Q: What is your budget?

A: Let’s be real honest here, shall we? We like our comforts. We don’t house-sit or camp or “backpack” or stay in places that don’t have A/C or internet. We don’t have to justify that but we do by saying that internet funds our travels and A/C keeps the bill payer happy. We find our rentals through AirBnb or VRBO initially and then rely on local networking or word of mouth to find better deals. We stay in hotels sometimes. We hire locals to cook for us when the situation is right. We have a bigger budget than many but that’s just our path and what works for us. Our house in Pedasi was $1500 a month. Electricity ran as high as $900 one month but averaged about $500/mo. We hope that will be the highest we pay on this journey for monthly housing costs, but it just depends on what we are doing and where we go. Some places will be cheaper, some might be more. It’s tremendously helpful that we do not own a house or a car in the USA, nor do we have any credit card bills or any other outstanding debt to weigh us down (other than a storage room for $125/mo and 40 acres of raw land in AZ that is $350/mo). So we have almost no financial obligations other than what we are doing at that moment. In Panama we lived with about the same budget as the USA but we were able to travel a lot more and have a different experience than we would have in the US (having a full time cook for instance). We expect that we will be able to do more with less in other countries, too.