Hi, my name is Crissy Whalin.
I'm 40-years-old and I'm a single mom to an amazing 11 year old boy named Zephyr,
and we travel the world.
We've been traveling for about 18 months.
Our goal is two years of full time travel on a small budget.
I worked in radio for 20 years.
I was co-hosting and executive producing a news talk show and I realized that I needed to
make a change and then I was like, okay, here's all of the things that I have to
pay for every month.
What if I removed those things?
Would I still have enough money from part time jobs to do something completely out
of the box?
And then I just sort of thought, what are the reasons I wouldn't have enough money
to travel?
How sad would it be if I couldn't take our son to see his dad in Australia?
We took a trip to Paris like two years ago where we had fantasized about traveling
the world.
I had a very serious conversation with Zephyr, and I was like, I think we could do
this.
And he just was like,
“Yeah, I want to do this!”
And so I started to look at like, what does it actually cost?
The instinct is to become an Instagram person and make money off of it and try
and do what every other travel blogger does and like monetize it.
I was a producer who sees things from behind the scenes.
I felt like it was very disingenuous, and not everybody can be a travel blogger.
So how could I
do it on a small income, do it without getting anything for free.
You know, as Americans in particular, we hear a lot about what happens in other
countries, but we've never even been outside our own state.
So I really wanted to show my son the world as it is.
There's always a path to budget
if you really want to do it. You know, I work two little jobs.
I still work in radio, and that gives me enough money.
I make $35,000 a year. That is more than some and a lot less than others.
Now I make less than I ever did. Honestly, traveling on a budget
forces your hand in so many ways. You realize what becomes important and you recognize
how privileged you are to even have that money.
I don't have any rent.
I still have to pay health insurance.
I looked at what was I spending a month in rent and halved that. I can only spend about
$50 to $85
a night on accommodations and over a month that accumulates to like less than what I
was paying in rent.
And if I can go cheaper than I do. I pack us in carry-ons so that I don't have to
pay the extra fees for baggage.
In terms of school, he does homeschool, which we love.
His dad and I split it.
It's about 400 bucks a month.
In contrast to the private school we were paying for, which was $1,800 a month.
We use a program called K12 International.
This allows us to be on any time zone we want, and it still sticks us to a
curriculum.
$5 can get me food for the entire day if I budget it right.
I bought groceries in Lima.
Those groceries lasted us five days, and then we take
ten U.S. dollars, and that's what we can have per day to kind of have fun with.
We're not out every day.
We're settled down.
We're taking the two weeks to save money, and then we'll have the money saved to go
to Machu Picchu.
The obvious thing for people is they always say to me, well, what countries
have the best exchange rate for the U.S. dollar?
They hit Southeast Asia, or they hit a country where they feel their dollar goes
further, and I don't really feel like that's a challenge.
Go to France, live off $10 a day,
see how you do.
It's so much more challenging and you become so much more appreciative and
present when you are at the financial disadvantage.
And it's not to say that we don't like nice things, it's just you can come back
to all of that.
You don't get more time.
That's the one thing I can't buy.
I can't buy time.
What I want to do is show women and families and that have always wanted to
travel, that money is not the obstacle to travel and that your kids
are better off by you taking them out and showing them the world and giving them the
opportunities.
Let them see it and start to formulate their own opinions.
And I think as a parent, you learn.