What nomads are out there traveling married and/or with a family?

Hi! We’re Ukrainian family with two sons - 4 and 1.5 yo. We spent 5 months in 7 Asian countries last winter. This time we’d like to do the same on another continent. We’re thinking about Latin America or Africa. We need a good kindergarten and beautiful safe place with good warm weather. That’s why we’re searching through all the topics on this website

I’m also late to the party. We’re a family of four (kids age 10 and almost 7), we’ve been travelling/working with the kids since May this year. It’s not easy trying to work and school and see things with kids, but so worth it! We’re in the UK at the moment, about to head to Spain (yay, we can warm up a bit). We’ve been in Latvia, Estonia and Belgium before Scotland.

Hardest part is balancing our commitments (work and correspondence school) with sight seeing. We mainly work the week and check out the local areas on the weekends, with lots of playgrounds in between.

Late to the party, but we are a family of 5 that travel together. We are heading back to Europe for 5+ months starting in mid December. Twin girls, soon to be 13 years old, a boy 8 years old. All schooling is online, so our only criteria is a strong internet connection. I work remotely as a web developer. We really aren’t 100% nomadic as we have a home base, but we are seldom there. Would love to setup another home base in Europe, looking at the depressed properties in Spain, maybe we will pull the trigger this time around.

Hey David,

Thanks so much for the recommendation! Funnily enough, I was on your blog not long ago and left a comment (that Sarah replied to) mentioning that we would be heading to Koh Phangan soon, after not being there for 8 years. We plan to get there in September, so it might be a bit wet, but we will be hitting up that area for sure and looking for the day care.
Thanks!
Pat

I love hearing about other travelers with kids! My husband and I just became nomads June 1st. He is a SAHD for our 9 month old daughter and we plan to stay in most places for 6-12 weeks so we have some stability for her while we wander. So far travel has been great for her, she’s really come our of her shy shell and is much more interactive/open with new people then she ever was at home. We’ve got good routines down for naps and such so she feels comfortable more quickly in new places and it’s been working on the shorter trips we’ve done - we’re really hoping this trend keeps up

Going forward we’re also really curious about what other families do school wise. We’re a ways off from that but we plan to have number 2 in about a year and would like to continue our travels thereafter.

Jumping on this old thread as well. My wife and I with our 4 kids have been traveling for over 2 years. you can see more about our travels and crew at http://homealongtheway.com

But more importantly there is a Facebook group with 500 other traveling/location independent families. https://www.facebook.com/groups/LocationIndependentFamilies/ IT’s so encouraging to see the other traveling families there and how they solve similar problems we run into.

And frankly I love learning from places like nomadforum but the conversation about where/how much/what to do etc changes when you have kids. For example we cannot baseline on $1,000 USD a month in SEA. Things are different when you have kids and it’s encouraging to see how everyone is doing similar yet different things to solve problems like education or date nights etc.

We are currently travelling with our 2 year old. We are 1 month into our 8 month travels and so far the big challenge has been adjusting to life on the road without the usual routine.

I think the biggest difficulty is for our daughter and the lack of friends her age. We try to get her out to a local park most days, and do activities like swimming, but it has to be tough for her, having her world turned around.

We are in Chiang Mai until early August so if anyone is around and wants to gather for a play date / beers, feel free to send me a message!

Pat
0905859034

The threads a bit old, but thought we’d add our bit on here.

We’re an American nomad family; expats for 4 years and nomads for almost a year. We travel with our 3 year old son and blog about setting up a business on the road (http://nomadica.io), why we chose to go nomad and how the lifestyle suits our family. We blog at http://theluxpats.com.

Happy to jump on chat or jump on Skype for other families considering the leap.

Been together for 10 years, just had a baby girl - then left to see the world straight after. Now working online fully.

My wife and I have been travelling with our two sons, 4 y.o. and 1.5 y.o., since the younger one turned 3 months old.

We are currently on a three month long journey, went from Warsaw (where we are based) to Tel-Aviv, then Sri Lanka, stayed there a few months, then Bangkok for 3 days, back to Sri Lanka, and now we are headed to Hong Kong, and then Berlin.

A lot of our thoughts were around location independent education. Currently, our older son is enlisted to a kindergarten in Warsaw, but in two years he will need to go to school. We started a project around that, please PM me if you are interested.

Traveling with a kid of 2. Now is the period we gonna look for kindergardens for him, because it starts to get lonely for him otherwise. We’ll think about school later : ) Generally, this means slower travel, not less than a month but I don’t think that’s a problem for most people anyway. Looking forward to more resources that can help out nomads with kids, it’s great to find blog links btw!!!

We get married in 2011, 1 week before we left Canada to became full-time nomads and we founded a company together. So we worked and travelled together for about 4 years now

It’s great to see so many success stories with married couples, especially with the addition of children. I have been working in a large corporation for about 5 years now, and the corporate culture, 9-5 desk jockey thing has been slowly killing me, mentally and physically. I’m working on going #nomad, co-founding a start-up, but I think the bigger challenge is going to be finding something fulfilling for my wife, as she would have to give up her position as a teacher.

Has anyone here gone nomadic as a former teacher or with a spouse in the profession? If so, what did you transition to as your new career?

Been traveling/working with my wife for about a year-and-a-half now and we are having a blast!

Hi Nayar,

There are lots of ways to fund it - some people just save up the cash before they leave, others pay off the house they live in asap, then rent it out and live off the rental income, others who haven’t paid off their house yet will just re-finance it and pull out some equity and use THAT to fund their travels. For us, since we intend to do this indefinitely, we are playing around with earning money online to supplement the funds we have currently.

Because we travel slowly, fitting in work and sightseeing is doable. Our schedule so far this year was 1 month in Maui (budget buster!!!), 2 months in Bali, 19 days in Siem Reap (Cambodia), 3 months in Penang (Malaysia), 1 week in Singapore (visa run since only allowed 3 mo. at a time in Malaysia on a tourist visa), now in our 2nd 3 mo. stay in Penang, then will go back to Bali for 2 months etc. On the other hand, if we were hopping around from place to place every week or two, we’d all be burnt out and exhausted. I was talking with another traveling family the other day and they’d actually had moments where they were like “Let’s just go home - I’m sick of this!” - but they are traveling much faster than we are, and staying in 1-room accommodations mostly (that’s for a family of 4) - as any parent knows, cramming the entire family into a 1-room place for months would not be ideal. Whereas if you travel slowly, your budget can allow for more spacious accommodations - case in point, we are staying in a gorgeous fully furnished 1450 sq ft modern high-rise condo with swimming pool, playground, gym, and laundry service right now for $33 per night. They are paying the same price for a single room in a guest house. But that’s the best they can get if only staying a few days here. But since we signed a lease for 6 months, we were able to get something much more comfortable for our money.

Obviously if one only wants to travel for a year, then traveling slowly as we are would not necessarily be a desirable option since you wouldn’t get a chance to see everything you want - but in our case, we are hell bent on doing this for years, so we don’t feel rushed to pack in as much as possible into a short time frame, and can take the time to chill out in one place for a good long while before moving on.

I’ll be travelling with my wife in a few weeks. Wish me luck!

Married for 2 years, traveling for 4, been together 7. Having a routine is definitely very important! We work on the same projects with each other so it’s a bit like @marcusmeurer. It’s definitely best to work as a team as much as possible. Of course, this isn’t always practical because skill sets might not complement each other well.

Not really traveling as a married couple but I’m traveling with a couple to help their with their baby. We’re traveling to make documentaries so I help with that too

Me and my wife travel once a year for 3 to 7 months each time, working from wherever we are. The only reason we don’t travel all year long is to avoid the boreal winters.
We both work on the same business, and that makes it a lot easier, since times are the same, we split the costs and the profits, we help each other, etc.

Solo travel is way, way harder after a while, and traveling with a non-working partner is also difficult, unless things are crystal clear from the get-go.

We work on digital and online-related stuff, as most of the nomads we know.

If I could recommend skills for this kind of life, they would be programming, photography, language-teaching, many web-related things and pretty much anything that can be done from a computer, specially if it is asynchronous (it gets hard to be online several times a week with people in different time zones).

Wow, thats great @BellyBellyKelly. I have a 2 year old and i hope to do this one day too as i love traveling. However i am finding it hard at the moment on working out what skills i have that can be monetised to create an online income, one where i don’t have to trade time for money. any suggestions on where to start?
Appreciated.

Hello!

On Sunday (Jan 18th), we’re beginning our 12 month around the world journey with three of our four children (2, 10, 12). Who knows what will happen after the 12 months.

I’ve had a travel bug for a long time, and with an online business for 12 years, I always dreamed of doing it. Now I am! So excited

The blog will be live soon, but I have Facebook and Twitter set up:

https://www.twitter.com/atwpluskids

Kelly

My wife, young son and I decided to travel/work abroad in Eastern Europe. We actually bought one-way tickets to do a 1 year adventure and then found out she was pregnant after buying the tickets. Our 2nd baby was born while we were in Romania and it has been a very rewarding experience.

The thing that I have not yet figured out is what to do when the children are of age to go to school. One idea is to enroll in a local school (wherever we are) and to settle down for a school year. Another option is to home school or to find an international school. I’m leaning more toward enrolling our oldest in the local school system for the experience and language learning.

My travel partner has been with me since 2010 - we were married in Taiwan in 2011.

My long-term girlfriend @Feli and me are traveling and doing business together since more than 3 years.
We got different routines and to handle our private and business life.
I think the most important thing is to work like an emanzipated team and stay professional and focused in the business section.

One of the biggest challenges is to set up routines and structures that should be worked out together.
One of the biggest advantages being on the road together is to share your experiences in other countries and cultures and having a reliable business partner right next to you.

Been together nearly 10 years. On the road about two now. What are your questions?

Been traveling/working as a married couple for about a year-and-a-half now and we love it!

Establishing a set work schedule was definitely important for us. We both run our own businesses online and can get pretty tunnel-visioned with our own projects. By establishing a working routine that we both adhere to, we’re able to get plenty done while still allowing ourselves time to hang out, go on dates, and have fun being married and on the road!

Plus, the work routines we have in place allow us some space from each other. Traveling with a spouse is amazing, but being with each other 24/7 can be exhausting. Having a routine/schedule allows time to detach from each other a bit.