"Nomadic Matt" Kepnes on Traveling the World for $75 a Day

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1:36is it possible to travel around the world live around the world do remote work anywhere you want and just spend 75 a day or less i think when i was younger i really wish i had done it and of course with inflation probably when i was younger you could have done it for less than i don't know know,$30 a day even. My guest today, Matt Kepnes, he's known as Nomadic Matt. He's been traveling the world for decades and he even wrote a book 10 years ago, How to Travel the World on$50 a Day or Less. He's updated it. It just came out, How to Travel the World on$75 a Day or Less. And it's definitely possible.

2:18And look, I'm going to share this episode with my daughters because maybe they want to travel around the world, but they're afraid it's too expensive. And there's all sorts of tricks like on finding flights, finding places to stay. And of course, it's so much easier now to find remote work. And Matt gave some extra tips on that that I haven't thought of. But I wish I had done this. I was always so obsessed with the straight line, oh, I got to get through graduate school. Now I got to make some money. Now I got to rise up in my career. And I always kind of put off traveling. And now, of course, during the course of the past 30 years of career, I've traveled a bit, but the beauty of travel is you really can kind of learn and see new things in this open-minded way without all the stresses that and responsibilities that age brings.

3:11And if it's truly possible to do this cheap and have all these amazing experiences, I bet your career would be much more successful anyway, and you'd have be so much more well-rounded and open-minded. And, you know, I guess for me, reading did that quite a bit when I was younger, but I do wish I had traveled more. I had never had any money at all when I was, you know, before I started my first company and then eventually sold it. I had zero dollars in the bank all through my twenties. I thought that was, I wouldn't be able to do this kind of travel, but you can. And well, anyway, let's have Matt tell us why.

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4:12Matt, when you first came on this podcast 10 years ago, and it was when your first book came out, how to travel the world on$50 a day. And now this, you've rewritten the entire book, but now it's called how to travel the world on$75 a day. Is that because of inflation? Yeah, you know, I mean, the last edition of this book came out in 2017 and so much of the world has changed since then. Prices naturally rise, but COVID-related inflation has just changed the cost of travel so greatly that - Like 50 %?

4:52Yeah. COVID not only changed pricing around the world, but so much of the travel industry was decimated during COVID that a lot of companies don't exist anymore. A lot of ways to save money don't exist anymore. And then the demand is so high for travel and continues to remain so high for travel 2024 so even more people travel around the world than 2019 which was the peak before covid and so there's just so much demand that companies don't have any reason to lower prices is that because like during covid everybody kind of your nickname's always been nomadic matt and this is like your social media names and so on is it because the nomadic lifestyle now has become much more common since COVID.

5:41Like everybody works from home. People kind of gave up entire careers and realized they could do more effective work remotely. And even AI has allowed freelancers to kind of, a lot more freelancers to flourish and have a more nomadic lifestyle. Is that increasing the demand? I would say so. I would say it's a lot of factors. You know, I mean, I once had this hostel owner tell me, you know, we took on a lot of debt to stay open during COVID. You know, we had years. And I owned a hostel, too. And we, you know, and and so you have to make up that losses. Right. So you have a lot of small places just raising prices to pay off debt.

6:20But I think the digital nomad stuff in certain destinations does play a huge factor. Like if you look at Bali has way more people, Medellin, parts of Mexico, like locally, Mexico City, like locally, that's going to play a big difference. like and is it is it a lot more possible or easier to to live in some of these let's say cheaper countries because more people are doing you know either remote work or or freelancer type lifestyles which wasn't as possible 10 years ago like now you could be like this graphic designer and live in the cheapest countries in the world and use ai to do your designs and use you know basically email and social media to get all your clients like you could live anywhere in the world yeah i always tell people that traveling around the world is cheaper than living in the states right you know if you look at um 75 bucks a day that is roughly a little under 30k a year i'm not good at math so three six let's just that that's right yeah yeah it's like 27 and change Most people in the U.S., if you add up your total cost of living, that's less than you spend.

7:40So I always tell people, go travel. My friend Lauren just got on the news because she couldn't afford a house in the U.S., so she bought one in Italy. So that kind of went viral. But it's so much cheaper overseas, especially when you travel, that you can easily go live in Thailand or India or Bali or Mexico or Colombia for a lot less than you can in the States. Well, I want to get to kind of like how you got into this in a second. I remember your story. You basically work in some shitty job like for an advertising agency, something like that. and you hated it, you gave up, and you started traveling, and you realized this was a possible thing, and that's kind of changed your life, and then led to all these, you learned so much, then you started giving tours, showing people how to do this, and on and on.

8:40But I just want to kind of like start this off so people see the value that you have learned over these years. you know what's if if you could do just one money saving tip or if you had a time to just give one money saving tip to people and i know this is almost a cliche question but what would that tip be for reducing expenses so much they could travel on 75 a day money saving tip like before you go or or even like while you're going like what's what's the biggest kind of and i even in the book you say there's no like one magic ninja trick to to do this but like what does seem like amazing that nobody knows?

9:18I think the biggest money-saving travel hack is the most obvious one. And that is just be flexible. People think that travel is expensive, right? They look at flights and they go, oh, I can't afford this trip, right? But every day, there are thousands of deals happening for airfare, hotels, resorts, cruises, tours, you name it, it is happening. And so if If you can just be flexible with either when you go or where you go, you are going to find a deal. In my inbox this morning, I could subscribe to all these newsletters, cheap flights to Japan and this month, cheap flights to Ireland in October.

10:01As long as you're willing to not be so rigid, you will find the deal. They happen all the time. Let's start with the cheap flights. Let's say I wanted to go to India. Okay, that's going to be like over$1 ,000 or even$2 ,000 flying coach to India.

10:22But in terms of being flexible, if I just say, hey, I'm here, I'll leave on two hours notice, just tell me when there's a super cheap flight. How does someone do that? Yeah, so there's a couple ways you can do that. First, I would consider looking at points and miles, like looking at your credit card points. You know, if you can pay off your credit card bill every month, like you should definitely be earning points. And so you can use those points to pay for a flight. There's always economy award space available. So you can just sort of look at the calendar. So just by the way, so I don't get miles just by flying a lot.

11:01I can get miles by just having a regular credit card that's linked to my miles account and always use that credit card for all my expenditures. it's something like a penny per mile, something like that. And you can build up miles that way. Yeah. The value of the miles is sort of in the beholder and we can get in the weeds on that. But it really like, you know, if you have like a Chase Sapphire or a Capital One venture or an MX, these are in points that you can then transfer to various airlines that you can then use to redeem for free flights. Right. So, you know, if you pay off your credit card each month, you know you're going to spend the money anyway so might as well earn points for it but let's say i don't have that much miles and i i remember vaguely like there's some thing where if if you don't care about the hour or the day that you're taking off you can get alerted for for super cheap flights yeah there's a bunch of resources going um is a good site it's called going uh going.com Yeah, Goering.com, Fairdrop, Airfare Watchdog.

12:07They all have these alerts out there where they'll tell you about like either last minute deals or, you know, there's a sale happening to India five months from now. And so you can be on these lists and find and like stay alert because obviously you don't have the time to continuously search airfare inventory. so i just outsource it to all these companies that hire people to look and use ai to scrape airfare um and then they tell me when i should go like how cheap and if i'm flexible about all the routes and everything like how cheap can i can i do it like let's say something that's normally a thousand bucks how cheap do you think it can get uh i mean you could find i have seen fares to the Europe peak season for like 300 bucks round trip.

12:57Wow. And let's say one way, cause I'm traveling for$75 a day forever maybe. Yeah. I mean, one way, like probably a couple hundred, you know, one thing that has definitely changed since COVID is that there are a lot more budget airlines flying internationally across like intercontinentally. Right. So like now you can go from the U S to Japan, for a couple hundred bucks on an airline called Zip Air. There's an airline out of Dubai called Fly Dubai that has really cheap flights to Africa, the Middle East, into Asia. Air Asia goes everywhere to like Australia. So you can piece together these sort of budget airlines around the world and just save, you know, like 50, 70 % off you would a major carrier.

13:49You know, but I remember there used to be a thing with the airlines where you could say, look, I'm flexible when I'm going to travel. Let me know. Like, didn't they used to kind of like at the last minute giveaway deals if they, if a flight wasn't full or does that not exist anymore? That doesn't really exist anymore. You don't really see last minute fares, um, or fair deals. Like people talk about what if I just fly standby, right now flights are so full and they're going to award uh loyalty people uh like loyalty program members before anything like you just can't just rock up and they'll you know be like here's 100 bucks you know and they'll take it because it's an empty seat they'd rather fly it empty so and the reason i'm focusing on this because you even mentioned in the book this is often the obstacle people have they they feel like their first reaction is the flights it's too expensive to get where I want to go.

14:42So, but if, but yeah, and your point, your very good point is be flexible and be creative. Like, let's say, is there some, like cruises often have like super cheap deals. Is there some place I could take a cheap cruise to? And then for like, can I take a cheap cruise to the Mediterranean and from, or even to Alaska and then get to Siberia cheaply and then take a train to Europe? Like, would that be cheaper? Is there anything that's super cheap? Well, I think the time value of money and all that, or the money value of your time might be not worth such a long trip. But I like Google Flights. So if you go to Google Flights and you type in your home airport and then just type in everywhere, it will bring up a map of the world and it will show you how much it costs to fly anywhere in the world from your home airport.

15:34So you can piece together something based on kind of what you just said, based on that, right? Let's say your end destination is Istanbul, right? And the direct flight is like, I don't know,$700. But you can fly to like Paris for like 200 bucks. And then you can take a budget airline for 100 bucks from Paris to Istanbul. So if you're willing to connect, you can play with these flight routes to find a much cheaper flight than just a direct one.

16:34Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

17:05And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. If I wanted to live on$75 a day, and by the way, I say live as opposed to travel. So that's maybe a big difference, but I would go to someplace like India where you could basically live on like five bucks a day or 10 bucks a day.

17:47I think, I mean, I don't know how much a hostel is in India to stay there, but like where you stay with some family that's like couch surfing or Airbnb. Like if you go to a cheap country, what's the cheapest you could do? Well, I mean, you could do it, um, India for, you know, if you're staying for free and eating a local food and, you know, you have 10, 20 bucks a day. Um, I think India is probably one of the cheapest destinations in the world, um, between the exchange rate and just the cost of living. You could probably travel there for like 40 bucks a day but if you really want to be like ultra backpacker like cheap traveler you can probably get it down to like 20 bucks a day yeah so if you average that out with like like what's the cheapest in europe like western europe cheapest in western europe uh probably portugal and that's probably going to set you back like 50 60 euros a day so okay so that's still around 75 bucks a day, or, or I don't know what the exchange rate is now, but, uh, uh, so where, where do people, but, but you're kind of talking about with traveling all around traveling the world and you're saying with travel costs included, you know, it could be up to$75 a day.

19:01Cause once you're there, like once in you're in Europe, you know, what do you do? Yeah. You know, like you said, um, the flight is often the barrier, you know, but as we've said, like, There's many ways to fly cheap. When you fly over there and you land, I like to help people travel like you live. You don't eat out every meal at home. I do. Uber Eats. All right. Most people don't eat out. Go grocery shopping. Go picnicking. You don't have to eat out every meal. You can lower your food costs that way. Take public transportation. You know, walk like there's so many free activities, do free activities.

19:46So like there's a lot you can do to fill your day without having to spend a lot of money. When it comes to accommodation, which is obviously a huge cost, you know, if if you don't want to stay in hostile dorm rooms, which are obviously very inexpensive. Consider, like you said, couch surfing or a similar website where you can stay with locals and a hosted family for free. um airbnb rooms rather than get your own place stay in someone's guest room that's often very cheap um and you know there's all sorts of like home exchange services and house sitting services that you can do um where like let's say you're going on vacation james and you want someone to watch your house i as a traveler will come and watch your home while you're away of course there's security and the we've been vetted and IDs have been verified and all that stuff, background checks.

20:38So there's a lot of ways to reduce your costs as you travel with accommodation, with food, with activities, you know, what's wrong with just wandering around and sitting in a park with a book, right? Like not everything has to be like, we're going to do something, right? Most people don't do anything in there. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Like, I actually hate going to the tourist things. Like, and I think many people do. Like I remember one time I took my daughter with me. I had to go to Paris on work and I took my daughter with me and she wanted to see the Mona Lisa. So we passed by the Louvre and I said, here's what we're going to do.

21:18We're going to be in and out of there in 15 minutes or less. We're just going to go in a straight line to the Mona Lisa. You're going to see it. We're going to turn around and we're going to leave as quickly as possible just to check that box. And then the rest of the day, we just walked around and hung out. Yeah, and Paris is such a beautiful city. Some of my favorite memories in Paris, and I go quite often, it's never like the Louvre or the Dorsey. It's like I found this random park, and everyone was having this beautiful picnic, and I met some people. I wandered into this amazing seafood restaurant.

21:54It's all the things that happened through chance. Then like, oh, like my favorite memory was fighting the crowd to see the Mona Lisa. That's no one's favorite memory. Like right now, like so when you stay in Paris, do you still keep it to 75 bucks a day? As a travel writer, I tend to spend more money because I do everything. So to help you, the visitor, know where the best deals are, I go make tons of mistakes and do everything to be like, okay, don't do this, do that. But oftentimes I will like to prove that you can do this on$75 a day, I do it to be like, here's my video of like, here's what I ate, how much I spent on transportation, how I saved money on accommodation.

22:43But you can do it. And just to roll back the story a little bit, can you talk about how when you first, I mean, you changed your life and that you were working the corporate job that wouldn't have allowed you more than like two or three weeks vacation. You really couldn't travel the world. Like what changed? What turned you into the superhero you are now, Nomadic Matt? Yeah, so I was working in healthcare admin. After college, I got a job doing just clerical work at a hospital in Boston. And like you said, I had like a couple of weeks vacation a year. It wasn't really an exciting job. I didn't really think that was my career, healthcare administration.

23:31But I paid the bills. And then I took a trip to Thailand with a buddy of mine in 2005. And it was there that I met a bunch of backpackers. And I was just fascinated by the fact that these people were just traveling for as long as the money lasted. And, you know, we were on this way to this temple in the northern city of Chiang Mai. And we were just kind of talking. And they were, you know, this is January 2005. And they're Europeans, so they got a ton of vacation time. And then there were like a couple of Canadian backpackers who were just traveling for like a year. And they were just like, I can't believe you took all your vacation in January.

24:10What are you going to do the rest of the year? And I was like, didn't really think about it, actually. I guess do nothing. And that kind of thought stayed with me for a little bit. and so I was traveling with my friend Scott and then when we got back to Bangkok I made him come and stay with me on Kosan Road which is like the big backpacker street in Bangkok and I was like I wanted to like pretend to be a backpacker. I was so inspired and I just loved it. We actually met a ton of people some of them came to our next destination with us and I was like I love this freedom and so on our last place in Thailand we went to this island called Chiang Mai, no, sorry, Koh Samui.

24:51And I went - Beautiful place. By the way, the White Lotus season three is taking place there. Yeah, yeah. I did not stay at the Four Seasons. I was at a much cheaper hotel. I was at a yoga retreat, super cheap. And I, Scott didn't want to wander. So I went wandering and I just sat by this beach all day. It was this beautiful beach. And I was just like, you know what, I'm gonna go home and quit my job and go travel for a year. I was finishing an MBA at the time. So like it felt like a good break. So I was like, you know, I'll finish the degree. I'll travel. I'll be like these backpackers and I'll go back and get a corporate job and the white picket fence and all that jazz.

25:35And yeah, I went away and I just kept traveling. I mean, it's funny because like every time I have to travel to something, I'm really dreading it in the weeks and months beforehand. Like for instance, I'm going to Norway for some stuff in a couple of weeks. And it's almost to the point where I want to cancel it. I know I'm not going to for anybody from Norway listening to this. I'm not going to cancel it. And once I get there, I love it and never want. And it's just, it's so freeing, that feeling of traveling, because you feel disconnected from like the decades of life you built up in your home.

26:13And there's something very freeing about that feeling, you know, and you get to see things that are almost the same culture as yours, but not. And it's like, you know, 10 ,000 miles away or however long. And I don't know, there's something very beautiful about traveling. And you've tapped into that. Like you do it all the time. like those first few years, how often, how, what percentage of the year were you away? I mean, on that first trip, I was gone for 18 months. Um, yeah. So I, I left in July, 2006, and I didn't come back until the end of January, um, 2008. And how did you survive? Like, how did you now, admittedly you were doing it on, you know,$50 a day and like your first book alludes to, but, but, or less, but how did you have money to, to do it?

27:05Like I never was able to save money when I was younger. I lived like a pauper, you know, I, I had been saving money, you know, I had my 401k and all that jazz, um, you know, I'm my employer match. And then when I decided to, to quit and do this, I, I moved into a hourly position at the hospital, just, you know, basic entry, I left my salary roll. And when you walk into a hospital, you ask, what floor is this unit on? And somebody goes, fifth floor. I did that. That's a great job. Yeah, it was easy and allowed for overtime. So I just, I worked. I went to school and I worked. And I went to school and I worked.

27:48And I just saved and saved and saved. I moved back in with my parents for like six months before I left. Uh, and so that allowed me to save about 30 K between my previous savings, um, the overtime and just cutting my expenses as drastically as I could. And, and that, uh, the 30 K a lot for 18 months of just nonstop travel. Like how many countries did you visit? Well, uh, not a lot. I think on that first shift, let's see, one, maybe like 10 or 12. Because what ended up happening is I ended up living in Bangkok for a good nine months of that. And so my goal was to have$20 ,000 for the trip and$10 ,000 to come home with.

28:40And then – Did you make money while you were traveling? Yeah. Because about eight months into the trip, I was like, I actually want to go back to Europe next year. I'm going to need more money. So I ended up teaching English in Thailand for March to November of 2007. And how did you get that gig? Like, did you just put up an ad, like learn English, and like wealthy Thai people wanted their kids to learn English? Or like what, how do you do that? There's a lot of like online resources, like just job boards, where language schools would post. So I just applied online. and they're pretty easy to get, honestly.

29:24A teaching English job in Southeast Asia, they're all over the place. They didn't really pay well, but it's really just to earn a little bit of money. And then so that helped support me and grow my savings. Because what happened in the interim is when I planned my original trip, Like one US dollar got you 1.5 Australian dollars. So I budgeted based on that exchange rate. But by the time I got to Australia, it was one-to-one. So like the cost like went up, you know, 50%, you know, of what I had budgeted. Because the exchange rate had changed so much that I actually ended up using a lot of my savings for the two months I was in Australia because I needed the extra money.