Speaker A
A few weeks back, I made a video called the Southeast Asia retirement loop that went off a bit, and I want to talk about something today: slow travel and retirement, that is just happening more and more. So, I met a couple in Da Nang
Exploring slow travel as a smarter alternative to traditional expat retirement, focusing on flexibility, cost savings, and lifestyle freedom.
Key Takeaways
- Slow travel offers a flexible, cost-effective alternative to traditional expat retirement.
- Selling property and investing proceeds can replace the need for a pension or retirement visa.
- Visa and tax complications are reduced by avoiding long-term commitments in any one country.
- Slow travel suits younger retirees or those seeking mini-retirements rather than permanent relocation.
- This lifestyle emphasizes experiences over possessions and postpones major life decisions.
What the video covers
- Slow travel and retirement are becoming increasingly popular, especially among Gen X and older millennials.
- Many people are selling their homes, ditching mortgages, and traveling long-term without settling permanently.
- Slow travelers avoid long-term visa commitments by rotating stays of 1-3 months in multiple countries.
- This lifestyle offers financial benefits by replacing traditional retirement assets with liquid brokerage accounts.
- Slow travel allows postponing permanent relocation decisions, providing freedom and flexibility.
- Settled expats maintain leases, visas, and routines, while slow travelers embrace temporary living arrangements.
- Visa challenges are minimized since slow travelers do not commit to long stays in any one country.
- Slow travel can be cheaper than staying at home due to lower living costs and no property upkeep.
- The lifestyle suits those without large pets or complex medical needs, and those who prefer flexibility over permanence.
- Slow travel is not necessarily permanent but can be a transitional phase or a new way of living.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Slow Travel and Retirement
- 01:10Challenges and Considerations for Slow Travelers
- 02:15Financial Benefits of Selling Property and Investing
- 04:41Definitions: Expat vs Slow Traveler
- 06:01Building Networks and Saving Money on the Road
- 07:18Visa Issues and How Slow Travel Avoids Them
- 08:31Lifestyle Flexibility and Seasonal Travel Options
- 09:46Summary and Final Thoughts on Slow Travel
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
last March, late 40s, originally from Atlanta. They'd sold the house 6 weeks earlier, not rented it out, not left it with a property manager, sold it, split the proceeds into a brokerage account, and bought one-way tickets. So, I asked, you know,
Speaker A
"What visa are you on?" And they looked at each other and were just like, "shrug, whatever." They hadn't even thought about it. They weren't in a hurry to get one. You know, they had a month planned in Da Nang, then they were
Speaker A
off to Chiang Mai, then they weren't sure yet. Nobody was making them decide, right? I've lived in Vietnam for 7 years. I have a lease, a family here, a favorite pho lady, regular coffee shops, a guy who repairs my motorbike. I'm
Speaker A
about as settled as it gets as an expat, but I'm going to spend the next 15 or 20 minutes basically making the case that if you can, what this couple is doing is probably smarter and easier than what
Speaker A
I'm doing, okay? I'm not going to be defensive or be judgmental in my tone, 'cause not everyone can do it. I can't do this right now, but I have before. You know, selling a house and immediately replacing it with another one might be
Speaker A
the right move for certain people. You know, this morning I was talking to a guy who has a 100-lb dog. You can't just loop around Southeast Asia with a 100-lb dog. The data on this doesn't really exist, but it is definitely a real
Speaker A
trend, right? There's a specific kind of retiree and person doing this right now. Sometimes digital nomads. They tend to be younger, 40s, 50s, and they're just not settling anywhere. They're not visiting either, though, right? They're doing something in between and it's sort
Speaker A
of this like slowmad, nomad, whatever, mini practice retirements, right? So, they do these little mini retirements and the shape of it is, I actually want to picture you to picture the right thing. It's not a vacation and it's not
Speaker A
settling. It's like my friends Mike and Muriel that I interviewed last year a couple times. We hung out a bunch.
Speaker A
They've been traveling around Southeast Asia for a year. But, the idea is you sell some of your primary assets, you ditch your mortgage, you ditch your big bills, you ditch your cars, and then you spend a year, maybe 2 years, traveling
Speaker A
around three, four, a half dozen countries. You don't sign a long-term lease, you don't buy furniture, you don't apply for any retirement visas.
Speaker A
And, the entire decision about where to actually live gets postponed on purpose, sometimes for years, right?
Speaker A
While the person or the couple just lives. They just rack up experiences. Reminds me a lot of a book I read called Die with Zero, a wonderful book. But, I used to think this was mostly sort of
Speaker A
retirees in their 60s or 70s, sometimes burnouts, people who couldn't settle down. But, it honestly just isn't anymore. You know, the couples I meet now, they're 47, they're 49. I've met five different versions of this couple in the last year, at least. Some are
Speaker A
even in their late 30s, some are in their 50s. They're not necessarily running a business from a laptop. But, what used to be treated as a retirement abroad has turned into this second, totally different thing that's just like, "Hey, we can basically do this
Speaker A
now. There's no need to wait in the traditional sense. They're done with the house, they're done with America, they're done with the home, they're done with the small town life. And, the math basically says they have enough that
Speaker A
they can just continue moving around. Some people create content, while they do it for a second income. Essentially, that asset has done the job that a pension used to, right? The mortgage, the property tax, the upkeep, it's all
Speaker A
been ditched, and in return, it's a single asset that gets sold, put into a brokerage account, and maybe a dividend income portfolio, like what I have, and then you live off a specific dollar amount month to month.
Speaker A
It's often significantly cheaper to travel the world than to stay at home. It's very hard to believe, but it's real. So, what I hear over and over again, in almost the exact same words, is that the house is the retirement
Speaker A
account, right? They just hadn't thought of it that way until finally the mortgage was paid down and the math basically started to work. Maybe they became empty nesters. It's generationally specific, too. It's a lot of Gen Xers, some older millennials.
Speaker A
Bits and pieces for remote work or content creation just seems like not just easy or fun, but the right thing to do at the right time for them now.
Speaker A
Basically, they're thinking we don't want to wait a decade, yeah? We want to go now. And we can just sell this one asset, ditch our zip code, ditch our house, and it's not really reckless. It just is the next move, the next sort of
Speaker A
chapter in life. Is this necessarily permanent? No. There's a bit of pushback about that in the loop video I made, but it's like the loop doesn't have to be permanent. This might just be the next 5 years of your life, you know, and that's
Speaker A
amazing. So, quick definitions because the niche kind of mixes all these ideas and things up. An expat picks and settles in a country. They are expatriated, hence expat, from their home country, but they still keep their home citizenship and
Speaker A
passport, etc. They're settled. They have a lease, a visa strategy, furniture, routines, a life, sometimes a job, sometimes not. Deep roots. A slow traveler picks a rotation and keeps rotating indefinitely by design. 1 to 3 months per place forever. Almost like
Speaker A
snowbirding, but snowbirding as a phase. It's sort of a mini retirement. The slow travel doesn't have an end destination, right? It's temporary on purpose. The couple in Da Nang aren't committing to slow travel forever, but they're not committing to Da Nang forever, either,
Speaker A
right? The most expensive decision of their life to relocate is permanently delayed 'cause ultimately, if you do it 1 month at a time, you still get a lot of the benefits of travel. This is a key point here. If you're booking a hotel
Speaker A
room for 1 night, you get a shitty rate. For a week, you get an okay rate.
Speaker A
For a month, you can get a really good rate. And so, what you do is you book 1 month at a time. And as you start to go to these different countries to meet different people doing this, you often
Speaker A
get word-of-mouth recommendations for where to stay, how to travel, where to eat, what to do along the way. You can accumulate the numbers of landlords, etc. as well. Like Mike and Muriel, I know they have a one go-to landlord in
Speaker A
Da Nang. When they're going back to Da Nang, they can literally just text the landlord and say, "Hey, do you have a unit available for me?" You can have this same thing set up in Chiang Mai, across different countries. And
Speaker A
essentially, you start to save money in the same way someone who lives like a local does, but you never actually settle down. They just refuse to guess and find out later. Why the visa isn't a problem? Well, argument one, it's the
Speaker A
biggest one for this specific group of slow travelers. The visa problem is basically eliminated because it never asks a country for a long-term commitment in the first place. Settling as an expat in Southeast Asia means playing a visa game forever. It can also
Speaker A
mean paying taxes if you're in a country for over 183 days. Vietnam doesn't have a retirement visa. Places like the Philippines and Thailand often want 20,000 up front for retirement. Malaysia can be six figures. They want this in a
Speaker A
bank, documented, seasoned. Every 90 days proved. Perhaps for the rest of your life. If you want the newer privilege route in Thailand, it can cost you 650,000 baht up front. You know, that's like 20-odd, 25,000 bucks. And
Speaker A
they can go up and up. Some places like Malaysia want you to buy a condo up front. But, it's exactly t
Speaker A
travel, you don't have to decide whether Thailand is your country in 5 weeks or in the first 3 weeks in Vietnam if you want to stay there forever, whatever, right? You leave without having signed a 5-year contract with any government,
Speaker A
okay? Almost every country in this region hands out 30-to-90-day tourist entries for Canadians, Americans, Europeans, Australians, easy. Vietnam's e-visas runs about 90 days, 25 or 50 bucks. Malaysia hand out 90 days at the airport, no application. You know, the
Speaker A
couple in Da Nang I talked to spent less on visas in 4 months than a single deposit would cost for a lot of traditional retirement visas. So, you're spending in the hundreds instead of a thousand. Other big pro, the weather
Speaker A
arbitrage, okay? Every place on Earth in Asia has a bad season, a typhoon season.
Speaker A
Da Nang has a rainy season, Chiang Mai has a burning season, Hanoi stinks in the winter, okay? Early spring air quality returns, but you don't want to miss the bad part. Manila has a typhoon season as some people pointed out in my
Speaker A
loop video. A settled expat is married to the good, the bad, the ugly, the miserable months when it's too freaking hot. Oh my god, I don't like that much in July and August cuz it's too hot for me. Well, this way you can just leave.
Speaker A
Chiang Mai has a cooler season, right? You don't have to have a discipline about it because you can literally just move on when you're ready. I think this is similar in some sense to the digital nomad kids, but ultimately this isn't
Speaker A
kids. I'm talking about couples, retired people, adults. Argument three, this is the one people get wrong the hardest.
Speaker A
The cost of doing this is much closer to the cost of just settling than anyone assumes. People think it's much, much more expensive. It's not if you're a seasoned traveler, okay? Ho Chi Minh, for example, the Numbeo data here is
Speaker A
very clean on cost of living. A single person non-rent living costs runs about $485 a month. A one-bedroom outside the city center here can be anywhere between 250 and 500 bucks. Close to the city center, let's say it's 500. All in, easily you
Speaker A
can show up and spend a month here for 1,700 bucks, 1,500 bucks. Cebu, I'd say the same thing. You can get in there around 1,500 bucks. Manila city-wide, easily under a few thousand dollars a month. You know, maybe a bit
Speaker A
more in the BGC. But, it's worth knowing before you assume that like there's one number for one country. You know, you can go into Cambodia and Phnom Penh, you could probably be living off six or seven hundred dollars a month if you
Speaker A
want. Ultimately, it's up to you. The thing is, you basically can do it advantageously by renting rooms by the month instead of week. And instead of paying for an expensive visa, you are literally paying to travel instead, right? So, every 90 days
Speaker A
instead of paying for a new visa renewal, you just pay for a flight to a new country and you often get let in for free. Is this a privilege that only some people have based on their passport?
Speaker A
Absolutely. Could my Vietnamese wife do this with her passport? No way. Take advantage, man. If you're under 55, too, you're often closed off from a lot of real retirement visas or under 50, so you can't get them anyways. I can't get
Speaker A
the O other retirement visa in Thailand, no how, cuz I'm 43. The visa in Philippines costs 50, 40 or 50,000 for someone my age, right? This is just a reality. Another aspect of this is that you can include other places outside of
Speaker A
Asia. Do you want to spend summer in Europe on a Schengen visa? You can get 90 days into Europe every 180 days as a Canadian, an American, an Aussie. And you can go spend a good or you can spend
Speaker A
like a transition time, right? You can go to Europe for April, May, June. That's fantastic. You can go to Europe for June, July, August and skip the Southeast Asian heat and humidity. 98 euros a square meter in Porto, Portugal
Speaker A
will still get you a nice place and you don't have to buy into the market. You can just rent for a few months. You can go to Albania, you can go to Georgia, you can go to any of these places or all
Speaker A
of these places. You want to spend a couple months a year in Greece, you know? You want to go to Mexico's Playa del Carmen? All very doable. I would just say it's when you slow it down that it works. It's the fast travel that is
Speaker A
so taxing that causes burnout, right? But rent in pesos has not really moved that much, right? What it costs in American paycheck to rent a place in Oaxaca, Puerto Escondido, San Cristobal for 2 or 3 months or to spend a month or
Speaker A
two in Belize, these are all just extremely affordable options when your actual comparison is "Hey, should we stay in our house in our hometown and keep paying for a life that is basically going up and up and up every year with
Speaker A
inflation." You're not paying a real premium for staying uncommitted. You're basically breaking even. And I think that number is a big surprise to a lot of people.
Speaker A
What you don't pay for is easy to miss until you list it out, right? No furniture, no housing costs is being fixed, no deposit locked up with the landlord for months at a time, no visa or tax lawyers, no motorbike, no car
Speaker A
purchase, no car rental. You're settling cheaper on paper, but you're getting this incredible amount of flexibility if you're just traveling around all the time. One more thing though.
Speaker A
Don't rush it, right? Absolutely not. Quick honest take here. I told a caller, a couple about 2 months ago that they could do this exact lifestyle for about $2,000 a month in Southeast Asia, no caveats.
Speaker A
That could be careless. They ended up spending a lot more. We had a bunch more conversations about it. Ultimately, you need to go out and experience this, right? That's the beat. Every time, your situation, the exchange rate, the
Speaker A
housing markets you're eyeing, where you want to go, they're all changing constantly. I don't know from a video whether you're going to like Da Nang or not. You might only want to be there for a night once you show up. This way, you
Speaker A
can always move on. Obviously, if you want to run your real numbers, you talk about your house sale proceeds, an actual routine, an actual schedule, etc.
Speaker A
We can go deeper into that in the membership where I have my courses, my guides. I do live Q&A calls, etc. And that, of course, as always, is linked below. If you want my help, if not, keep watching the videos, subscribe, like,
Speaker A
share. I appreciate it. I'm Evan A, retired early in Vietnam. Argument four, the one that actually matters for most people, a mini-year practice retirement is renting your life instead of buying it. Renting you keeps you honest in a
Speaker A
way that settling never does. So, before you sign a lease abroad, you're making a five-to-10-year bet on one city, right?
Speaker A
Before you sign a big visa, you're making a big bet on a country. Sometimes it works. In my case, it worked. I got lucky. But, I've watched plenty of other expats who realize by the month eight, by the third month, by the second week
Speaker A
that it's the wrong social scene, the wrong weather, the wrong everything for them, and they've already invested three months in a lease or invested a year in a visa or whatever, and ultimately a place just isn't right for them. Every
Speaker A
month is a cheap experiment with a built-in exit when you do slow travel. If a place grabs you hard enough, you can decide later that you're going to settle there, right? The whole point though is that selling the house first is what makes
Speaker A
the experiment cheap instead of expensive. If you keep everything in your assets back home, it's a pain in the ass, and it just ends up being your whole life is on the phone to a property manager at 2:00 a.m. or
Speaker A
whatever, having to replace a fridge in the middle of July or a heater or a boiler in the middle of February. Selling converted a fixed, location-locked asset into a liquid one that you can then live off of anywhere
Speaker A
on Earth, and I think that conversion is the entire mechanism mechanism mechanism mechanism. It's not about being braver than a settled expat. It's not about owning a mortgage payment for a house you're never living in. I I it's
Speaker A
honestly just about slowing down and collecting experiences, right? There are real costs, of course. I've watched people be caught off guard by this. I've heard about it in the comments.
Speaker A
Community is a big one. Deep friendships need repeated unplanned contact over real time. Rotating every month or two means a life of acquaintances and constant permanent goodbyes. For a couple in your late 40s, it might be okay cuz you're together, but it's a
Speaker A
real trade-off to not have that community. You're going to feel lighter, but you're also going to be less connected. Healthcare continuity is another reason to push back, right? It hits earlier than most people expect. No fixed base means no regular doctor, no
Speaker A
local medical file, you know, nothing following you between countries. This might be fine at 48, but not at 68. If you have a real diagnosis that shows up mid-rotation, you might want to settle down and stick to a place. You know, if
Speaker A
you're dealing with multiple languages and multiple clinics, the admin never fully disappears. Mail, banking, email.
Speaker A
People open their laptops a lot when they're traveling these days. Nothing is ultimately going to get rid of that administrative work. Telling you otherwise is Another specific reason for the younger group than the original retiree crowd, kids. If kids
Speaker A
are still involved, right? Going to visit them becomes a clock, them having their own children and grandchildren.
Speaker A
I've met couples who are doing this, you know, with children under 20. They miss out on milestones a kid has when they're at college, when they're away, whatever.
Speaker A
Just because you're an empty nester, it doesn't mean you're not connected to your kid anymore. Fifth, this is quieter, but it's real.
Speaker A
Selling your house is giving up your safety now. Maybe it's obvious, it goes without saying. It's not a reason not to do it, but it is something to know. It's harder to go back and re-enter the housing market after you've left it than
Speaker A
a lot of people understand. It's a real deal, especially if you don't have a job, you don't have an income, you're not going to qualify for a mortgage anymore. Where I land after 7 years of being fixed in a single place, I'm doing
Speaker A
the opposite thing. The fight between settling and constantly wanting to travel, wanting to do more.
Speaker A
It's a debate, right? Especially for the younger crowd, 40s, 50s, I think you should do it while you can, but it's not going to be right for everyone.
Speaker A
Ultimately, you can't pick a country or a lifestyle from a spreadsheet or from a video or from my advice. You got to spend the first year doing this, running three or four real stints, making a real short list of countries, finding out
Speaker A
what the actual cost of permanent or slow travel is for you. And I think the one beautiful thing about it is other than getting rid of your original asset and moving abroad, taking that first big leap into the unknown of travel, it's
Speaker A
cool to not have to commit to Da Nang or to Penang or to Georgetown, whatever, Bali or Sarawak or any of these wonderful places, you know? Grow some wings, get out there, enjoy the travel, travel slow. Eventually, when you find
Speaker A
the right place, you can build a base, you can build a home. Ultimately, it's never too late. And I think all of you should do this, you know, 90 days here, 60 days there. Stack some stamps in your
Speaker A
passport, learn about all the different places in Southeast Asia and around the world you've never been. Once you've accumulated all those experiences, it'll be way easier to choose which place is right for you. For me, I choose my
Speaker A
family and Vietnam again, whether I was 47, 37, whatever. And no, the kids have not left yet. And yes, when they do, I'll probably go out and we'll travel a bunch more again. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Evan A. You can watch that
Speaker A
original Southeast Asia loop video here or you can watch this video where I talk about five countries I think you can still realistically start over and settle down if that's your thing on under 10K. Take care.
Topics:slow travelexpat retirementdigital nomadsSoutheast Asia travelretirement planningvisa strategiesproperty sellingfinancial freedommini retirementstravel lifestyle
