If you’re like me, you have probably had cell service through one of the major carries. I’ve used Verizon since I first got a cell phone in the 1990s. And when I’ve traveled, I have typically either not used my phone (i.e., just stayed in airplane mode) or paid Verizon’s $10 per day international plan when I’ve needed coverage. And to be honest, it’s worked just fine. I’ve often had Wifi and didn’t need more than occasional cell coverage, so spending and extra $10, $20 or even $50 on a trip was fairly inconsequential.

This is not going to work when I switch to full time travel in 2026. $10 per day doesn’t sound like much if you’re only using it a handful of days each year, but it will add up fast if I try to use it full time.

This leads to the investigation of the best way to handle cell coverage while traveling, and while I thought this would be one of the simpler issues I had to resolve, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated.

One of the easiest “solutions” – and one I hear touted frequently – is to simply use a VoIP service like Google Voice. (VoIP stands for Voice of Internet Protocol, and it’s essentially a cell phone plan without actually cell service. Instead, it uses the internet for making and receiving phone calls.). But there are some serious downsides to this approach.

For me, the biggest downside is that VoIP services often do not play well with two factor authentication for things like your financial institution. If you depend on a text 2FA code from your bank in order to log in, there is a chance that this will not work if you are using a VoIP service. I won’t get into the technical details (mostly because I don’t understand them), but the bottom line is that you often need an actual U.S. based cell carrier in order to receive these 2FA codes. And being stuck in a foreign country with no ability to access my bank account sounds like a terrible idea.

Some VoIP services also have restrictions in how long you can use them overseas, and I have read stories about people getting notices that the service will be cut off until they “renew” it by being back in the United States. For normal travel, this likely works fine, as most trips will be shorter than the limit, and the risk of getting cut off is remote. But for full time travelers, being forced to return to the U.S. at a specific time to avoid losing cell service is less than ideal.

Taken together, these limitations make VoIP a nonstarter for me, at least as a complete solution.

Other people seem to simply abandon traditional cell service and rely exclusively on an app-based solution like WhatsApp. You can make and receive calls using WhatsApp, and from my limited worldwide travel, it does seem like some parts of the world rely heavily on WhatsApp as their exclusive “cell phone” provider. But again, there are significant limitations, including the same problem with getting 2FA codes from financial institutions. It also means abandoning your traditional cell phone number in favor of your WhatsApp number, which may be fine for you, but I’ve found that trying to convince friends and family that they have to use WhatsApp to contact me is far from ideal.

If you aren’t worried about the cost, you can just keep your traditional U.S. based carrier, and opt for an international plan. Verizon and T-Mobile both offer plans that would work, but they are more expensive then I’m willing to pay. After all, I’m trying to retire early and cut costs, not increase them.

So this left me with some of the “low cost” cell carriers in the United States, and at least for now, I’ve landed on Tello. Tello is a real cell carrier, meaning it should have no trouble receiving 2FA codes. It’s also far less expensive then the “big name” options. And Tello allows you to change your plan whenever you want, which means I can use a cell and data plan when I’m in the United States, and change to a data only plan when I’m abroad. So far, I’ve only tested this in the U.S., and Tello has worked fine. It costs $25 per month for unlimited minutes and unlimited data (though the data will apparently be throttled if you exceed a certain amount, which is 50GB per month as I’m writing this). Tello does not have its only cell infrastructure; it uses the T-Mobile equipment. This does raise a question for me about whether T-Mobile prioritizes its own customers when the network is busy, but so far, it hasn’t seemed to be a problem.

When we start traveling, we can eliminate the “cell phone” part of the plan, since the cell coverage only works in the United States, and we can reduce the data to something like 5GB per month, which lowers the cost to $8 per month. And here’s the key: even without cell coverage, Tello allows Wifi calling, so (at least in theory), as long as you have Wifi, you can still make and receive calls. There’s also one more sneaky bonus here: if you have a local data plan (which I’ll get to in a minute), Tello is supposed to treat that local data as the equivalent of Wifi, which means you should still be able to make and receive calls even when you don’t have Wifi, provided you have a local data plan.

So now I’m at $8 per month, but I have limited data and no traditional cell service. To address this, I plan to get a local data plan in whatever country I happen to be in. This, too, presents options and complications, but to try to keep this simple, you can either opt for an actual local sim card (either a physical sim if your phone still takes one or a digital sim), or you can use an esim provider that has international plans. There are lots of choices here: Airalo, Holafly,Saily, and many others. We’ve tried Airalo, and it worked fine, but I have no idea if it’s what we’ll end up using long term. Here’s a video from Project Untethered (though a little dated) talking about some of the options in way more detail:

Here’s a video from Grounded Life Retirement Travel – a channel I really like – also covering these issues in more detail, though it’s again a bit dated:

On the one hand, I’m pretty confident the local sim option is the cheapest; there’s a cost to using the digital esim apps. But on the other hand, there’s convenience and security in knowing you’ll be connected from the moment your plan touches down, rather than waiting until you can find and successfully activate a local sim. And this is likely what we’ll do, at least at first. I expect it will cost around $20 per month, on average, for a data plan, but time will tell, and I know that some countries are more expensive than others.

Here’s a quick roadmap if you want to follow our plan:

1. Create a Tello account;
2. Port your existing number from whatever carrier you are currently using to Tello so you don’t have to change numbers (Tello makes this part easy);
3. Use Tello’s unlimited plan ($25) when you are in the United States;
4. When abroad, changed to a small data plan (say, 5GB for $8 per month) on Tello, to use as a backup.
5. Get a local esim from an app like Airalo, and load up the data you need on it, either country specific, by region, or globally. (Note that country specific plans will usually be cheaper than regional plans, which will be cheaper than global plans).
6. Use your local data plan for data, connect to Wifi when you can, and you should still be able to make and receive calls with you U.S. Tello number.

All this sounds great, and it’s definitely affordable.

I sure hope it works as advertised, but until I start traveling in January 2026, I won’t really know if it works as smoothly as advertised. Stay tuned for more information once we put this system to the test starting in January. In the meantime, if you have experience using a system like this, please let me know what worked and what didn’t.