zlacker

>>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.

>>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".

>>antist+qa2
It's not like OP said "Anyone can do it just like this!". It's just what they did. Is it really so shocking to you that richer people have more opportunities in their lives than poorer people?

>>googlr+5x3
See my sibling reply.

It didn’t take being “rich”.

My budget is lower than it was when I was making $135K (the median college educated couple in the US makes that much) when I had my house built in 2016.

The only thing different that I’m doing based on my income now is subsidizing the rent for my younger son instead of selling my old house and paying cash for the Condotel I bought. It was the same price in 2022 as what I bought in 2016.

>>scarfa+5L3
It's not just about income, but also your assets. From your description, I don't think it is wrong to call you rich, or at least above average net worth and income. Also, you making $135k solo is a much better situation than you+partner making $135k combined as might happen with the median college couple. You doing it solo means your partner can put all their time into...well..whatever they want.

I don't really see anything wrong with your reply, I was mostly replying to the person who was whining that you have to be rich to do it. But I do think, if you had less income and fewer assets you would need to go about doing what you did in a different way.

>>googlr+p04
Yes, I realize in the grand scheme of things, even $135K puts me in the top quintile of income. But this is HN full of tech people. In 2016, any average CRUD “full stack developer” could get that much in any major metropolitan area in the US with 5-7 years of experience. An FHA loan that we used to get our house built was 3.5% down or around $12K.

On the other side of tech compensation, that’s less than a returning intern I mentored got when they came back - and not as a software developer as a junior consultant at BigTech working remotely where we make 10% less than software devs at the same level

I still posit that it is more about priorities (and lack of dependents) for your average mid careers professionals.

There are people making less who choose the RV life or AirBnbs and cars.