Let’s Go Exploring: Cusco and the Lost City of Machu Picchu
“Holy…crap…how…much…further?” I panted. I was carrying a 10L jug of filtered water from the supermarket to our AirBnb. What’s normally a common and uneventful task in South America turned into an unexpected slog because of one major thing you have to watch out for if you ever visit Cusco, Peru: the altitude. Cusco sits about 11,000 feet above sea level, which is *checks notes* really freakin’ high. We had gotten a prescription for Diamox, an anti-altitude sickness drug, before we left for Peru, and once we arrived we were chugging the coca tea generously provided by our host like crazy, […]
Why HomeExchange Beats Airbnb
So after the worst travel day ever and just barely making it to Australia, we thought we’d be on easy street. Nothing but blue clouds, rainbows, and unicorns from here on out right? Wrong. Turns out, we weren’t done with jumping through hoops to be in Australia yet. We had to prove we were worthy. And as such, our HomeExchange host in Sydney cancelled on us at the last minute, so we suddenly found ourselves (at least temporarily) homeless. Now, of course, this is completely understandable, given that there was a medical emergency that the host had no control over. […]
Reader Case: Can I Move to Spain?
When we first left Canada in 2015, we thought travelling internationally was a luxury that we could only afford to do for a short time. Little did we know that it would become our unfair FIRE advantage since it can be used to control your living expenses using geographic arbitrage (in non-pandemic times, at least). So this subject line immediately piqued our interest. Spain is one of the Europe’s favourite retirement destinations because of the sunny weather, friendly locals, and surprisingly affordable cost of living. So can geographic arbitrage rescue our reader? Let’s find out! Hello: I have read your […]
Let’s Go Exploring! Da Nang, Vietnam: The Next Digital Nomad Paradise?
The last time we were in Vietnam was 2016. Things were simpler back then. No one knew what a pandemic was, ChatGPT wasn’t threatening to replace jobs, our parents were all healthy, and the only thing we worried about was how badly we were going to get scammed. We’d read an article from seasoned budget traveler Nomadic Matt called “Why I’ll Never Return to Vietnam,” and were pretty worried about going there. After all, we’d just been spoiled by Thailand, “the land of a thousand smiles,” which had a visitor return rate of 50% while Vietnam only had a 2% […]
Big Tech Is Laying Off Workers: Is Your Job Next?
For most of the FIRE movement’s existence, the single largest career type that made up the movement was engineers: specifically, software engineers. The reason for this is that the modern FIRE movement’s explosion in popularity happened to coincide with a similar explosion of growth in the tech sector. From early 2000 to now, the world went from a personal computer being a 20 pound box of metal sitting on a desk to something so small and portable that we can fit it in our pocket. We also went from a typical US household owning a single computer to our current […]
