Hey everyone, so the question we are being asked again and again is how are you affording a trip around the world and there are a number of components to that answer. One of them was a couple of years ago I found out about a company in my town that reserves 20% of your salary and every 5 years it is expected that you take a year off. Now my company doesn’t do that but I thought well maybe I can just do that myself, so I did that for a couple of years.
Secondly, we managed to pay off our mortgage after 20 years in the same home and rented it out to provide some additional income. My husband works for himself and is still making income abroad, and finally we had a house fire a couple of years ago (I’ll explain).
Someone once told me to never waste a good crisis, so we took a really long time settling our claim and transformed every burnt/smoke damaged napkin into cash, much to our underwriter’s chagrin. I don’t suggest that you turn into a pyromaniac or anything but we were able to add to the nest egg by not replacing a lot of the extras in our life. On the positive side, it was a great way to declutter 20 years of accumulated stuff.
Finally, to keep costs down the only stars we will be sleeping under will be outdoors and not in resorts. In fact here in London, we are house sitting through Trusted House Sitters, and our lovely 4 bed row house comes in at no cost, with the added bonus of a kitty cat we are watching over. The house belongs to a British couple in their 80s and the man is possibly one of the most interesting persons I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. I have never been acquainted with someone who has a Wikipedia entry, but our host is a prolific writer, play writer, television and film a Parsi immigrant, producer/editor/director, a former Black Panther, thought leader, occasional university professor, journalist, and in a strange twist of fate, a friend of the infamous Serial Killer Charles Sobhraj (although I am sure he would only claim him as an acquaintance). You may remember Sobhraj from the Netflix show “the Serpent”, as a psychopath who has killed somewhere in the range of 50 people in the 60-80s for pretty minor reasons. For instance he might sell a backpacker some diamonds and then kill them later to get the diamonds back, that kind of thing. My host wrote a book to expose the man from the myth of the Serpent a few years back called Hawk and Hyena which I am reading right now. He is a natural storyteller in a way that I wish I was.
I hope we get the opportunity to do more house sitting, but I suspect it will take a lot to beat this sit. I mean where else could you get the phone number of a serial killer, if you were in the market for such a thing (which I am not by the way). London is bringing all kinds of new adventures.
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