The following is an excerpt from “Quit Like a Millionaire” by Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung:
If you had told me as a child that I’d go from the top of a medical waste heap to the top of the Swiss Alps, I’d have said that you were nuts.
But standing on Fürenalp in Engelberg, gawking at the snow-capped mountains, the obscenely green grass, and the adorably mooing cows, I realized my dreams were coming true. I giggled like an idiot and ran toward a trampoline we (weirdly) found at the peak.
Bouncing around, feeling the wind in my hair, the sun on my face, and singing “The Sound of Music,” I felt like I was on top of the world — which I guess I sort of was.
I didn’t think anything could top hiking in the Alps, but the life-changing experiences just kept piling up, each one better than the last. I scaled the cliffs of Santorini while gazing at the impossibly blue Aegean Sea. I biked alongside the canals of Amsterdam.
I breathed in the salty smell of the sea in Howth and experienced culinary heaven in the form of Kobe beef in Osaka. I steamed away a decade of stress in a Seoul bathhouse, and I received my PADI scuba certification in Koh Tao, after conquering my debilitating fear of water.
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In short, I fell in love with travel. The idea that traveling for a year would get it out of my system turned out to be a lie. For a decade of nose‑to‑the-grindstone work, time had been worthless. Punch in, punch out, go home, rinse, repeat. The year before I retired, I took two pictures on my phone. For the entire year. That’s all the memories that were worth keeping.
The year after I retired, my phone ran out of memory from all the photos. Every day felt fresh and new. I had finally tasted freedom, and I didn’t want it to end. So it was with a great deal of trepidation that I boarded that flight back home after our year of traveling the world.
Lying in my old bed, which had been transplanted to Bryce’s mom’s house, I felt like a bird in a cage, staring at the sky. I tossed and turned from the jet lag. Then I took out my laptop, where I had cataloged every dollar, euro, and yen spent on our journey. I tapped away quietly, trying not to wake Bryce as I added everything up.
“Holy shit,” I said too loudly.
“What?” Bryce mumbled. “Something wrong?”
I ignored him. I checked and rechecked every number and every formula over and over. This can’t be right. There’s no way.
“What?” He sat up, fumbling for his glasses in the dark. “Did we screw up? Did we spend too much?”
I shook my head.
“Then what?”
I pointed at the screen, at our total: $40,150 CAD.
We had managed to travel the world for the same cost as staying at home.
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Let that sink in. We had visited twenty countries on three continents. We had flown the entire circumference of the globe. We had done something very few people on Earth have the privilege of doing. And it cost as much as staying in one place.
Bryce was wide awake all of a sudden. The gears were turning in his head, just as they were in mine.
“You realize what this means, don’t you?” he asked.
I nodded. I knew.
We could travel the world — forever.
Penguin Random House
Adding in $875 CAD per person per year × 2 = $1,750 CAD for travel insurance, it ended up costing us $30,879 USD or $40,143 CAD per year.
The lie we’ve been sold is that traveling is expensive. But by splitting the year between expensive regions (like the UK, Western Europe, and Japan) and inexpensive ones (like Southeast Asia), our daily costs averaged only $42 USD or $55 CAD per person per day.
We stayed in Airbnbs and hotels, sometimes going out to eat, sometimes cooking. We even managed to sneak in splurges like fresh oysters and lobsters in Boston, a four-day scuba diving certification course in Thailand ($250 USD per person, accommodations included), scuba diving in Cambodia ($80 USD per person for two dives), hiking in the Swiss Alps ($87 USD per person), and Kobe beef ($48 USD per person) in Japan!
Here are our costs broken down by region and category.
