Have you ever thought to yourself, ‘Man, I just want to quit my job and travel’. Because same.
I thought it every day for the five years I was in corporate. Honestly, I know I even thought it in college.
Yet, even though I knew the travel lifestyle was for me, I finished college, got a big girl job, and kept pushing on this inauthentic (to me) life. Why? So that I could travel.
Recommended Resources:
Finances of quitting my job to travel
Why I DON’T want you to quit your job to travel
Sound a little bass-ackwards? That’s because it is. But, hear me out: I wanted to learn from big companies before going out on my own. I wanted to experience corporate life so that I could make an informed decision. And, I wanted to make a ton of ‘easy’ money so that I could LOVE entrepreneurship and appreciate the hustle even more.
I believe that just about anyone with the drive to do it can quit their job and see the world. I’m a white, middle class, solo-traveling marketing major from Iowa, and I’ve seen 51 countries on my own time in the last decade. I’ve been a digital nomad for a year. Here’s my story:
The Back Story: Why I Quit My Job to Travel
I decided to visit every country when I was 19. I was two semesters into university and assumed that I had gone too far (read: had too much debt and not enough earning potential) to turn back. My thoughts were that I didn’t have marketable skills that would allow me to get a job that paid well enough to both enjoy my life and pay off my debt. I held on to that belief until I graduated.
Looking back, I’m not sure that I was wrong in that belief, but I also think I’d have figured it out along the way.
However, in college I did everything that I could to set myself up for a lifetime of travel. I studied abroad and traveled solo during that time. I minimized my debt and took lots of domestic road trips. During college, I even started credit card hacking and created a savings account just for travel.
After graduation I was unsure of what success meant to me, so I kept heading down the corporate path. I did take six months after graduation to travel to Colorado and Brazil, but eventually went to work.
And then… my wandering soul landed in a cubicle.
However, I kept traveling and accomplished my financial goals super quickly. In theory, I was super successful. I’d paid off my car and student loans in three years. I had savings set aside, owned a home, and used my 15 days of PTO a year to travel as far and wide as I could.
However, I knew that the lifestyle of working 49 weeks a year and then having to balance seeing my family and seeing the world with the other three just wasn’t for me.
So I created an escape plan.
Originally, the plan was to eliminate my debt, then quit to travel and work. After a taste of a full-time income, though, my college plan of bumming around the world wasn’t as attractive. So, I told myself that I’d save up a year of expenses (roughly $40k), and then I’d quit my job. Once I saved enough money, I told myself I’d give myself a year in my current role at work before I quit…
Do you see how I kept pushing the metrics for success further out in front of me?
Then, it all changed.
How I Quit My Job To Travel
In June of 2019, I had officially spent five years in the traditional workforce. I’d moved to Rhode Island, Florida, and Texas for work. Each time, I found a little adventure that helped me accomplish my travel goals. I got closer to major airports, had doubled my income, and was generally happy.
Then, a few things happened at work that I wasn’t ok with. Nepotism, harassment, and more were happening around me daily. When I raised concerns, I was met with indifference at best. By day, I was miserable. By night, I was having anxiety attacks that kept me up. Which, in turn, led to even worse days. I’d cry in my car on the way to work, eat lunch in my car, and spend my free time daydreaming about my escape plan.
To cope, I decided to take a two-week long vacation in Southeast Asia to unplug and reevaluate.
The Final Straw
While there, I accidentally sent a hotel confirmation to my work email, so I logged in to retrieve it. It was then that I saw a chain of email messages blaming me for something that I didn’t do (because I was in Asia?), and the demand that I’d meet with several layers of my higher-ups when I returned to the office.
I was standing in a hotel on the beach in paradise, and all the anxiety that I’d felt over the past few months flooded over me again. Instead of soaking up the sun, I wanted to run out of the lobby and into the water. I wanted my activity level to match my racing heartbeat.
Face flushed, heart racing, I was a million mental miles away from where I should’ve been. My mind should’ve been on the beach. Instead, I was two weeks in the future, in a conference room in Dallas getting chewed out over something that I no longer cared about.
Ultimately, it took the friend that I was traveling with to ask me some honest questions about why I was living the life that I was. This friend and I had lived together a few years previously, so he knew that my goal had always been to travel around the world, nonstop, while earning and income and making an impact.
He asked me what was keeping me from quitting my job and traveling full time. I didn’t have an answer.
There was nothing but myself holding me back from doing what I’ve always wanted to do.
So, the next working day, I called my boss from the beach. I told her that I was leaving the company, and she was supportive. She also knew where my heart was, and told me that I didn’t need to come back to the states to turn my computer in.
In that moment, I was free.
One Year Later: What’s it Like?
When people ask why I quit, I can tell that they’re looking for some juicy dialogue about why I did it. In the end, corporate and I aren’t made for each other, and that’s okay. I decided that it was better to let go of the success metrics and daily activities than to hold on and get emotional rope burn.
I was becoming an emotionally and intellectually concave version of myself, all while becoming physically convex. When I looked to the future, I saw the best parts of myself move to opposite corners. I couldn’t stomach that as a reality.
I quit my job with some savings, but they wouldn’t last forever. For real – I was 27 – my 401(k) and a years’ worth of savings was a nice cushion, not a full-on retirement.
When I quit, I was left with a whole lot of question marks. The thing is, they did’t scare me the way I thought they would. They feel more right than anything I’ve done since graduation and that feels like a success to me.
When I quit my job, I jumped without a parachute, and built it on the way down. I figured out how to cut my expenses at home and while traveling. This means I gave up my lease, car, insurance payments, and more. I cut my annual expenses in half immediately.
Life on the Road
Then, I started ‘slow traveling’. Basically, I get by-the-month leases in places rather than stay in hotels now. I can stay just about anywhere in the world for less than $700 a month, but in many places, my rent is closer to $350. Now, I eat in because I have a home everywhere, make friends, and go on budget-busting adventures regularly.
I started off by freelancing, then realized that people wanted to learn how to travel solo, so I started teaching them. Then, I built a course to streamline the process, and work with people one-on-one, too.
But it hasn’t all been rainbows and giggles.
Coronavirus killed my freelancing gigs, because nobody was paying for travel writing. I stopped traveling for five months to live in my mom’s house in Germany. I put a lot of money in to ventures that didn’t pan out.
Here’s the truth – I’d much rather be doing this than be stuck in my corporate cubicle back home. Any of these setbacks are better than corporate life, because I get to take complete ownership for every. Single. Thing.
Whether or not my work is successful in anyone else’s eyes is TBD – but what is that success anyway? Is success measured in Instagram followers, or money generated? Time spent, or things that make me feel gratified?
Are You Glad You Did It?
Yes.
When I quit, my year of expenses was my ‘in case I have to go back to corporate’ money. I still have 90% of that money, but invested it because I don’t need it as a fall back anymore.
Besides making this life financially work for me, I FEEL better. The other day, I had my first anxious night of sleep in over a year. I woke up feeling so grateful, because I haven’t felt that way in so long. Now, I’m so much more in control and in touch with what goes on in my work and life, that I can make changes on a dime to prevent those awful nights. In the past year, I haven’t cried over my work, lost sleep over KPI’s, or stressed about someone else’s ideas of what I should do to be successful.
Success to me is what I allow myself to feel. In my solo traveling, corporate escapee, solopreneurial life I am choosing to create a value for myself that is higher than in any office. I hope that in writing this, it gives me something to look back on in a month, a year, or 5 to give a fond smile to, knowing that my confidence in these moments carried me to where I am.
Congratulations Sam! All the best! You have tremendous skills behind the pen and I can’t wait to read more! Joel