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[return to "In praise of blowing up your life"]
1. scarfa+0m1[view] [source] 2023-06-13 07:49:33
>>jger15+(OP)
I’ve mentioned the last year of my life on HN where my wife and I decided to get rid of everything we own that wouldn’t fit in four suitcases including our cars and we became “hybrid digital nomads”. We fly to different cities across the US and stay in midrange extended stay hotels and stay in our own “Condotel”[1] the other six months in Florida.

What I haven’t talked about is what got us to this point. I grew up in a small town in southwest GA, moved to metro Atlanta in 1996 and stayed there until last year.

We had a house built in 2016 in the northern burbs and thought we had our “forever home”. All the time from 1996 -2020 I bumped around between 7 jobs as a journeymen “enterprise dev”.

My wife had lived in metro Atlanta all of her life. We got married in 2012 (both on our second marriage).

Everything changed in 2020. Our youngest son (my stepson) graduated from high school, Covid happened (didn’t fatally affect anyone in our inner or outer circle) and I fell into a remote job at BigTech.

When things got back to normal around 2021, we both realized that life is short and we wanted a change. That’s what caused us to blow up our life and we are both happier now that we really can’t acquire “stuff”.

When we left our condo in March to start our six month trip, we put it in the rental pool, it gets professional managed like a hotel room and we get half the rent to cover our mortgage.

We don’t own a car. We take Uber for six months once we hit a city and we have a Sixt subscription and we rent a car by the month when we are at home.

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2. antist+qa2[view] [source] 2023-06-13 13:40:53
>>scarfa+0m1
Right, so the "secret" to blowing up your life is just to have massive savings, income and rental property, so that instead of owning your possessions, you can just rent them for 2x the cost of ownership while being a digital nomad.

Got it.

Just in case someone finds this "profound".

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3. kilian+kd2[view] [source] 2023-06-13 13:55:14
>>antist+qa2
Not to mention a massive carbon footprint by the sounds of it
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4. scarfa+Jj2[view] [source] 2023-06-13 14:26:03
>>kilian+kd2
Yes, I’m sure the plane wouldn’t fly if I weren’t on it…
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5. bmoxb+os2[view] [source] 2023-06-13 14:58:56
>>scarfa+Jj2
On an individual-level then sure, but less people buying flight tickets will obviously lead to airlines eventually running less flights.
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6. scarfa+PG2[view] [source] 2023-06-13 15:53:58
>>bmoxb+os2
It’s even more nuanced. Airlines don’t make money on main cabin for the most part. They make money from business class

https://www.zippia.com/advice/business-travel-statistics/

and selling miles to credit card companies.

https://airlinegeeks.com/2021/12/17/here-s-why-airline-loyal...

If main cabin dropped by half, they would still fly the routes.

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