International travel with little kids does sound pretty awful. But medium sized kids seem to travel pretty well!
I was in Tajikistan and met a couple that took their three kids out of school for the semester to cycle across Central Asia. I thought that was pretty awesome, but also insane.
I met a few overlanders taking their kids along on the trip on the Pan-Am Highway - looked pretty awesome for a kid.
Yea, sounds like a sweet gig to me. Some real life learnin’. Just gotta be young enough where hanging out with your parents is still cool.
All this talk about travel and retirement reminds me of one of my favorite stories:
(I don’t remember where I first saw this, and it may have been here, so apologies if so)
The Story of the Mexican Fisherman
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
We traveled a lot prior to kids. It was largely for this reason. For example we once took about 7 months off to travel around the world when I was between jobs. I was pretty broke back then. We paid for the trip by racking up the credit card debt. But it was all planned. I knew I’d be able to pay it off and I knew that I wouldn’t really get the time again. We had kids kind of late (mid 30s) so we had a good bit of time to travel a lot.
But after kids, I have little desire to travel anywhere interesting. The logistics of traveling with kids are tough. Also the kinds of things they find interesting are very different from what I’d want to do when I travel. If it were up to them, our only trips would be to Disneyland. Part of the problem is that they still quite young. I do think it will get better when they get older. In fact they both talk about all sorts of places they want to visit. But there is no way I’m taking my kids on an international flight at least for a few more years. In my case, having a couple of kids will have put an approximately 10yr hiatus on international travel.
I will say that most of my friends with kids do a lot more travel than I do. Maybe their kids just travel better. However, the majority of that travel is to see family that live overseas. That’s a different kind of trip, imo.
I agree and I more or less alluded to this in my earlier post. However, if your projected retirement age is in your 30s (like the guy in the article), that really changes the calculus quite a bit.
Question for my esteemed colleagues:
I have a friend who is doing pretty well financially, upper middle type. He is a typical index fund investor with some other various long holdings, Vanguard user.
He is looking at diversifying into a small amount of crypto, but isn’t tech savvy and knows I have a little btc so was asking for advice.
He found GBTC but that has a 50k minimum and 2% fees so that seems silly.
Is there anything else he can easily trade on Vanguard or am I going to have to teach him about exchanges and wallets (ieeee)? Thanks!
He could invest in MSTR or a bitcoin mining company like MARA or RIOT to get some exposure, although each of these options seem to be acting as an even more leveraged and risky investment compared to btc on its own and I have no idea what their fair value should be.
Looking at the RIOT chart still tilts me… had a couple hundred shares purchased under $3… sold around $4 in November to decrease my crypto exposure… whoops.
It’s so easy to buy BTC i don’t see how that could be an issue. Hell if he doesn’t want to use it for anything and he’s happy just buying and holding he can do it on PayPal.
On the beach vs. immersive travel front I think it just depends on your motivations. Absolutely nothing wrong with unwinding on a beach for days. Sometimes that is absolutely a wonderful trip. The problem I have is with the people who use those types of trips as a crutch because they are too scared to do anything else. I have a few friends like that who not only go to the same hyper touristy beach in Mexico(Cancun is so Americanized it might as well be part of Florida) over and over but stay at the same resort every time. When you talk to them it’s obvious what they like about it is the familiarity and they are always making comments like “I would be scared to go to Colombia” or wherever you talk to them about having gone yourself.
I guess what bothers me is that too many Americans have been tricked into thinking the world is a scary place when it largely isn’t. The world is full of wonderful places and doing the same thing over and over just seems wasteful to me.
On travel with kids: we have an 8 year old and had booked a trip to Europe for last Thanksgiving but of course it got cancelled. I think traveling with an 8ish year old is good for everybody. They’re super excited, and you get to experience the trip through young eyes.
YMMV depending on your kid. Ours has always been a good traveler.
The other end of the spectrum is feeling like you have to be constantly on the move and try to squeeze a million different things into each day of your trip. You end up trying to do so much that you don’t get to enjoy any depth of experience.
Often it’s the case that you can enjoy more by doing less.
An immersive trip (to me) is actually the opposite of trying to squeeze everything in. It’s living as much like a local as possible and trying to understand the culture, not visiting every museum in town. My wife and I know we have screwed up when we end up in a bar or restaurant and it is all tourists. Some entire parts of cities are like this. La Rambla in Barcelona is kinda cool on the surface but it is swarmed over by tourists. I’d contend you learn little to nothing of Barcelona by staying and eating/going out in an area like that.
I haven’t done enough foreign travel but I’ve been all over the US. Wherever we visit, this is what we try to do. Easiest way is to make friends with a bartender, and ask them about the good local spots to hit. That’s lead to some of our best travel experiences and locals have always been really friendly too.
Agreed. One of my favorite travel memories is being in Cozumel and walking deep into the neighborhoods and stumbling across a parade. Still have no idea what the occasion was, but we stood along with the locals for a half hour watching a bunch of kids all dressed up parading through the neighborhood.
We do the same as @anon29622970 whenever we travel - especially in foreign destinations. Our first questions to a local is always “Where do you take your family to eat?”
This is good advice. One thing I have noticed over my years of travel is if you show up somewhere eager to learn about a place or culture the vast vast majority of locals love to tell you all about it and like you said give advice.
My best guess is the whole rude locals trope is mostly locals tired of American tourists showing up and treating the people there as a nuisance to their vacation. Most Americans travel to destinations to do certain things or visit a building or something. I have found almost every city and town is worth visiting if you are willing to get past that kind of travel and go eat at a hole in the wall and actually talk to people.
Going back to the Barcelona example one of the favorite trips we ever went on was finding a RT ticket to Barcelona for $260 or something and just renting a car and driving up and down the Catalonian coast staying places and eating/drinking. Tarragona/Begur/Pallaflugel(sp?) were all great places. People asked why we went to those places and the answer was simple they were on the random route we chose. We did of course have to go see La Sagrada Familia when we went back to Barcelona for a couple days before our flight so we are not immune to doing a touristy thing here and there.
In these big cities with subways the game my wife and I play is to have no plans and get off at literally random stops. It’s hit and miss but a lot of fun.
That’s a fancier way than I’d have known to phrase it but yes lol. Pure p-hacking. Like, I’m pretty sure if he were to apply the same optimization procedure to randomly generated charts, or to Roulette, he’d still find “winning” algorithms.
Bucketlistfamily seems to do it just fine.
We saw this in Tokyo one time. We went to the “Hipster” neighborhood of Tokyo (Daikanyama) and were wandering down some side street when there was a kids parade associated with one of the Buddhist temples, with all the kids dressed up in traditional garb and being led by large wheeled instruments, very cool thing to get to see.
I agree with the general sentiment but I think it’s important not to overcompensate and make a mistake in the other direction. If you’re going to Barcelona and avoid La Sagrada Familia or to Paris and avoid the Louvre because “too Touristy”, that’s bad too. Part of the reason some places become touristy is because there is something there worth seeing or doing.
Like all things, you want to hit a balance.