Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs to travel the world, how did it go?

My wife and I quit our jobs to travel Europe and work on farms (helpx.net). I set up a personal blog to write about our experience and realized that, given ample free time, my mind gravitated towards writing, coding, and photography for fun.

When we returned home, I eventually went back to work with my old employer, but with a new perspective. I had already quit, knew what the world looked like outside the office, and was no longer afraid to get fired. Paradoxically, this made me more valuable to the company -- I acted bolder and spoke more truth. I took on a new role, coding again after a hiatus, writing personally and professionally, and started speaking at tech conferences. This mix of activities led me to join Twilio as a developer evangelist in 2014.

When we quit our jobs to travel I was making ~$65k/year. When I joined Twilio a few years later, my starting salary was $120k/year.

I share the professional benefit first because the short-term professional/financial costs are the most concerning when considering extended travel. But, in a way that never would have made sense on paper, that trip catalyzed a trajectory shift that significantly increased my earning potential and professional satisfaction.

There were also a bunch personal benefits. We lived for two weeks with a family that had young kids and realized that we'd probably enjoy being parents. We now have two of our own, and we do. We saw how folks in Barcelona, Paris, and Stuttgart raised families in small apartments and rethought the necessity of the suburban homes we grew up in. We now live in Brooklyn. On a thirty-cow organic dairy farm in the mountains of northern Spain, we drank milk still warm from the udder for breakfast and cooked dinner with ingredients we harvested from the field. We eat differently now. During six weeks in Turkey, we accepted spontaneous invitations for tea in people's homes and offers for rides while walking dirt roads during rainstorms -- hospitality extended to us by Muslim strangers unlike anything we'd experienced before. My wife and I were raised in Evangelical churches.

We saw beautiful sights, experienced new cultures, challenged our perspectives, made lifelong friends, etc. All the cliches you think are going to happen when traveling the world. And we also saw tremendous professional growth, precisely because we took a break from our careers to gave our minds and hearts the space and time to explore.

Having a minor criticism of one’s country is a healthy, normal thing.

We stayed in a lot of hostels, along with some guest houses, Airbnbs, hotels but the majority of the time it was something in the cheaper end of the spectrum.

We initially budgeted £10 food, £5 drink and £5 activities per day, and kept quite a lot of records at time, but ultimately we just ended up feeling "it is what it is". We made the active decision to just make the most of the trip and overspend. For a reasonable number of days we could average out towards our budget but we found fairly regularly there were bigger expenses for activities which would blow the budget and we neither wanted to miss them or do nothing for the next fortnight! Once you have committed so much, it sort of feels like it is better to commit a bit more and make it awesome (£60k spent on awesome seemed better than £42k spent on okay).

Before leaving I ran a couple of companies, one which employed 12 people and another which was contractor based. I wasn't wealthy (at least not by the standards set in the UK if you speak to a financial advisor) and £60k was a large amount of money for me to spend (a very large amount). But all things going well with life, you earn it, you spend it, we decided we wanted to do some of that spending earlier in life whilst we could enjoy it.

Since then... I have had heart ops, a blood clot on the lung, my partner has developed ME/chronic fatigue syndrome... COVID19 has engulfed the world. Needless to say we are glad, thankful and lucky we did what we did when we did!