Comment by scarface_74
3 years ago
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.
I've done this on a smaller, temporary scale and it wasn't for me. You end up spending a lot of your time planning, packing, unpacking and generally working around all the things you never have to think about when you just live where you want to live and do some traveling. Our life became meaningless chores that just ate away at all the interesting things we could be doing or wanted to be doing.
We’ve figured most of those things out. We always travel on Sunday. We unpack our clothes. Do an instacart order. Find the laundry facilities, gym and pool at the hotel and find something to do on the weekends. My wife takes care of the washing and folding clothes and she hangs out during the week with people in one of her fitness organizations (she’s a hobbyists fitness instructor), she will organize a playlist and be a “special guest instructor”.
We usually stay at an extended stay with a full kitchen. Finding things to do is part of the fun. I book hotels ouf a year in advance since you don’t pay until check out.
> you don’t pay until check out
surely that doesn't apply to extended stays? don't they want some money like... after 2 weeks or a month or something? what prevents people from sleep-and-dashing? i guess that's why they have a CC on file but they don't know if it'll go through.
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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".
I actually agree with you:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307059
But my former home is rented to our son at a discount to its market value to help him out and it offsets most of the holding cost. But I still lose money. That’s the only thing that the extra money is going to - offset the mortgage.
Honestly, my fixed costs are actually lower than they were before I started working for BigTech when I was working as a journeyman CRUD developer making less than a returning intern got at my current company.
I was making $120K when I had my house built in the burbs in 2016 and paid 3.5% down with an FHA mortgage. I was the only one on the mortgage.
If I had still been making that, I would have sold my house that doubled in value over the past six years and paid cash for my place in Florida.
My total expenses including mortgage and all utilities is less than $3000 where I live now. I was paying more for my mortgage, utilities, maintenance.
Even without that, my 1250 square foot condo I bought in 2022 was the same price I paid to have my 3200 square foot house built in 2016.
The amount we pay for Uber or SixT is about the same as we paid for one car note + maintenance on an older car + car insurance.
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?
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.
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Not to mention a massive carbon footprint by the sounds of it
Yes, I’m sure the plane wouldn’t fly if I weren’t on it…
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One more thing: no kids/empty nest! :-)
Won't this get kinda boring after a little while? I guess I've been on enough business trips that constantly traveling to me seems stressful and boring. I liked looking forward to meeting coworkers though, so having some people like distant family or friends in these areas makes life more enjoyable. I guess I've also been somewhat forced/or I guess blessed to live in a different state for a while. You won't really get a good understanding of a place until you've lived there maybe 2-3 years and have driven all over and met different types of people in that culture. The first year I think is mostly adapting to the differences and handling culture shock if you move across the country.
I work during the week and my wife is a hobbyist fitness instructor and trains other instructors. She reaches out to people online before we go and goes to different gyms while I work and we do the normal “date night” things on the weekend finding interesting things to do in the city we are in. She makes friends everywhere and flies to conferences without me. I also travel for work (cloud consulting) occasionally.
Because $Life, we haven’t really traveled that much until last year.
The end game is to sell our house in Atlanta after our son moves out (he pays rent with two of his friends). Because I never want to be a traditional landlord again. I did that a decade ago, pay off our Condotel and it will be cash flow positive without a mortgage and then find some place to live the other six months. It will be another tax free state just to keep taxes simple. We are thinking about either Las Vegas or some place in Tennessee.
Packing and unpacking isn’t that bad once every three or four weeks. I have one suitcase that never gets unpacked except when I travel for work.
My girlfriend is an oncology social worker and sees patients who lament that they waited until retirement to fulfill all their dreams of travel, etc. and then got cancer and realized there's a big chance they will never achieve almost any of them.
For this reason we decided not to wait to live life and moved onto an RV two years ago and have visited 20 states and two Canadian provinces while I work full time and she works part time, both remotely, often over Starlink (as I type this now from a small RV park in the Yukon).
You're paying half your rent to property managers?! Stop this insanity. There is no such thing as a rental pool, unless it's literally a pool that is rented. What service are you using?
It literally is 300-400 units in a resort “hotel” and they rent out your unit as part of a pool of units. They do all of the marketing, replenishment of supplies for the kitchen, maintenance, payments etc. The units are rented out by the night just like a hotel when you aren’t there.
But you don’t understand the other part. I’ve done the landlord thing before. I would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever be a landlord again. The entire purpose of it was never to make money. But to have a place to stay for six months, a legal residence in a state that didn’t charge taxes, and for it to pay for itself when we are not there.
When we leave every year, we pay a one time $110 cleaning fee and don’t think about the place again until we come back in six months. The income comes in the same account where the mortgage is paid automatically.
I did the math on one of these in Clemson and it would have still cost me $10,000 / year if it was rented year round.
I liked the model but the numbers didn’t work out to make it an investment. Sounds like the one you found does, so congrats!
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I stayed in one of these places in Miami FL, but I didn't realize what it was until we arrived. Really interesting model.
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"Rental revenue is shared with the management company, and owners typically pay no upfront fees for management, which includes the marketing and reservation of the units.[citation needed] Typical monthly fees for units in the rental pool include FF&E (Furniture, Fixtures and Equipment) reserve and resort fee(s). Although the revenue splits between owner and management company do vary from project to project, most hover around 50 percent."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condo_hotel
I noticed that. 5-10% management fees / commission is normal even for holiday rentals.
Not for hotel style properties. The OP’s model is also super common.
Hotel nightly rates are generally much higher than the daily equivalent of monthly rent. You’d need more info to know which is a better deal.
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Well done you both.
Are you documenting/journaling your interactions and experiences in the various cities that you visit with a view to drawing any conclusions? Or just enjoying the ride?
Yes. I have a blog where I started posting six months before we set out on this journey until the present.
Can you link the blog?
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Condo rental pool is a term I've never come across before.
What rental pool service did you use?
A developer creates a standard resort hotel and then sells individual units out as condos.
You can (and most people do) use the onsite property management company. All of the individual owners make their units available as inventory to the property management company when they are not staying there. The property manager should have an algorithm to ensure units are occupied equitably.
> and stay in midrange extended stay hotels
What does this cost roughly?
My price at home for mortgage and utilities at home is $3K. One fee pays all utilities.
I keep my monthly hotel stays around the same amount since my mortgage is covered e-bike we are traveling. I stay at more expensive places to “vacation” by using hotel loyalty points earned.
I also don’t have a separate “vacation budget” like most people. It’s spread out for six months. My goal was always to keep my budget to the same as it was when I was just a regular old “enterprise Dev”.