Is Full Time Travel Possible in 2025??

Travel – Something that almost everyone says they want to do more of.  Yet finding the time, money and the stress of planning makes it so that many people are not able to travel as much as they desire, or deserve. 

So how do you set up your life so that you can travel full time, or at least be able to travel any time to anywhere? 

Today your travel experts, Kim and Isaac, hosts of the hit podcast Full Time to Travel Time, will share the steps they took to be able to go from working full time, to being able to travel full time! 

Taking the Steps to Travel Full Time

In 2018, we (Kim and Isaac) packed most of our belongings into storage and hit the road, traveling full time for 3 years with no address.  Over the next 3 years we explored 30+ National Parks, hundreds of Airbnbs, Epic Caves, Waterfalls, Hotsprings, met Wildlife and took on the stress of finding where to live next.  Full time travel opened up the whole world to us, it helped us understand the framework of America, the people of America, and how important our national parks and protected forests are to the well being of all the creatures and animals who live here.  

So how did we get here, how do we have the time, money, and energy to be able to travel full time?  Well it started first by working backwards. I (Isaac) had already set up my life so that I could travel whenever I wanted, but I was still in the framework of trading my time for money.  Reading books like The 4 Hour Work Week, and Vagabonding gave me a new framework of how I could set up my life differently to create more freedom, and more impact.  Kim, at the time, was working 50+ hours as a vet-tech at this time.  Vet-techs are one of the most under appreciated (in terms of pay) positions in the US and when we looked at our individual net worth, Kim had a net-worth of -$13,000; Yes NEGATIVE $13,000.  So after working 50+ hours a week in a job, that almost everyone would say is very important, for 8 years, and being extremely frugal, her life was worth -$13,000 (95% of the debt was student and medical)….Crazy.  We knew we needed a change.  So we worked Backwards.

Creating Our Travel Budget

We first looked at what we wanted our lives to look like.  We established that we wanted to be able to travel whenever we wanted, wherever we wanted.  We also wanted to make a positive impact on the communities we were involved with and on our incredible planet.  So next, we looked at how much money we needed to bring in per month in order to be able to live this lifestyle.  At the time, I was able to get an Airbnb for $40-50 a night, so we needed $1500/mo for housing, $1000 for food, $1000 for gas and entertainment, $1000 for bills/debt payout.  In all, we realized we only needed $4,500/mo to live this lifestyle we had always dreamed about…How truly doable; We knew we could make enough money.  So we set our monthly income goal to $5000 (we now make around $30,000/mo and plan on doubling that this year alone).  

Once we had our monthly income goal set to achieve our dream lifestyle we then looked at what our current skill sets were and what we could put out into the marketplace that would add great value, while also not tying us down to a physical location.  We established Kim was great at talking to people so she would be our sales person.  I was (and still am) a leading expert in Local SEO (Google Maps Marketing).  So we set up our plan: Kim would go to networking events and sell our Google Maps Marketing package and I would execute on the SEO and Marketing Campaigns.  We were charging $500/mo for this service so we only needed 10 clients to hit our $5000/mo goal, what could go wrong!?

Failure…For the first 3 months we failed…HARD.  We didn’t bring on a single client for the first 3 months.  At the time, Kim was working full-time as a vet tech and part time in LocalFi while I was working part time with existing clients I already had and full-time in LocalFi.  So we were each putting in 50-60 hour workweeks and we were seeing no progress at all in LocalFi.  This was a hard time, and one of the hardest times in our relationship. So I picked up a book I often go back to when times are hard: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. 

What I realized was that I was blaming Kim for not bringing in clients (since that was her agreed upon role), but you can’t control the actions of others, only the actions of yourself.  What actions could I take to help us bring on new clients? So I started going to networking events with Kim and I started reading every book I could find on how to launch a business.  What we quickly realized is that Kim was in the wrong seat.  While she was great at talking to people, she wasn’t (at the time) very good at selling people or even explaining what our marketing package was.  So we switched things up, and sometimes the right seat, we learned, is not the most intuitive. 

So Kim, a trained vet tech with no SEO experience started running our operations, and Isaac, an introvert, started doing sales…Within a week of switching our seats we signed on our first client.  You see, what we found was that Kim was PHENOMENAL at creating systems.  She was able to essentially download the systems I had created in my head all around SEO and then document them in a way that allowed them to be duplicatable by others, even others who had no training in SEO.  This was a massive breakthrough in creating an actual business, not just a job for ourselves.  We also found that, while I was quite nervous meeting and talking to new people, I was actually great at developing long term positive relationships and my confidence and expertise in this field drew people to want to hire us.  

We gained 3 main takeaways from launching this business:

1. Sometimes the “right seat” in an organization is not the obvious one.  The right seat can also change as a person grows and evolves.  If a business partner is struggling, really look at and ask yourself: “Is this really the best seat for them?”

2. Systems are what creates freedom and the ability to scale and grow.  If I was still doing all of the day-to-day operations, there is no way with how many clients we had (and currently have) that we would be able to travel full time!  Being able to take my decade of experience and success in Local SEO, and then systemizing it to a point where we could hire others to duplicate the same success was Essential in our business growth and freedom.

3. You can only control your own actions.  If you find yourself blaming another business partner for lack of success, you are in for a bad time.  Take responsibility for what you CAN control (your own actions) and figure out what you can do to help your business partner succeed, instead of blaming them for failing. 

We could now afford to travel and we could work remotely!

Within one year of launching LocalFi we had done it, we were making our goal income level and we packed up all of our belongings and we hit the road.  In 2019, our first full year in business, we produced $139,029.45 in revenue, more than enough to be able to live our dream lifestyle. We were able to keep growing our revenue year after year, while traveling full time, because of one major factor…SYSTEMS. 

Traveling Full Time in 2025 – Is it even possible??

The answer is…Of Course!  We just needed to work backwards to see how much we needed to make in order to live this lifestyle.  Inflation definitely has had a big impact on travel (and life in general) so we took 2024 as a growth year, where we did far less travel, but set up new revenue streams in order to be able to continue our full time travel lifestyle.  Since we set up our life to be able to work remotely we can continue to travel while working online.

Creating Your Travel Budget

So now Airbnb is about $100-$150/night so I budget out $4000/mo for housing. You can get big discounts on Airbnb for booking a place for a month, sometimes up to 50% off, so I can get a great place that would normally cost $7000/mo and negotiate a price of $3500.  If you are staying a week, you can usually get 10-20% off the nightly price.  We love to talk about the idea of traveling slowly. We love to be able to really get to know a community, meet amazing people, meet new friends and stay in a place for a few weeks at a time. Traveling slowly helps you maintain your energy and physical well-being while traveling full-time, and is often much cheaper as you can get big discounts for staying at an Airbnb for a month and that allows you to cook at home far more often, which is a huge money saver on the road.

Food $1500, Entertainment $1500, Bills $2500/mo (we now own 2 houses so our bills have gone up a lot, we do Airbnb one of our houses and that breaks even on expenses for that house).  Total needed is around $9500/mo, that is our new target income goal.  Now you can absolutely travel full time for much less than this.  Take away our bills, cook more often, do more free entertainment (like hiking) and you can still travel quite comfortably for more like $6000/mo.  If you have a camper van, you can do it for more like $2-$3K per month.  There are also a lot of budget friendly destinations as well as traveling places during the off season, which we love to do.

Increasing your income by creating multiple income streams

So how did we increase our income from $5k to $10k/mo?  To be honest, because we implemented such great systems into our business, we have naturally grown to already be making that much monthly, but we don’t want to just break even, we want to bring in extra income so we can invest in assets that continue to grow and generate income passively so it was time to establish new revenue streams so we can continue to build our wealth and set us up for for success in the future.  So in 2024 we launched our new podcast, Full Time to Travel Time, that teaches people how they can start traveling full time. Full Time to Travel Time also includes our travel blog on our website. We also started creating an educational wing for our business, LocalFi, as we have learned so much and want to help others on their journey.  We plan for this educational wing to Double our revenue by 2026.  We also restructured our offerings in LocalFi so we are taking on less clients, but higher paying clients, allowing us to continue to do great quality work and not getting pulled into the day to day operations.  So after 5 years of full time travel we took a year off in order to set up the revenue foundations that will allow us to spend the next 5 years traveling whenever, wherever we want, while similarly increasing the positive impact we are able to have on this planet.  

Save Money while Traveling on a Tight Budget

When we first started traveling we absolutely were traveling on a tight budget. We found that when we kept a strict budget, that is what let us travel indefinitely. We even found ways to get free accommodations, by using platforms like Couchsurfing.com and staying with relatives. Since we had worked hard at creating financial independence that is what allowed us to work as digital nomads and fulfill our goal of full time adventure travel. While we did look at creating a travel blog at the time, we saw that a quicker pathway was to create our own business and to create our own online courses, both of which allowed us to be location independent.

Becoming a Full Time Traveler

So can you travel full time in 2025? Absolutely, just work backwards, see what income goal you need to hit to be able to, and look at what is the most valuable thing you can bring to the marketplace that allows you to hit that income goal.  Then start building, the road will be tough, but so rewarding!