My honest belief is the only actual limitation to the life I live would be a really tough passport to travel on (in saying that I have met people travelling on passports from almost everywhere, it's just a lot harder for a person / family with a passport from a country with lots of visa requirements.
We were a one income family. My husband drove trucks 60 hours a week in Australia (not a cheap country).
We rented out a spare bedroom. We sold everything we owned (not much, we didn't have assets or own a home, no fancy car) left with 3 kids and fuck all money. We almost ran out.
And we were stuck in a foreign country with no way home because our borders were closed. As our funds went down, I found a way to teach English online for $10 usd an hour. Eventually I got sick of travelling with hardly any time or money. And then I found a great remote job.
My point is, If you want it badly enough you'll sell everything, cancel every subscription service you have. You'll save every cent, no takeout, no wastage. You'll take every opportunity to learn some skills that might help you abroad. And you'll find you have enough to buy your ticket (even if it's only domestic or close by local if you have difficult visa restrictions). And then you save a bit longer and you go. It doesn't have to be complicated.
We are by no means financially more wealthy than any average western world family. I didn't win lotto, sell a big tech company or gain some kind of inheritance. I'm just a normal everyday human. My main difference to the standard family is we don't buy stuff, we never owned cars on finance and we were always living on a strict budget that allowed us to save.
I dare you to challenge your limiting belief (if travel is something you actually want to do) 🙏
Have you told your story elsewhere? The one about being trapped outside of Australia. And Spain let you stay? It sounds fascinating.
I really would love to write a book about it. We're NZ citizens and couldn't get home for such a long time! We were kinda grateful in a lot of ways. It forced us to really challenge everything and get very uncomfortable.
We were actually stuck in Vietnam, but found out we were pregnant and since we prefer home birth we had to find a country that was open and didn't have too many rules to travel to. We spent three months in Turkey, a month in Greece and then moved over to Spain. 🤩
It was a bit of a wild adventure 💯🙌
Wild. I'm glad it worked out. I also couldn't get back to NZ and I'm only three hours away in Sydney! Lottery to get admission in to NZ. Special permission required to leave AU. Mandatory quarantine on arrival with a toddler while working remotely. Impossible.
Yeah that whole thing was nuts right?! When we got to Europe no one could understand why we couldn't go home to have the baby 😂 most people thought our country was a bit crazy since everywhere else at least took in their citizens 😅
NZ was commended for acting like a safest country. !!! But other side people were losing.
NZ and Aussie were a joke. The absolute bs fed to our citizens and residents was complete garbage. People were genuinely conned into believing if they didn't comply with rules they would never travel again and so many people believed the lies 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
I find it interesting that barely anyone we meet knows that Vietnam mostly escaped the whole thing until 2021.
Of a population size of 99 million people, there were something like approximately 2030ish cases from the start until May 2021, only 36 people died (old and already unwell people - not one young healthy person)... That stayed well out of international news and it annoyed the heck out of me every time I heard how 'well' NZ was doing.
1. Probably one of the most remote countries in the world, bloody hard to get to.
2. Tiny population. Numbers of course were going to be low by comparison and no one was going to bother to do maths to calculate a per capita scenario.
It still annoys me - clearly 😂
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