How to Quit your Job & Travel Around the World - Rolando Archila

roughly in the first 20 years of your life, you're going to be studying, right? Like you're gonna be studying, you're going to be going to school, you're going to be learning the next about 40 ish years of your life, you're going to be working and trying to build your career and the next 20 or so, or 30 years if you're lucky of your life. After that, you're going to be enjoying right like a basically enjoying the fruit of your life as you retire at 65. And then all you got to do is just chill. So he had an interesting idea where it's like, what Okay, what if I just take like a few years of this third section over here, when I'm going to be just retired and just intersperse them in between those other 40 years of working. Welcome to the action Academy podcast staring back while I celebrate freedom, the show where we help you achieve financial independence with a mindset methods and actionable steps from guests who've already earned their freedom, the freedom fly. Choose to do what you want, what you want, with who you want, with who you want, when you want when you want with another episode today. Now, here's your host, Brian Luebben. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to or welcome back for another episode of the action Academy podcast. I'm your host, Brian Luebben, bringing you the mindsets, the methods, and the actionable steps for you to achieve freedom in your life today. Before I introduce everyone to today's guest, I want to I want to start this episode with a quote. And that is nobody in the retirement home ever says that they regretted spending too much time with their family, or traveling too much. So as we go through our life, why are those the two things that we seem to be lacking the most in? Is it time Is it money is it responsibilities and priorities? The list goes on and on. And that's the topic of today's show with our guests. Rolando, our chilla Rolando is one of my dear friends who was a recovering workaholic, as in his words, he actually was one of the youngest vice presidents in his company at the age of 27. And realize quickly that he was spending the best 40 years of his life working for and with people that he did not enjoy in a job that he was not progressing in or passionate about. So he decided that he wanted to go travel with his wife around the world. And they needed to figure out how the heck to do that. So they spent years planning and figuring out and reading all the different books and watching all the different seminars and figuring out how to best go about this. And then they freaking did it. They quit their jobs, travelled around the world to 15 different countries, and spent an entire calendar year traveling from coast to coast across the entire globe. So I know this sounds like a huge ordeal. And that's something that's going to be completely out of reach for a lot of us. But what I can guarantee you is it is not. And with today's story, Rolando is going to be able to teach you everything from how to plan your mindset around this to make this possible, how to vision it, how to budget for it, how to prepare for it with friends and family, how to plan just about every aspect of this trip. And whether that be for three months, six months, one month or a year. This episode will give you the tools that you need to do that. Now listen, we were not made as humans to spend the best 40 years of our life slaving away doing things that we don't even enjoy. I personally I'm not going to wait till I'm 65 to enjoy life. And I don't expect you to either that's listening to this. So please listen to what Rolando has to say, pay attention to it and stick around for the end of the episode for Rolando his link to his free eBook where he goes into depth and detail about all the things that we talked about. And even more. As I leave you on this intro, I have just a couple asks of you. If you're finding value from this show, please subscribe to the show. It's normally in the top right corner on Apple podcasts or Spotify. If you're listening on Apple, please leave us a five star rating and a review that is greatly appreciated. And it helps the show grow. And then also follow us on Instagram at action Academy podcast. So without any further ado, Rolando, my brother from another mother. How are you doing my friend? Good, man. I'm super excited to be here with you, man. This has been it's been a long time coming I feel Yeah, so I'm very excited to have you on Rolando goes and he works. You went through a period of time and then he'll travel for a period of time and then the cycle continues and the cycle keeps going forward. So this start with how do you set this up? How do you get this going? Why did this even began? So for me starting even broader a little bit then then travel to me a big part of a big goal of mine has always been to create a life where I don't need to take care vacation from. I think there's so many people that see vacations even or travel as an escape to something out from your daily life, right? Or, like a way to escape the dread, or the parts that you don't really like. And for me, a huge objective has always been okay, how can I just create and design a life, that I feel that I can just never have to take a vacation from thinking that I can just live on a day to day basis in a way that I feel fulfilled and happy? And like the way the master would say is you live in a peak state, right? How can you create a life in which you live in a peak state? For me, a lot of that comes from travel, and not everybody is the same. And not everybody loves to travel and stuff. For me, that's a huge kind of fulfilling part of, of creating a whole life. Some of the benefits that I've found when traveling again, we can go into a huge rabbit hole just in travel overall. But some of the benefits that I've seen from travel is, to me, one of them is if I've ever wanted to live a long life, like we all want to live a long life, we all want to live a long and exciting life. My experience with travel has been that it slows time down. And it really makes me and it really gives me an exponential amount of time almost from a perceptual standpoint, there's actually a lot of neurobiology about this. There's an author called Steven Kotler who talks a lot about this. Things like the rise of Superman and the art of impossible. He has a lot of books about this. But there's a lot of neurobiology behind this. But long story short, essentially, whenever there's novelty, and variety in your life, and in your lifestyle. There's certain hormones that get released that slow down your perception of time. For me, what this all means at the end, is that you I feel like I am living a fuller, longer, more thorough life. And if you think about when you were a kid, right, when you're new when you're a kid, I remember like when I was like, eight years old, a year would feel like forever, like it would just feel like a huge leap. And they would just you would be a completely different person from age nine to at age 10. Now, we're all like, we're all like these jaded adults. And we look back and we're like, Oh, good. Yeah, it's November now. It's November 2021. Oh, my God. Where did the time go? Where did a year ago it just flew by. It's the complete opposite in my theory of the why that is, is because when we were kids, we were always getting that novelty that I was just talking about. You were always learning, you're always growing, you're always exposed to new ideas, and everything was brand new. And as soon as you become an adult, everything has a routine, you go to drive the same way to work, everything is the same. So the growth in your brain gets stunted. And your perception of time gets shortened. So to me, I feel like the best way to live a full long life is travel. And again, there's many other ways reasons why. But that's, for me one of the most critical reasons. So what we're talking about isn't Rolando just being an influencer, that just happens to have a ton of money sitting around in a bank vault where he can just go fly, you know, first class across the entire world. What he does is he's very intentional with his time, very intentional with his lifestyle design. And he's very intentional about his setups, and his structures, to be able to allow himself the freedom to be able to go and travel. But Rolando and I today, if you're wondering what kind of value we're going to bring and provide to you is we're going to talk about why to travel, which we just did, we're going to talk about how to travel, and then his systems and frameworks that he does to be able to allow himself to do this perpetually for the rest of your life. Correct? Absolutely. That's the goal. Awesome. So let's see. Yeah, I was just gonna jump in really quickly on the on the travel thing. I feel like another another, like awesome benefit that I've gotten from it is it expands your mind in a sense that you realize that you only see the world from one perspective out of 8 billion possible perspectives, right? So immediately, you become humbled by it, you become much more open to the idea that I'm not entirely right, that the way that I'm living, maybe necessarily right now is not the way that everybody should live. So it just makes you like a little bit more open and more empathetic and more leaning towards others, and able to understand other people's perspectives as well. And it's just there's so many different things that I feel like it's done. It's done for my life. I just wanted to throw that one in there as well. Yeah. And there's a beauty when you're living and you're operating under being a guest in someone's home in someone's culture. Because what happens is you start being the person that provides the answers, you start being the person that asks the questions, and then that's where you start tasting life a little bit more. So before we dive into the nuts and bolts Let's go into the federal framework about how this is even possible. A lot of people are listening to this right now. And they're like, must be nice. Sounds cool. I've got two weeks of PTO, bro. Like, what are you talking about? So you shared a framework with me before. And I think it's something that you're attempting the model, I think you've got a hybrid version of it. Can you talk about that framework that you shared with me previously about the what is it the five years on one year off? Is that correct? Yeah. So this is something that that I stole a version from, there's a designer, a famous designer called Stefan Sagmeister. And to that point, a little parentheses here, like I love the term lifestyle design, which is truly what we're talking about here, you create, you're designing and creating a lifestyle, but the word design, right, the word design means something specific, and it means you are intentionally and purposefully placing things around you so that you can then create a lifestyle that you want, right? If you think about the designer of a building, or the or a painter who is designing something, every brushstroke that in every color, and every palette, or in the case of a building, right, every single like doorknob, or everything that's made, has a purpose. And it has an as a true like intention behind it. So if you think about your life, the same many, I think for many of us, the easiest thing is to just live life by inertia and by momentum and just do the things that we have always known or that society has told us that the way that we have to live, or like simply, oh, I guess I have to go to school, and then I have to go to college, and I have to get a job. And then I have to retire 40 years later, like that whole framework was essentially created by people who are no smarter than us. But because we're all social animals, and we all seek to, we have all want to fall into conformity in a certain sense. We've all kind of gone in that direction. And the problem with that is oftentimes what's right for other people may not be right for us. So I just wanted to mention that idea of design, because this guy that we were just talking about Stephen Sagmeister. So he's a designer, right? He's a, he's created like many cool piece of art and graphic art. He's created, like, famous album covers for the Rolling Stones and stuff like that. But he has a TED talk. I forget the title of it right now. But he essentially talks in that the whole framework that we have around retirement just makes absolutely no sense. Like he, he basically again, being a graphic designer, he lays it out very visually, but he says, Hey, roughly, in the first 20 years of your life, you're going to be studying, right? Like you're gonna be studying, you're going to be going to school, you're going to be learning the next about 40 ish years of your life, you're going to be working and trying to build your career and the next 20 or so, or 30 years, if you're lucky of your life. After that, you're going to be enjoying right like a basically enjoying the fruits of your life as you retire at 65. And then all you got to do is just chill. So he had an interesting idea where it's like, what, okay, what if I just take like a few years of this third section over here, when I'm going to be just retired and just intersperse them in between those other 40 years of working. So what he does is he takes seven every seven years, he owns an agency and a business and stuff, but every seven years, he says All right, guys, we're closing up shop, I'm done. I'm done. I'm out of here. And he goes and takes one year off. So every seven years, it takes one year off. And what turns out that to happen, like that would happen is he initially thought hey, this is gonna ruin me, it's gonna be the worst thing that I've ever done. And that one gap year ends up inspiring the next seven years of creation, and then ends up inspiring and molding, what the next kind of stage for him is. So he's just made it a routine to just take those seven every seven years close up shop. So I've been able to do something similar as well, where I've, I was able to actually take one gap year, I was already a few years ago. And it was such a mind bender, that experience of taking one year off. And I ended up traveling to 15 Different countries in four different continents. It was like just a life changing experience. And we can get into the nuts and bolts of Connect how you do that, how you get there and all stuff. So I'm more than happy to do but I guess more to the broader picture. I was I was thinking so differently. My mindset was so different. You don't realize that when you're in that day to day grind, and you're like, essentially a slave to your habits. You don't often have the time to really like just think, thinking create and think creatively. And that's what that what that time was able to afford me. And it truly changed the trajectory of my life and has created a lot of the frameworks and a lot of the ways that I live right now. I love what you're talking about. Because I remember coming back from trips feeling refreshed, re Energize. Like you just woke up from a nap you woke up from asleep that you've been really needing. And when Rolando was talking to me before about this, he was saying that there's so much that goes on in your conscious brain Monkey Mind is the term for it. You're thinking about what's next? What do I got to do? Where do I need to be? What, what's for dinner, where am I going, I've got this meeting, I've got this call, I've got all these different obligations and responsibilities, your mind is not free enough, consciously or subconsciously, to be able to allow for a creative process or to allow for inspiration. So this is literally forced inspiration into your creating your next seven years of life. And before we go on to this next topic, we will dive a little bit about how he designs this up, and then we'll finish with some of his travel, actual experiences, and then we can bake it all together. But a story is I was, I went to visit the Sistine Chapel in Italy. And if you've been to the Sistine Chapel, you know that there's a staircase to go up to the top of the Basilica, so that you can climb all the way up to the top, it's a stone staircase is very, it's like shoulder width, very narrow and winding, it's very difficult to climb, it takes a while. And they have little spots on the edge of the staircase for people to rest, stop and turn around and go back down because they are unable to get up whether they are too old, or they're unfit. So as I was walking up the staircase to climb to the top of the tower to see the entire Vatican, from the top of Rome, I was watching all these people that had spent their entire lives working here. And they were 67 years old, 80 years old, trying to climb that staircase, and they could not physically do it. So they were turning around, and they're walking back down the stairs. And they were unable to see the view at the top. So to anybody that is asked, How can I do this? I don't think this is possible. I'm gonna wait till I'm retired. I would say that, yes, doing what we're about to talk about the systems is hard. But I guarantee you, it's not as hard and as painful as what they were feeling, being finally being able to accomplish their goal, and they weren't able to go up the staircase. So I'll get off my soapbox. Now. I think that's, that's such an important. I love that. Again, not everybody likes travel. But assuming you do, and assuming it's something that you want to do, or assuming that even me, you don't have to go all the way to Italy, but you just want to take some time off and travel around your country. Whatever it is, the point is, this whole idea of the deferred life is just doesn't make any sense. Like this whole concept, you're gonna work really hard for 40 years, and then enjoy life just makes zero sense, right? If you imagine you spend the best, most productive, strongest years of your life, doing something that you love, and then you retire, guess what, you're going to be bored, and you're going to hate it. And you're going to want to go back. Or imagine that you are that you spent the worst one one is, and this is unfortunately true for many people, you spent the best 40 Best 40 years of your life doing something you hate, or that you feel indifferent about, or that you're just like, I can take it or leave it. And then you spend you go back and retire and then go enjoy life. Man, you just like you're gonna you just spent the best 40 years of your life doing something that you hate. Only doo doo doo doo something that by the way, we're not guaranteed, Hey, I just know a guy who was 38, who passed away from a stroke two days ago. And that's the kind of stuff that can happen. And you have to assume that's something that is squarely within the realm of possibility for yourself. So the urgency of again, living life, that's intentional. Now, today, as soon as possible, is there's almost no more important urgency that life and death. Literally, yeah, literally life and death, because there is nothing that's guaranteed to us. So I would rather take the risk and choose your heart. So there's a quote that says, Choose your heart. And I've referenced that a little bit previously where it's marriage is hard. Divorce is hard, being fit as hard, being unhealthy as hard be systems that we're about to talk about. And bacony systems and processes in your life is hard, but not being able to do anything you want. For the 40 YEARS OF YOUR 40 BEST years, your life is also hard. So choose your heart, decide which one is more beneficial for you in the long run, and then stick to it. So let's talk about a little bit about how to actually design this. We can talk at a broad scheme and then we can go into some of the specific investment vehicles and specific strategies that you've done, that somebody can that's listening to this can apply or at least go down the rabbit hole. So as we're beginning this, take a story. Let's take a journey about a young Rolando that has this idea he He has this idea about this maybe being possible. And he's like, Okay, how do I make this work? Take us on that journey from the start to planning the trip to Okay, let's go, Tom, what is that? Now? Awesome. Yeah, I guess you addressed earlier, this idea that some people might be w two employees with two weeks that was made very like a super 32nd bio. For me I was. I was born and raised in Guatemala, I grew up there. I've moved here to the US when I was 24, College, ended up going into an internship which turned into a full time job. So by the time I was 26, I was the youngest VP, at this company, I was doing really well making a ton of money more than I knew what to do with at that point. And I was actually, and I was like, Oh, I'm actually like, not super happy. Like, unbelievably, right. Now, with the benefit of time and hindsight, I've been able to realize that a lot of that unhappiness just came from it came from a couple different places. One, I wasn't growing as much anymore. And we talked earlier about the importance of growth and stimulation and continuing to challenge yourself in ways that is, and that was, I was very comfortable at that point. And then secondly, I was doing something that, to me felt like, it didn't have impact, I wasn't truly living within my true gifts. I was good at what I was doing. But I wasn't really within living within my gifts and being able to impact others in the way that I wanted to. And I didn't have the freedom that I wanted to have. Like, for me, the freedom to be able to work with whenever you want, wherever you want, I've discovered is actually something that's very important. Back then I was like, Okay, I need to do something. And I remember actually one very specific moment, when I can, I came to this realization that I needed to bolt and it was my boss came into my office. And I had at that point A while ago had like, ask for a raise. And she came in and just is like, hey, guess what, you're getting this huge raise bigger than the one you asked for. And there's this other bonus, and you're getting a title and a bonus bump as well. And she left my office and I remember my emotion being angry. And I was like, What the hell like why am I angry right now I should be super happy I'm making so much. Right. And very quickly it dawned on me is I'm just in the wrong place. This if I take this salary, it means that I have to stay here longer. And the longer I stay, the more the famous Golden handcuffs are going to start materializing. So I was like, Okay, I have to take some action. So some of the initial steps that I took where I actually started with, and this is something that you and I have had a lot of conversation around, but it started with a vision. And to me, that's such an important thing, I think it's a very different conversation. If you're saying I am escaping something, versus I am moving towards something, I am chasing something, it's a very different point of view. A lot of people want to escape their jobs, a lot of people want to escape their relationships, they want to escape whatever it is that you're trying to leave, that will only get you so far. I think a stronger and better and more appropriate way to design your life is to work towards something that you dream about something that that makes you like that gives you butterflies in your stomach, and then makes me truly excited. That is the kind of stuff that to me, makes like the vision will pull you. There's only so far that something that you're escaping will push you towards. So I started with a vision and I and we can go into specifics about how to do this very quickly. Like a vision is essentially like I drew five years in the future. Here's what a day in the life of my life looks like. And I said, here's where I woke up what I was doing. Like, here's what my relationship looks like with my wife, here's what my house how much money I have. Here's how here's what I'm doing with my life. I was like, super, super specific with all the different areas of my life in my health and everything about what what I was feeling at that moment and tried to be very detailed with and here's a cool little tidbit about this. In that vision a long time ago, I wrote I think there was a specific paragraph that said something like, this morning, I woke up in Italy. And I was working from there. And while walking around the streets of I forget I think I said Venice or something. And I was really enjoying my life. And literally one month ago, I spent the month in Italy, where I was working and I woke up You know, early in the morning I was walking the streets of Rome. And I was you know listening to meditations by Marcus really as well of walking the streets that Marcus are really as walked through and going through the Pantheon all stuff. That was a literal line that I wrote in my vision many years ago. And back then I had no clue and no idea how I was going to pull it off. I have no clue because I was a W two employee. I didn't know anything about it. But I put something on paper that I knew I could make into reality. So that's step number one, create a very compelling vision that you know how you're going to go chase win I'll share one more step here with you. And then we can pause. But another thing that I think is super, super important, especially in this context, is there's another exercise, there's an exercise by a guy called Tim Ferriss. He wrote a book called The Four Hour Workweek. And once again, I'm gonna I'm bar I'm borrowing and stealing this from everything, man, but I credit where credit's due. But then he actually also has a head, he has a TED talk on this thing as well. But that he talks about this exercise called fear setting. And what that means is essentially, all of us have some have some big goal or some big leap in our hearts sorting our souls and our brains, however you want to call it, but something that is calling you, there's, there's a stuff that's in your zone of comfort, and there's something that's way bigger than you that you get that kind of scares you a little bit that's out there. One, one of the first things that you have to do when you have something like a calling like this is you have to do a fear setting exercise. And what that means is, it's essentially a keep this short, but it's essentially a table, where you are very explicit about all the fears that come up for you, when you think about making this leap, what could go wrong, and try to be as explicit and exhaustive as you can, for me, like some of the stuff when I was thinking about like, Okay, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna quit my job and go travel the world. I was like, what if I can never be employed again? What if I go hungry? What if I, what if I get shot while I'm traveling through South America? What if there's all kinds of what ifs? What if my family disowned me, because they think I'm a, I'm a lazy bum, and a vagabond, and there's all kinds of stuff that will come up. And there's stuff that you are, that's very top of mind for you. And there's probably a bunch of stuff that's in your subconscious that you haven't really even realized you're afraid of might actually happen. So that's step number one is be very define your fears. Step number two to that is list for each of those fears. How likely is that to actually from one to 10? How likely is that to actually happen, be real? And what you'll discover is, like, many of those things are actually quite unlikely give you I went back and I was like, Okay, how likely is it that will go hungry? Probably like a one. Like I'm a smart guy like I can I can like at least drive an Uber or something or figure something out, or I have my family loves me like, I'll I can go on food stamps, like, it's unlikely that I'll go hungry, right? A one out of 10? How likely is it that my family goes zoning, they're cool people, they love me, they won't. So list, what you'll discover is there are many of those fears that are actually quite unlikely to happen. That's the second step. The third step is think about what you would have to do to prevent those fears from happening. So say, What can I do so that I don't go hungry, I can have a savings account that I just saved so that when I come back from my travels, I can always live off of that, if I can't, like go and produce more money for any reason, list all those steps. Again, you'll discover in that step, that there are many things you can do now, before you make that leap that will prevent any of those bad things from happening whatsoever. And that all those things can actually become a plan for you to go take action right now to go and actually feel like you're taking fewer risks as you're jumping. And the last step is, is repair. So list, is that one thing as unlikely as it is were to happen, what would you have to do to fix it. So to go back to the one I just mentioned, if I'm gonna I say I all of a sudden am struggling to put food on the table. I can go freakin get a job at McDonald's. I'm like, and I'm like, those are like ridiculous things. But I was like, I'm a smart guy, like, I can get another job, I'll be fine. Like, I can make a case for all this stuff. And actually, one of the things that opened for me was if see, like, one of my fears was I'm going to be unemployable, when I get back ended up never actually taken another job and just work for myself out which I love. But I'm going to be unemployable was one of my fears. So what I did was, but I'm going to take time during that trip to actually build skills that make me more marketable and more and better when I actually get back. So I actually took a bunch of online courses and read a bunch of books, and worked on myself while I was traveling because I had the time and the bandwidth to do. And then I'm getting a couple of online degrees and stuff. And I ended up becoming way more marketable when I got back then less market. So a lot of people wanted to hire me. But, you know, fortunately, I was able to do my own thing. But the point is that you'll realize that there's many things that you can do, no matter what, and you'll figure something out. So that accessory exercises in itself will remove a lot of the fears and will remove a lot of a lot of the trepidation that you have because most of the barrier to go into travel is not like how do I buy plane tickets like most of the tactical stuff, we can figure that out. There's plenty of blogs, most of the barriers are in your own mind right most of the barriers to living the life of your dreams are in your own mind, so you have to take the discipline and and you know, thoughtful step of taking action and figuring out what are those mental obstacles that you're working they that you're working with, and you got to work through them, and up to overcome them. I will pause you right there. I'm gonna pause you right there. So, to wrap what he just said back up, he's talking about you, you start, you're intentional about creating your vision, then you go from there. And you've got a very, very nice printed vision. We've had this discussion on the show before, this is your first time listening. It's a vivid vision. So you can go get the book cam, by vivid vision by cam Herold and I will walk you step by step on how to do this. And then so you go from there, and then you think about every single way. I call it blowing it up. Think of every single way that you're going to blow this plan up every single way that it's going to go wrong, every single thing that could happen. This is called fear setting. And then this is the exercise that he said, Well, you just make a list of every single thing that could possibly go wrong. I do it in order of you know, severity, like you said, you've got what if I go hungry? What if I get kidnapped by I get kidnapped in the middle of Narcos? Yeah, so it's like, you have all these things. And then you think you talk you literally write it out on paper. And then you list the probability of that actually happening. And then at the very end, you put what would you do? You can put multiple things about what would you do if that did actually happen. And all this to say, like, here's a whole other thing is what the money is the biggest thing that a lot of people talk about, here's the thing, you don't need to go live this lifestyle of a Instagram influencer, every single place you go. A lot of these places are very beneficial like Greece, yes, you can go to Mykonos and Santorini, like I want to, but I also want to go to Athens and be able to just go to the museums and walk the streets, the philosophers walked. So a lot of this is called somewhere you go to different countries, some are more expensive, true, but some also have a much, much lower cost of living. And this is called geographic arbitrage. And then Rolando can speak on this here in a little bit. But what that generally is like, for example, I went down to Brazil, the Brazilian re AI is five to one for the US dollar for me to buy a steak dinner with a bottle of wine. It was 20. It was like 90 reais, which basically turned out to 17 US dollars. So if you're new in a remote job, which do not tell me that you cannot get a remote job in the United States on a 21 I promise you, you can find something that is a remote job in USD even if you go on Fiverr or Upwork, and you're a freelancer, you can find something to do for remote US dollar job, get the US dollar job remotely do it in another country. And then this cuts your entire savings rate in half. So now, yes, you have some money to work with. But now you're supplementing income that goes five times as far. So like $100 turns into 500 turns into 1000 turns into Can you talk a little bit about how you baked some of these countries into your travels if you were intentional about that, pairing them with some more expensive countries? Or how did you really go about your lifestyle to where was it a balance between extravagance and then vagabonding or was it more level? Yeah, no, great question. So to me, there's three levels of travel. Right? There's, there's the college hostel, like I'm gonna spend live on $2 a day. Yeah, no, exactly. That's like the first level, there's then there's like maybe like the luxury level when you're very comfortable. And there's probably like a middle somewhere in the middle. Like when I did my year, I was somewhere like in the middle, like above average, essentially. So I live very, like everywhere I say this, my wife and I, we took this trip together. So we everywhere we stay was private Airbnb. We traveled in planes, trains, and automobiles, and everything was very comfortable. I wouldn't say luxurious, but it was very comfortable. This is again, a number of years ago, we do this a little bit differently now. But to get specific, there's essentially like, when we did this, we had a budget of $50 per day. That's all you need. $50 per person per day. That's all you need. If you do the math, that is what $20,000 $5 Yeah, exactly. So that's about to not even 20,000 Not even $20,000 $18,250 Rolando, are you worth $50 million? He wants to do 100 million yet. Oh my god, you can do this before you're worth $100 million. Exactly. Oh, wow. Go on. No, no, it's $50 a day. And here's in now that was the average mind you so we traveled again, we're getting to the tackle here but like we traveled in South America throughout South America we did. Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile. We He went through Southeast Asia. So we did Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, we did, we did your place in Europe, we did the US, all those countries have very different very different costs. But especially if you go to some of those other like Southeast Asia or South America, in many other most other places in the world, actually, you can, like we were spending 25 to $30 per day, which is insane. And we were living super comfortably and eating great food and doing all the touristy stuff, and doing all the tours. So there was no shortage of we were not suffering by any means. That is very realistic. Again, you can spend as much as you want. But the point being is you really don't, you really don't have to be, like you said, a multi billionaire in order to be able to live like this. It's totally doable. That is definitely one one thing, the other thing that I think it's helpful for people to learn about. And this can be a whole in depth conversation, as well. But I know that you're very familiar with business travel hacking, right. So understanding how you can leverage things like credit card points, and miles and loyalty programs and all that stuff, to essentially travel for free in, I took 30, this is for two people, 30 plus flights. And I spent a total of about $1,500. And that this is around the world, mind you, I literally went around the world, like I went from, you know, west to east. So I went around, and I spent a total of $1,500 for both of us, because we have learned how to do travel hacking and how to leverage points, miles and credit cards in order to make this a reality. So this is absolutely doable. Again, we can go into a whole rabbit hole just in travel hacking. And I know that this is something that you're very familiar with. But it's something that I highly encourage people to if you're not doing this right now, get on it, it's so easy. It's so doable, and just be irresponsible with credit, be smart with your money. But if you are get into travel hacking as soon as possible, you're missing a perfect example of that right now, too. Because right now I'm in the process of saving up my money for my next house hack, because I want to purchase another house. And we're wanting to go back to Brazil for New Year's and Christmas for my girlfriend's family, we want to go visit them. So I'm like, okay, that's an expensive flights, like $1,700. So through my lifestyle, every single thing that I do is on a credit card, and I pay off every single credit card every single month, so I don't pay interest. So literally, I was like, Oh, I don't really know if I can afford to do that right now. And then I just don't casually peruse my points. And I'm like, Oh, I can literally buy the entire flight with half of my Amex points. And then I can use my Capital One points to buy the Airbnb. So I'm just going to go ahead and do a round trip to Brazil for New Year's and Christmas in the middle of peak season for free. So that's fun. And you can do that people, I promise. I greatly promise you, can you talk a little bit. So we did all this, and you're traveling around the world, we've talked about the vivid vision, we've talked about the fear setting, we've talked about geographic arbitrage, and we're gonna have to break this into two episodes. So man, you're gonna have to do a whole separate episode, I can already tell, I already know the reaction that this video is gonna get, we're gonna need to do a whole separate rabbit hole episode on travel hacking in general, what it is what it looks like me and you can go into some credit cards, the pros and cons, etc. Can you talk about and we even went as far as to say, basically $19,000 per person will get you comfortably traveling around the world. Can you talk a little bit about so the maybe the year leading up to this, as we close out here? This is the last frontier of all of this, I believe. And if we're doing the fear setting exercise, I believe the last fear would be that they're leaving the known. You're leaving the known for the unknown. And so friends, family, dogs, what are some things that you can do? Obviously, we can FaceTime, we can Skype, we can text, you can have international messaging. But what are some things that you did outside of the financial? Because I promise you every single one of you can save 20,000 in a year. I promise you if you want to you can do it even if you're making 40,000, which is the median salary. What did you do outside of the monetary to prep that last year before your first departure? Yeah. So to me, the first step to this and I know that we're getting there, again, tactical, but there is one mindset thing here that's really important. And it's commit, right? There's a bit it's a very different thing. Oh yeah, I'd love to travel the world sometime, then to say, Okay, I'm committed to leaving June 2022. That's a very different thing in your saying I am doing this. So the first thing you got to do is make sure that you commit and you write it down and tell other people and sign up for it because you're doing this thing, right? Okay? Now the reason why that matters is because that then leads you to make different choices. Then if you were not committed, you mentioned some things right? So for me, it's dude, I love dogs logs out, huge dog person, I don't have one, I would love to have a dog, I will probably have one in my future. But right now, it's just it just doesn't it doesn't fit I made that I made that choice to not have a dog because it puts barriers between me in the lifestyle that I want to go ahead and live right now. That'd be forever, I don't know. But probably, it'll be a while. One of the initial things that I started to think about at that point, just as the year leading to is, of course, you want to make sure that you have all your you know, family finances in order and all that stuff. But starting to think about diversifying your income, right. And diversifying in by diversifying means creating other possible sources of income, especially if you can create passive income, where it's truly passive where you have to spend very little time of it and you don't have to be there physically. Like that. That is something that and you know, in terms of passive income, again, this is something that I know you've talked a lot about in your podcast, but it's you can think about real estate, you can think about e commerce, you can think about buying laundromats, there's all kinds of stuff that you can do. Exactly, pick an episode of Brian's bag, the action category, and you'll find something but the point being this is a worthwhile investment for you, if you want to try and live a lifestyle, frankly, in 2021, like for me and I, and I want to be careful the way a word this, but COVID, in that sense, was almost a gift. Because of course, it's a terrible thing to happen to many people. But in some sense it was it accelerated many things that have already happened. Any everybody is used to working remote now, everybody is open, every company is now opening to negotiating for remote positions. The very first thing that you should think about is maybe you don't want to quit your job whatsoever. Maybe you love your job and you love doing what you're doing. You want to stay on that track, perfect. Negotiate with your boss and say, Hey, can I work remotely for the next three months? Is that cool, I'll just go work in Argentina, and it's the exact same timezone. And I can just keep doing the same thing that I'm doing right now. But I'll just do remotely, it's absolutely think about like ways in which you can, there's also programs I'm trying remember the names, there's one even called like remote year, there's, I think it's remote year comm or something where you can take like a program of 123 to 12 months, where they'll organize everything for you. And you can keep doing your job while you're there. But you just you're just in a different country, and you just pay them a fee for you to go, all this stuff is possible. But to me like a lot of the work that came from going into this last year before taking some like a year off, it was, of course, making sure that I was like being very smart with what I was I traveled the entire world one pack backpack, being conscious of the stuff that I was buying, making sure that I planned what I was going to wear, making sure that I had all like I have an extra copy of all my paperwork and my passport in case I needed. There's a lot of the tactical stuff, I actually have an e book on this. So I can send this for free to all your listeners, if anybody's interested, would then really goes into the tactical this stuff, but it's the point being it's very doable, it's very accessible. And the the tactical stuff is way less important and way less hard to do, then all the mental stuff that's gonna prevent you from doing those actions. And I'm gonna literally teach that in the beginning intro I'm gonna say, stick around to minute 50. And you get Rolanda is free eBook. So what's the link for the ebook? I'm gonna have to look it up. I'm gonna send it to you. And I don't have it. I don't remember off the top of my head. It's an it's on Kindle. It's an Amazon if you want to look it up there, but I edit it. I will edit it into the back half this episode because this ebook is earned not given. Somebody is really if you're listening to this point, man, you're serious about this. Like, you may be a nut like us. No, I think you may have some travel hacking and some remote work and your cards are still listening. I think this is for you. And then also a cool part about all this is that there are no rules to any of this. You don't have to do a year you can plan for a year and then decide you want to do six months you can plan for a year decide you want to do three months. You don't like this country cool. Leave the country, go to another country. You don't like that city cool, go to another city. Like all of a sudden your tolerance for things that you don't like gets very low, and then you just start being like oh, okay, cool. Let me control my reality. Let me manifest my own destiny. Let me actually go out and take actionable steps to have a day that I really enjoy. And that will be the longest year of your life. I know a girl that just did it for three months, she came back, she misses her friends she wants, she just traveled Europe for three months, quit her job. Now she's back. Now she wants to do something else. She's already got another job, I promise very possible people. So I was about to say, like, I just want to be conscious of our time here. And I want to keep this episode, within 15 minutes, we're gonna have Rolando back on first, sure, with his permission, of course, to talk about travel hacking, and to talk about more of the nuts and bolts of this. But in closing, can you tell us maybe a couple of ways that this has changed you and that this experience has changed you for the better and how you would recommend it to people that may be on the fence, because I'm in. So to me the way that it has changed me. And I hinted at some of this before, but it's it has truly led me to try to live a life. Like I was actually thinking about this recently. Because I was thinking it, I'm starting to look towards the next kind of seven year break. And I was like, holy shit. I'm not sure I want to take a break from my life. Because I like it so much. The problem? Exactly, and I probably will. But the point, the important point to that is the way they changed me it's really set me on a course to, to realize that everything in your life can be malleable, everything that's around you, you can change. You don't have to take anybody's word for anything, you don't have to live according to anybody's model. Anything, everything that you see around you the computer screen that you're staring at the phone, the the streets, that you're walking on the a lot of the philosophies that we believe a lot of the mathematics, all the stuff that were created, that was created all the ideas and objects were made by people who are no smarter than you. And you have the ability to change things, you have the ability to dent the universe, and you have the ability to design everything around you in a way that is right for you. So that is the way that I changed from this experience is i It opened my mind to realize oh my god, I can do anything I decide to do. That's and that's a wild idea. That's a wacky thing that until you do it, you don't realize that i anything i decided to really commit to doing I can do. So it has led me to be hyper intentional, and hyper focused on being on purpose and on being choice for and I'm saying no to many things that other people say are right for me and saying yes to anything. That's a hell yes. For me. And like we were talking at the beginning, like there's a lot of back and forth. And there's, there's never a moment in which like, Okay, I've done it. Now everything's perfect. There's never gonna be that moment. But you can get damn close to it. You can keep going, you can keep bouncing against the walls, until you find that moment in which you feel like you are living on purpose. And I'm getting damn close to it. And I feel like that has been the biggest benefit of going down this path. Man. We are to jazz stuff for eight o'clock on a Monday night. You believe that is eight o'clock on a Monday night and we are high people. We are Hi, I know you're gonna be listening to this probably in the morning for anyone listening to this. But wow, let's go. Londo where can people find you my friend? You know what? I'm not too, too. On social media. lately. I've been trying to take a little bit of a hiatus from there. But you can reach out to me on Facebook. That's you know, honestly, that's the best way just reach out to me add me on there. And we can be friends. And if you're in that in the same mindset, I suspect we'll get along just fine. All right, and I won't get a link to this ebook. And I will post in the show notes. And I've also added it into the back end of this episode. And so everyone will have access to that you could be able to do that. And then anyone listening to this still, please shoot us some messages, shoot us some questions. We're definitely going to have a second episode probably a third fourth fifth 10th episode as we go on. But shoot us an episode shoot some questions that you would like to hear about travel hacking, and more on this because the this whole podcast the whole reason we're doing this is for a reason for a purpose. In the intro to this podcast. As we talked about guests, we talk to guests who have earned their freedom and choose what they want, when they want with who they want. And I can't think of a better example than today's episode. So Rolando, my friend, thank you very much for your time today. Brother pleasure being here with you man. I'm excited to hear I'm excited to see you continue on this path that you're on also and dude, so pumped for you. For this thank you very much and this is this is Brian Luebben The host of the action Academy podcast and Rolando globetrotting. How do you pronounce your last name man or Jia? Our chilla that is deceptively simple. Okay, Londo globe trotting, or chilla. Oh my god, this man. All right, thank you very much. Have a great morning, afternoon evening and goodbye.