Everything that you have been lead to believe about saving money to retire and live well is a myth. The old paradigm is dead and gone. Retirement advisors tell you to buy the biggest house you can buy, invest everything you can, set a budget to live on the least possible expenses. All this so that when you are old and burnt up from working yourself to death, you can sit in a rocking chair and relax.
True wealth is no longer the dream of a couple of million in the bank. True wealth comes from the experiences you enjoy through your life.
We are living a life of being without a home, traveling the world and staying in very nice houses that belong to others.
Right now we are living in a 2 bedroom house on a lake in Costa Rica. There is no way possible we could have afforded to live in a house like this with a similar location in the US. In Bellevue Washington a 2 Bedroom lakeview condo would run at least $3,000 a month. Our current accommodations cost us nothing but some of our time.
We take loving care of the pets and watch over the property when the homeowners are away. Since both of us have always been animal people, it is not work at all, but rather a very enjoyable way to live. We are full time house sitters.
Today we ran across an article at Business Insider that shows how one couple saves over $100K a year by house sitting. Although this is not direct income, it shows there is a fantastic alternative to the treadmill of living life in the US.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-we-save-over-100000-a-year-house-sitting-around-the-world-2016-1
House sitting is how we are going to stretch out our retire money as far as we can. Although we have just started on our retirement and house sitting adventures we are already seeing a huge reduction in expenses.