When we talk about “full-time travel,” I suspect some people think that somehow means a specific way of living. But if you’ve studied this obsessively over the past several years as I have, you start to see that most people – at least those who are telling their stories on blogs like this one and on YouTube – tend to coalesce around one of three different styles of nomadic living.

In this post, I want to talk a little about each of those three concepts, and then introduce a somewhat different way of looking at full-time travel that we are trying to craft on the fly as we go.

“Fast Travel”

These are people who tend to move around around once per week on average. They want to see the world, and when done correctly, they can check off approximately 50 new cities each year. One example of this style of travel – and a couple who creates content I really enjoy – is the Retirement Travelers. In fact, they just recently posted a video explaining in detail why fast travel is the style that suits them best:

I see the appeal. If I sat down to make a list of every city I’d like to spend a week visiting, I suspect I would come up with a list so long that it would take years – maybe more years than I have – to get to all of them. But there are some major downsides here as well. First, it’s exhausting . . . at least for us. We’ve been moving around faster than we’d like since September, and now that we’re in Buenos Aires for a full month, I am breathing a sigh of relief.

But part of the reason for this is the way we travel. To me, “Fast Travel” is likely to appeal most to younger travelers or, perhaps more importantly, travelers who pack light, and insist on going carry on only. John and Bev of the Retirement Travelers talk about this “travel light” philosophy a lot, and I suspect that’s the primary thing that makes this style of travel work for them.

But I’m sitting here in Argentina surrounded by two large suitcases that we can just manage to get under 50 pounds, two carry on bags that I am constantly praying will not get weighed at the airport, and two personal items – both of which likely fail either the size or the weight requirements for many airlines. Maybe we’ll whittle down our belongings over time, but for now, the literal and figurative weight of our baggage makes fast travel sound exhausting.

“Slow Travel”

Slow travel is characterized by a nomadic lifestyle that typically includes moving once per month. There are a lot of great YouTubers touting this style of travel. Some of our favorites are (in no particular order):

• Warren & Julie Travel. When I first started watching them, they were based in Europe and specialized in working through the “Schengen Shuffle.” If you don’t know, this is a key limitation of travel in Europe. Most non-Europeans can only spend 90 of every 180 days in the “Schengen Zone,” which is made up of most countries in Europe, and the list keeps growing. But recently, Warren & Julie are actually based in Cuenca, Ecuador and working their way around South America. Two other notes about Warren & Julie: (1) Warren is a health insurance broker, and he specializes in policies for full-time travelers (he helped us get our policies for 2026 sorted out), and (2) they travel with dogs, which creates several unique challenges, so if you’re hoping to do the same, following them might be a good idea.
• Grounded Life Retirement Travel, a couple who spends much of their time in Southeast Asia. They actually have tons of content and several different channels, all of which have great information.
• Retired Nomad Adventures (though they seem to straddle the line between fast travel and slow travel a fair amount)
• Brian and Carrie, another couple who make a lot of great travel content.

There are also some channels that blur the line between “fast” and “slow” travel, and one of the ones I really like is Finding Gina Marie. In fact, they posted a video a few weeks ago about how they found themselves creating a plan that had swung the pendulum way too far towards full-time fast travel than slow travel, and decided to bite the bullet and revamp their plans to slow things down. It’s a good video explaining many of the tensions between “fast” and “slow” travel, and how they find themselves being pulled towards fast travel even though they prefer slow travel:

When I initially started planning for early retirement, I thought slow travel probably made the most sense for my wife and me. But stay tuned, because my thoughts have evolved.

Expat Life

The third major category out there is a true “expat” life, where you actually become a full-time resident of another country. This is both freeing and limiting. It’s freeing in that you can settle into a place and really become part of a new community, all while avoiding the cost and frustration of long travel days. The limitation is that if your goal is to see the world, tying yourself down to a single country doesn’t really match that goal.

Additionally, while many countries around the world allow people to enter as “tourists” for 30-90 days, in most counties, if you want to stay beyond the tourist visa limits, you have to get an actual, more formal visa. That process is beyond the scope of this post, and the permutations are almost endless because each country is different, and countries may also treat citizens of some countries different from citizens of others. For now, suffice it to say that this can be a time consuming, expensive, and stressful process. Again, there are plenty of examples of this lifestyle on YouTube as well. Here are a few I like:

• Amelia and JP. OK, this one has a twist with it. When I started watching them, they were full-time residents of Cuenca, Ecuador. It’s one of the reasons Cuenca became our first “test city” in the summer of 2024. But more recently, Amelia and JP have been straddling the line somewhere between fast travel and slow travel. So if you’re looking for examples of all three styles, search through their content over the past several years.
• Retired Working for You. This channel focuses on expat life in Thailand, and he’s put out a ton of great content. He’s a bit, I’ll go with quirky, but there’s no doubt he has a wealth of information that anyone thinking of moving to Thailand would want to know.

Here’s a video Ameilia and JP posted discussing the pros and cons of Ecuador versus Portugal as an expat:

Maybe There’s a Viable Fourth Option

There are things that appeal to me about fast travel, slow travel, and becoming a true expat. But all three options seem to come with enough downsides that I’ve been thinking about a fourth option, something that straddles the line between slow travel and true expat life. For now, I’m calling the concept “Rotating Home Bases.”

The idea is fairly simple, and it’s inspired by something my parents have been doing for years. They live most of the year in Northwest Colorado. But eventually, they decided that the months of cold winters and shoveling snow was getting old, so they decided to spend January, February, and March in Southern California. With some effort, they managed to find an apartment overlooking the ocean that they can rent for three months. And they’ve now rented that same apartment for those cold winter months for over a decade.

This is what really got me thinking. Maybe it’s possible to expand upon that concept, but instead of having one temporary 3-month home every year, what if you have three of them, in three different geographic regions?

Is “Rotating Home Bases” Lifestyle Realistic?

I guess that’s what we plan to find out. The idea is that we would find three cities we love, in three different parts of the world, and that we would try to find an apartment in each that we could rent for the same three months every year. This gives us three strong “home bases” that would be jumping off points for shorter weekend or week-long trips – without taking all of our luggage with us, and without forcing us to become backpackers.

It also frees up a few additional months each year for other locations. So, for example, if we decided at the end of our four months in South America this year that Cuenca, Ecuador is our favorite location, we could try to find an apartment to rent for three months in 2027. Then, we would plan a fourth month somewhere else in South America. So, perhaps in 2027 we’d spend a fourth month in Mendoza, Argentina. And then in 2028, maybe we’d spend that fourth month somewhere in Peru . . . or Chile . . . or Columbia. You get the idea.

Then, the goal would be to find a second “home base,” likely in Europe – and ideally outside the Schengen Zone to avoid complicated visa issues. One place we’re visiting this fall is Albania, so let’s assume that becomes our European home base. Since it’s outside the Schengen Zone, we could spend three months there, and still go anywhere else in Europe we want for the fourth month each year.

Anyway, I think you get the idea, and we’re going to spend much of 2026 seeing if it’s something that might realistically work for us.

In the meantime, please check out our brand new YouTube channel, where we will be exploring all of these issues in more detail. Our first video, “Crafting a Smarter Way to Retire Abroad” was just published. I really hope you enjoy it.