be just passing through and so you make a lot of friends but then you lose a lot of friends or you just don't get to see them again or for a really long time.  

Kristin:    00:11:16    And so that sucks. And then also the good thing about living abroad is that you get to kind of reinvent yourself in any new place. So you don't have your past weighing you down if that is weighing you down. But at the same time, you don't have a shared past with the new people that you meet. And so you start to kind of forget that they know they only know the you that they meet in this very moment <laugh> and they don't know the old you from the past and you're still you. They just don't have any context of who you were in your hometown. Or people don't know what kind of car you drove to high school and they don't know the things that you like. Like these are new friends and you don't have any mutual friends. So that is kind of a weird thing.  

Kristin:    00:12:07    Speaking of friends and meeting people, the fourth thing I hate about living abroad is dating. Well, dating is hard no matter where you live. Well see that's a belief pattern that I have. Uh, dating can be hard. I mean at least I see that in memes on Instagram. People are always making fun of the dating scene, whether it's in Oklahoma or New York City or something. So dating it, it's hard as an expat living abroad because there becomes this question of who to date. From my research, most people meet their significant others either through work or through mutual friends. But when you live in another country, especially if you work remotely, you don't have either of those connections because your work is online and you don't know anyone <laugh>. So it becomes hard to meet people in that traditional sense. So you've gotta go and put yourself out there, which is cool getting out of your comfort zone.  

Kristin:    00:13:09    But then who do you date? Depends on how long you're living there. So if you're an expat for five years, should you try to date locals or should you try to date other expats or should you try to date tourists? And then if tourists are just passing through and you really hit it off with somebody, then there becomes this decision of, okay, was that just a fling or a one night stand or now do you go move to that person's country just because you met them for two weeks and hit it off? Like how do you know? Like maybe you meet your soulmate but you don't know 'cause you didn't have enough time to spend with them. So I've lived in Amsterdam on and off over the years and I've tried to date locals, but as soon as they find out that I am just temporary in the country, they typically don't really wanna see me again.  

Kristin:    00:13:59    So one guy that I dated, he ended things because he knew that I was leaving within a month or so, at least temporarily. Like I might be back in three months, but I had to leave because of my passport. One time I met a guy on the last week of his one year trip around the world and we hit it off, never saw him again. What if I had met him during the first week of his around the world trip? Maybe things would've been completely different <laugh>. And then there was another guy who I met in Croatia that I then met again in Germany, but he lived in Australia. So hey, that complicated things never saw him again. So dating as an expat or a digital nomad is can be really complicated. It's one of the things that I don't like about living abroad because it feels harder than it would normally.  

Kristin:    00:14:55    And I also wonder if I always wanted to travel more than I wanted a traditional lifestyle. But sometimes I wonder if that is a trade-off for some people when they move to another country, they meet their significant other stay and have kids and have the white picket fence thing in that country. But for other people it just means that you don't get that opportunity because you're just always in different countries. So you never know what could have would've should have happened, but that is one of the, um, challenges of living abroad. I should add on the other hand though, some of my clients have met their future wives within the first week of moving to another country and then they never left that country and they're there like 10 years later. And my friend Joy, who I talked about in the other podcast, met her future husband while she was living abroad in Costa Rica and now they live together in South Carolina.  

Kristin:    00:15:54    So really anything's possible. I just think that it is, it can be more difficult. The fifth thing that I strongly dislike about living abroad full-time is that you stop really fitting in in your home country, but you never quite fit in in your adopted country. So I talked about this a little bit in my video about how I see the US after leaving for so many years because I feel like there is a reverse culture shock that happens when you go back to your home country, even if it's temporarily after living abroad. So you really, the longer you've been abroad, the harder it is to fit in because when you come back it's like you don't just pick up where you left off 10 or 20 years earlier because you've changed so much as a person. Um, but then in your new country, even if you learn the local language, I think that you always feel a little bit like an outsider.  

Kristin:    00:16:59    At least I have. So I fe I speak fluent Spanish, I've lived in a lot of different countries in Latin America and I've always felt like expats were this other subgroup of the culture. So even the people that had residency or citizenship in Costa Rica, they aren't seen as Costa Rican by Costa Ricans <laugh>. So there's this like parallel universe that you end up living in where you don't really fit in a hundred percent everywhere, but maybe that's okay, but that a human being, you have a strong need for community. It's just part of our DNA. So that can be challenging sometimes because you wanna fit in. It can be easier to fit in with expats in other countries because at least you have all of that in common. But I think this is why quote unquote army brats have a hard time if they've moved to a lot of different cities growing up or they've lived in a lot of different countries and different military bases because they don't really feel like citizens of their home country 'cause they weren't really living there.  

Kristin:    00:18:06    But then they don't really feel like citizens of Singapore and Germany and other places that they've lived because they've kind of just lived as outsiders. So hopefully this changes a bit in the future as more and more people become remote or nomadic or live abroad as expats and it becomes a more acceptable mainstream lifestyle choice. And the more people travel and live abroad, the more the world becomes a smaller place. So we'll have to see how that plays out in the future. Another thing that's not cool about living abroad is that you will inevitably experience discrimination or racism. You're gonna feel what it feels like to be discriminated against no matter which country you're from or what color you are. And obviously the intensity and severity of the degree of discrimination that you experience will vary from person to person. And some minority groups will be wrongly maligned in in different countries and it's not fair at all.  

Kristin:    00:19:13    But one of the things that happens when you live abroad is that you'll just ex-- you'll experience that feeling-- if you haven't experienced it in your home country before. You'll definitely experience it in a foreign country just by virtue of being different, looking different, speaking a different language. And it's okay because you know when, when it happens, it's more about the person that's doing the discriminating. It's not about you as a person. But I was just watching a video at dinner actually, I was watching a YouTube video by Asian boss or something and they were interviewing people on the streets about what they're experience was like being discriminated against in Japan. And I think that video came up because I just recently published a video about my experience living in Japan. And so now the YouTube algorithm is feeding back those videos to me. Um, so I thought that was pretty interesting seeing people from the US, Australia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, all different countries who were explaining their experience being discriminated against in Japan because Japan is quite homogenous society.  

Kristin:    00:20:33    And so I didn't experience that too much to a degree there. But um, I have definitely experienced it, um, in other countries and sometimes it's very overt and sometimes it's quite subdued and sometimes it's just by default, like by design. So if you are in a place where you don't speak the language and you're at a bar with a group of work colleagues and they're all speaking the local language and you don't speak it, you're just gonna feel left out. But in other places it's actually, like in Japan, they were talking about, you know, people would get up and not sit next to them on the train because they look different or they were afraid of them or something. So you you'll experience that at some point. And um, yeah, it's not fun. It also depends on the culture too. And you can check out, uh, safety indices and also on Nomad List, they have a metric where you can see how friendly that country is. So I think they have L-G-B-T-Q friendly gauges and women friendly, all, all different metrics. So you can actually look at different countries and see how nice they are and how accepting they are as a culture. So, you know, you'll probably experience way less discrimination in a city like Amsterdam that has 200 nationalities represented or something like that, 180 and 190 versus a country like Japan.  

Leave a review

Kristin:    00:22:11    Hey, it's Kristin. If you're liking this episode, I would be so appreciative if you could help the podcast grow by leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform or by sharing the wealth, send this episode to someone you think it might inspire or share it with your friends on social media. Badass Digital Nomads wouldn't exist without listeners just like you. Thanks for your support. And now back to the show,  

Kristin:    00:22:42    The seventh thing that sucks about living abroad is the steep learning curve that comes every time you move to a new place. So if you just move abroad to one country and you stay there, you'll only have to go through this adaptation process once, but the more often that you change countries, the the faster you'll get through this learning curve adjustment process, but the more times you'll have to go through it. So this is actually the reason that I started a relocation company was to help people avoid a lot of the unnecessary pain and discomfort that comes from moving to a foreign country. So there's just a lot of frustration because you're learning everything for the first time. And so in my episode on the good things about living abroad, I talk about how your senses come alive when you live abroad and everything is new and exciting and different.  

Kristin:    00:23:38    But then on the flip side of that, there can be a lot of frustration, a lot of red tape and a lot of waste time and a lot of annoyances. And those negative experiences while you're climbing up the steep learning curve of life in a new country are not required for you to enjoy living in another country. It's not like if you get to avoid waiting in lines at banks or government institutions or trying to use Google Translate, talking to the internet technician or waiting for somebody to come and they never show up. Like all of those kinds of things that happen. It, it doesn't really add that much to the experience of living abroad besides just, yeah, wasted time, wasted money, frustration. And it's unavoidable because there's always gonna be your known knowns and your unknown unknowns. You can plan and plan and plan.  

Kristin:    00:24:41    And if you haven't lived there before and you don't know the ropes, there's always gonna be some X factor and things that come up that you didn't expect that you'll have to deal with unless you hire someone to help do those kinds of things for you. But it's not just the quirks and things and the red tape of visa and residency processes or buying a house or finding a rental property or opening a bank account. It's not just that. It's also the day-to-day stuff, the cultural adaptation that you go through. If you're a minute late in London or in Frankfurt for the train, you're gonna miss the train <laugh>. But if you're one hour late to dinner in Mexico or Costa Rica, that's no big deal. Or if you don't even show up to something, I mean, there's plenty of times when people have said, yep, I'll be there tomorrow at 10:00 am and they didn't come for 10 days.  

Kristin:    00:25:44    So there's all of those sorts of cultural things that you, uh, need to adjust to also. So it's not just the practical stuff, but it's kind of the, the minutia of daily life that takes up a lot of energy and you'll just go through a lot of lessons. And on a related note, the eighth thing I wrote down is that you'll get ripped off a lot. It just depends on how much you travel and how many new places you go to. And this is a funny one because in the other episode I talked about how you can develop street smarts by living abroad and how that's one of the things I love about it. You become like this expat ninja <laugh> who can find your way around the whole world. But it also does suck getting ripped off. You know, nobody wants to overpay for something, no one wants to get their stuff stolen.  

Kristin:    00:26:38    One of my friends who moved to Costa Rica was eating dinner and they had all of their stuff stolen out of the trunk of the car in the parking lot while they were in the restaurant. And then the same person, it happened to them again, I think it was in Las Vegas or London, something with an L it happened again in another really big city. So outside of Costa Rica, and he was from Denmark, he was like, how many times is this gonna happen? And you just realize that Murphy's Law, everything that can go wrong, will go wrong and it can go wrong more than once. If you have a 10% chance of something happening, it could happen still 10 times in a row, <laugh>, you will probably get stuff stolen at some point. You'll overpay for stuff at some point you'll survive and you'll move on from it.  

Kristin:    00:27:30    But it's just one of the things that I don't like about living abroad because when I come back to the US I feel like I don't have to worry about that stuff as much because I'm from here, I grew up here and there's not as many risks of that kind of thing happening. The ninth thing I don't like about living abroad is the language barrier when it's in a country where realistically you know that you're not going to be able to learn the language. So if you move to a country permanently, you really should make an effort to become fluent in that language because you will learn so much more and you'll integrate so much more into that country if you can speak the language. So I remember the moment when my brain started understanding Spanish when I was living in Costa Rica and I was actually at the mall.  

Kristin:    00:28:23    There was this Tuesday night movie night. It was like two for one in the mall in Escazu. And so all of my Costa Rican friends and I went, they all were speaking Spanish all the time. It was my host family's kids and, and their friends. So like, yeah, my adopted friends and actually one of the guys at the table was talking about me in front of me. And for the first time ever I understood what he was saying and I responded in Spanish and then everyone started laughing. So we were waiting to go in for the movie to start. And that was the moment I learned Spanish. It just kind of clicked. But it, it is frustrating and it sucks to be in a country where you really want to, to speak the local language, but you can't. Like in, in Japan, I was only meant to be there for two weeks.  

Kristin:    00:29:15    I ended up there for three months, but still that's definitely not enough time to work full-time travel, see the sites and learn Japanese. I'd probably have to live there for at least a year and take consistent classes to learn it. So, you know, if you go to Russia, it could take you a while to learn that language if your, if your home language is, is English. And so the language barrier, it sucks because you do get left out of things if you can't communicate with the locals, even if the locals are also fluent in your language. So if you're a native English speaker, you're lucky <laugh> because it's the global language of the internet and it's the language of business. So you can end up in a country like Norway or Sweden or the Netherlands or Germany where people speak English, but when they're in their day-to-day life, it's really awkward to be the only one who doesn't speak the language and everyone else there does.  

Kristin:    00:30:21    And so you start to feel like you get special treatment because all of a sudden everyone has to switch into English if they wanna talk to you. But then 13 other people are speaking in the local language. And so yeah, that language barrier is really tough. So if you're gonna be hanging out with locals, and if you're gonna be in a country for a long time, definitely try to learn language, at least learn as much as you can and it'll just make your life a lot easier. Even when I was in Bulgaria, like I wish that I could communicate with the vendors at the farmer's market, for example. And I was watching an episode of Chef's Table recently where a chef from New York City moved to Bali and he went and worked on farms and worked with locals and he, he learned Balinese and he might've also learned bahasa Indonesia too.  

Kristin:    00:31:14    So that was very impressive to me because when I lived in Bali, I probably only knew a handful of words. And really as foreigners, we should make a better effort. The 10th thing I don't like about living abroad, well this one's kind of a double-edged sword, but I don't really like when people ask me about politics. So what happens is that when you live abroad, you become the spokesperson for your country and the foreign country that you're living in. So if you are the only one from your country around, people will look to you for explanation, justification, or advice on current events that are happening in your country. And you just wanna be like, listen, I'm not in my country for a reason. I can't explain what's going on there. And so that's not really a big deal, but it does kind of get old when everyone is always assuming that because you're from that country that you are a political science expert or an economist or a government advisor or contractor.  

Kristin:    00:32:24    It's like, just because you hold citizenship from that country doesn't mean that you can explain everything that's happening in your country, especially when there's hundreds of millions of people living there. So people will make assumptions about you because of your citizenship. And then they'll also ask you a lot about what's going on in your country, especially if it's the US. And related to that, I put this as a separate number 11, I don't like paying Us taxes when I'm not living in the us. So the US and Eritrea are the only two countries in the world that tax people based on their citizenship and not their country of residence. So I don't agree that with that policy, I feel like if you are a US expat and you reside in a foreign country, you should be able to change your tax domicile to the country that you're living in.  

Kristin:    00:33:22    Now I have an episode with IRS, enrolled agent Grace Taylor about the complexities of taxes for us expats. So I'll link to that episode in the show notes of this one so that you can listen to it because it's an hour long, maybe even an hour and a half. So I don't wanna get into all of the details on that, but of course there are ways to deduct taxes from another country and to credit that to your tax base so you don't get taxed twice. There's also other sorts of tax credits and perks of being an expat, but it's still not the same as changing your tax base to another country. And this situation is a big reason for a lot of US citizens who relinquish their citizenship. So I'm not that extreme, like I don't want to risk my future and how much I can come back to my home country and how much I can see my family just so I can pay less taxes because in my opinion, they win <laugh>.  

Kristin:    00:34:29    Like I don't wanna change my citizenship just to avoid taxes. I wanna be able to have freedom of where I live and where I travel in the world. And I don't wanna be restricted from my home country just because I wanna save money on taxes because my family members are more important to me than any amount of money. So that's my personal um, opinion on that. Maybe if I was Eduardo Severin and I was a founder of Facebook, I would have a different opinion and I would move myself to Singapore too. Or if I was Dan Ian's brother, I would move to the Caribbean or even Andrew Henderson Nomad Capitalist. I mean, hey, maybe I just haven't reached that amount of money where I have I, maybe everyone has a price and once they reach that they're like, okay, I'm out <laugh>. But I guess I haven't reached that, that fine line yet.  

Kristin:    00:35:21    But anyway, one thing I hate about living abroad as an American is paying US taxes when I hadn't lived there for 12 years or something. And the last thing that I strongly dislike about living abroad is that sometimes your sense of self can get a bit confused. So this is another one of those aspects that has both sides to it because living abroad helps you develop your sense of self in a positive way and it helps you develop your self-confidence and your worldview. But, but sometimes, or at least in my experience, the longer that I've lived abroad and the more countries I've lived in, I felt like more of myself in many cases. But then I have also had some kind of self-doubt and confusion sometimes because you might forget where you learned something or you might not even know why you have a certain opinion.  

Kristin:    00:36:19    You might not remember where you picked it up or if it's yours to begin with or if it's something that you acquired while living in another country. And so that can be a little bit surreal and strange sometimes. So it's not a big deal, but I did add it to the list because it is something to be aware of. There's a strange dynamic where when you live in other countries, you get to be more of yourself and you get to be more conscious about who you are in the world because you can detach from old environments, old behavioral patterns, people from your past labels that you might have had since high school or from your old job or perceptions that your family and your childhood friends have of you. So you get to free yourself from any sort of expectations that might be from your community and your home country.  

Kristin:    00:37:17    But also the longer that you're away, sometimes you just need to really be intentional about checking in with yourself and reminding yourself of, of who you are. So overall, even though I actually had more numbers of negative things on this list compared to the positives, I think the weighting of the positive aspects of living abroad far, far, far outweigh the negatives. And I wouldn't have lived abroad for so many years in so many different countries if I didn't believe that, and I wouldn't have helped so many thousands of people do it if I didn't believe that. So if you're considering moving abroad, I hope that these two podcasts have helped you anticipate some of the pros and cons and opportunities and challenges of the expat lifestyle. And if you already live abroad, I hope that these episodes have resonated with you and reminded you that you're not alone in the world.  

Kristin:    00:38:24    So if you have faced any of these challenges before or if you've ever had these moments of euphoria where you were just having so much fun in a foreign country and you wanted to share with someone about it who understood, know that there are millions and millions of us out there scattered around the world who have had a similar experience or who feel the same way. So whether you haven't moved abroad yet and you are listening to this podcast to help prepare you for that transition, or whether you're already a digital nomad and you live abroad and you're listening to this podcast to connect with someone else who understands what you're going through, thank you so much for listening. And if you have any feedback or other things that I might have left out of either of these episodes, feel free to comment on the episode over at www.badassdigitalnomads.com and you can also leave me a voice message there as well. Stay safe, everyone, be well and see you next week.  

Kristin:    00:39:38    If one of the reasons you want to travel or live abroad is to meet new people, well you're definitely not alone. But even if you're not traveling right now, did you know that you can start connecting with other aspiring and experienced digital nomads today? It's true. As you know, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And in the Badass Digital Nomads Facebook group, you can connect with 4,000 other like-minded people from around the world who all share the same values of freedom and location independence. Plus, if you wanna become part of my inner circle, you can join my Patreon page for $5 per month and get direct access to private message me. Submit your questions for my podcast guests, contribute your opinion on new content ideas, and get early access to preview all of my YouTube videos before they're published. You'll also get to attend monthly private Zoom Hangouts with myself and other patrons. We just had a one and a half hour call last night with patrons from around the world calling in from places like Bali, California, Michigan, and Nebraska. It was so much fun. And you can join us for the next call by becoming a patron today at patreon.com/travelingwithKristin. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/travelingwithKristin.