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For Those Who Want More And Less
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For Those Who Want More And Less
We are Erin and Luke, a married Canadian and English couple with a shared love of travel and frugality, and the brains and beauty behind Conscious Wanderlust.
Our story is a tale as old as time: two people who found love in a hopeless place. We met in 2013 in Southeast Asia where beer was cheaper than water and hostels cost $1 per night. From here we spent the next 5 years traveling, working odd jobs, and gaining unforgettable experiences along the way.
We went from tending farms and packing fruit in Oceania to climbing mountains in South America to owning our first home within 3 years of “settling down” in North America.
Join us as we share our experiences traveling on a budget, pursuing FIRE, and living a health-conscious, minimalist lifestyle with a focus on sustainability, wide-eyed exploration, and embracing misadventures.
From 2013 to 2018 we traveled the world on a shoestring budget living out of one backpack each that contained everything we needed. In 2018 we put down roots in Canada, with the intention of trying it out for a few years then moving on to the next destination. Several life and world events thwarted that initial plan but led us to our new path: working towards a life where we can travel full-time by pursuing FI (“Financial Independence”, a branch of the FIRE movement: “Financial Independence Retire Early”).
We haven’t stopped travelling completely, but instead are more selective about where we go and for how long, in part because we both have regular full-time jobs but also because we want to reach our ultimate goal as early as possible. It’s a delicate balance between feeding our souls with adventures and budgeting to grow our wealth.
This is a place for us to share what we’ve learned in the past 10+ years and where we plan to take that for the next forever. From working and living “normal” lives in our respective home countries to spending 5 years traveling the world living out of a backpack to readjusting to our current life in Canada, we do our best to keep our love of traveling alive while working on becoming financially free to travel full time forever.
This blog will be a mix of travel, money talks, and everyday life to give you a glimpse of what’s possible for the average person to achieve. Selfishly, it’s also an opportunity for us to reminisce about and relive past travel adventures through storytelling and informative posts for you.
For years we’ve been saying that we haven’t seen our exact situation represented in social media or in the books we’ve read. There are many travel stories about people who were already photographers or models, who were in high-paying jobs or ones that required them to travel often, or the people who started their accounts at the dawn of the social media age and made it big.
A lot of the popular accounts also show more extravagant travel than the average person has access to or show how to travel for next to nothing using methods many don’t feel comfortable with. Similarly on the financial side, many of those pursuing financial freedom have or had high-paying corporate jobs and were adhering to an extreme level of frugality that we don’t care for. We fall somewhere in the middle of the extremes.
Before leaving our respective countries in 2013, neither of us was in a high-paying job, we didn’t have thousands in savings to fund us nor did we sacrifice anything in our lives to be able to afford to travel. We were and still are, average people working hard to make our dreams a reality by prioritizing what’s important to us.
Travelling while living a sustainable life within your means is achievable. This blog is our way of showing you that you can do this too. Not everything will resonate with you, and that’s okay, it’s not necessarily meant to. It’s about learning new and different ways of thinking and doing, and taking what works for you and applying it to your own life (or not). If nothing else, you will read amusing stories and laugh alongside our misadventures and life plot twists.
As for what you can expect in terms of posts, the plan is to share our adventures alongside informative posts on the destinations we visit as well as how we make our lifestyle work for us. We want to showcase our top travel tips including packing and planning guides and be transparent about how we budget and what we spend, providing breakdowns and guides for how you can do the same – both travel related and for everyday life. If there’s something you have a question on or want to see, let us know! This blog is as much for you as it is for us.
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