Coast FI Family Travel: We Ran the Numbers and Realized We Could Actually Do This
Instagram has been building me a case file lately. First it was the house-swapping, kids-in-European-summer-camp families, accounts like @cargobikemomma who make it look like a Tuesday errand. And, YES, they absolutely hit their market. I was immediately trying to figure out how we could make that work. Then the worldschoolers showed up. Laptop in one hand, ancient ruin in the other, teaching their kids about the fall of Rome, how to order in Italian, and navigate a train station like that’s a normal Tuesday. Heck yes. Then the algorithm went for my main artery and started showing me the people who just quit. Not “working remotely from Lisbon” quit. Sold-the-house, no-more-paycheck, see-you-never quit.
I have been obsessed with retirement since approximately day one of my working life. Work has never really agreed with me. No, seriously, I freelance from home twelve hours a week and, in the words of my old CD, “I’m an outside cat now.” So obviously I fit like Cinderella’s glass slipper into the world of coast FI family travel. I did the math on our own life the second I saw @wanderlust.haaks break theirs down step by step. Then I had to stare at the wall for a minute as my soul left my body to bask in the golden glow of peak millennial achievement.
Here’s the part nobody warns you about: the lightbulb moment isn’t the one you think it’s going to be.
What Coast FI Family Travel Actually Requires
If you haven’t hit this corner of the internet yet, here’s the short version. Coast FI is the point where you’ve saved enough that you’ll hit a full retirement number by a normal retirement age, even if you never contribute another dollar. You’re not retired. You’re coasting. Whatever you earn now just has to cover your current life. It doesn’t have to keep feeding the retirement account too. And here’s the hack – start funding it early because the more time you have in the market, the better.
There’s an important distinction. Hitting Coast FI doesn’t automatically mean you can quit tomorrow and travel the world. It means your retirement is taken care of. What’s left is a separate question: can you actually fund life on the road, four plane tickets and a dog and all, without a paycheck?
Turns out that second question has its own math, and it’s the one that’s kept me up the last couple of weeks.
Wait, Are We Doing This?
Here’s what I expected to feel after running our numbers: “we could theoretically sell everything and become full-time travelers in a couple years.” That’s the fantasy every one of these accounts is selling, and it’s a great fantasy. But it’s not what actually hit me.
What actually hit me is this: we don’t have to wait for any of it. I already freelance as a graphic designer twelve hours a week, and that income already covers a real chunk of what a serious travel life would cost. Which means the gap between our regular Tuesday and the wide-open, kids-see-the-world life isn’t some distant five-year moonshot sitting on the other side of a home sale and a citizenship approval. It’s a gap we could start closing now, with the setup we already have.
That’s the actual plot twist. Not “we could become full-time nomads.” It’s “we’re already most of the way to the life, and we didn’t need to blow up our whole life to get there.” We’re closer than we think. That’s a much more exciting sentence than “we could theoretically quit,” because it’s true today instead of true someday.
The House Decision Every Coast FI Family Travel Story Skips
Every one of these accounts glosses right over what happens to the actual house. As if it just floats up to travel heaven along with your commute and your work Slack notifications. It doesn’t. Turns out this isn’t one decision, it’s three, and none of them are fun.
You can sell it. That’s the cleanest option, and also the most “no take-backs” thing you can do to yourself on purpose. No mortgage, no property tax, no 2 a.m. call about a plumbing line while you’re six time zones away pretending you know what a flange is. The equity becomes your travel runway. The tradeoff: there’s no house waiting for you if the year goes sideways. With two kids and a dog, statistically, it will, probably more than once.
You can rent it out. That sounds passive right up until you remember you’re now a landlord, a job nobody applies for. A property manager takes a real cut. You’re still the one approving the invoice for whatever broke while you’re three time zones away eating something you can’t pronounce. Renting can generate income, but it also ties up equity you might rather hold as cash.
Or you can house swap. That solves where you sleep abroad, but it does nothing for the mortgage, insurance, or taxes quietly still due back home. It’s a great tool for the travel side of the math.
We’re still working through which of these fits us. It’s not one answer. It’s a different answer depending on which part of the year we’re talking about. And here’s the thing: the closer-than-you-think realization is that none of these three options are urgent anymore. We get to actually decide instead of scramble.
The European Question We Haven’t Solved Yet
The other thread running through all of this is European citizenship. My husband’s cousin mentioned it in a family WhatsApp blast like it was a casual weather update, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. If it goes through, it changes a lot. Cheaper visas, in-country tuition down the road, actual EU residency instead of doing the 90-day tourist shuffle everyone else is stuck counting on their fingers.
I want to be honest that this is a research project right now, not a concrete plan. I haven’t even made it through the full list of benefits, let alone a timeline. For now it’s living quietly in the background. It isn’t steering a single date on the calendar, and honestly, that’s a relief. It means it’s a bonus if it happens, not the thing our whole plan is holding its breath for.
Where Our Coast FI Family Travel Plan Actually Stands
We are not booking one-way flights next month, no matter how badly my anxiety-induced Notes app wants me to. We’re two years out from the version of this that feels responsible. We’re using that time to build the runway, figure out the house, and let the citizenship question resolve itself one way or another.
But here’s the part I keep coming back to. We don’t need any of that to already start living bigger. In the meantime, we’re debating the actual shape of the year like it’s a group project nobody assigned. One home base with day trips. A few three-to-four month stints in different countries. Or a US road trip visiting family first, easing into the deep end instead of cannonballing straight to Europe, the way we already know how to road trip with toddlers without it ending in tears (mine or theirs). For the record, I am the cannonball, my husband is for the latter.
If you’re circling the same math we were, run your actual monthly number before you run anywhere else. Figure out how you’re actually getting on the plane while you’re at it, because packing in a carry-on is its own math problem entirely. And before you assume the dream requires selling the house and moving continents, do the math on how close you already are.
Drop a comment if you have ideas of where we should go first and especially HMU if you’re already doing this!
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