Young Scrappy Money Podcast Ep. 042: Financial Independence & Slow Travel with Stephanie and Gillian of “Our Freedom Years”

Join us as we pick the brains of Stephanie and Gillian, a globetrottin’ couple and YouTube powerhouse who saved and invested their way to financial independence, retiring early from their corporate careers. Now they have a life of slow travel, exploring Europe and beyond with their two little dogs.

 Resources from this episode:

• Young & Scrappy, home to Michelle’s work as a financial advisor and financial coach.
• Our Freedom Years, Stephanie and Gillians’ YouTube channel specializing in all things financial independence, early retirement, and slow travel
• You can also find them online on their website, Twitter, or Instagram
• Jesse G, my editor. If you ever need audio/video editing work, give him all your love and money.

 [00:00:00] INTRO:  Hello, and welcome to the Young Scrappy Money podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Waymire, and each week I’ll be bringing you tips and tricks to help you take control of your finances, as well as interviews with people who made big financial changes in their own lives. So join us and we’ll help you get your financial shit together. 

MICHELLE: Hello everybody, and welcome. Welcome to another episode of the Young Scrappy Money podcast. I am excited to talk today because, man, I’m really missing leaving my house. We’re here in these weird times of 2020. This episode’s actually being recorded on April 4 2020. Here in the fine state of Georgia in the United States, we are deep into a period of everybody stay home, COVID-19, et cetera. And you might know this about me, but one of my very favorite pastimes is travel and y’all, I am missing it. I’m missing it so hard. I had to cancel some trips, I’m glad we’re all home and safe, hopefully. But also, I just want to live vicariously through people who are traveling basically all the time.

So, with me today is Stephanie and Gillian. They are a globe-trotting couple who have saved and invested their way to financial independence, retiring early from their corporate careers. Now they have a life of slow travel all the time, exploring Europe and beyond with their two little dogs. Welcome, y’all. I’m so excited to pick your brains. And, like I said, live a little bit vicariously through you.

 [00:01:35] GILLIAN: Thank you so much for having us today – and it’s great to hear your voice, too. We’ve been pretty isolated here for a few weeks. So yeah, definitely nice to have another voice instead of just a computer to sit in front of.

MICHELLE:  Yeah, it’s nice. I feel like these are times when connection, even if it’s virtual, is more important than ever.

GILLIAN: Definitely.

MICHELLE:  I want to start by talking a little bit about your financial independence. I did not put your ages in the description. But y’all retired at like 28. Do I have this right?

STEPHANIE: That is very incorrect. 

GILLIAN: Not so. Incorrect.

STEPHANIE: So I was 46

GILLIAN: And I’m 38 – I was 38 at the time, yes.

MICHELLE:  Okay, so here is me not ever knowing anybody’s age ever and also being completely incapable of telling ages. I was about to say, holy crap, but still, holy crap. So, let’s talk a little bit about this idea of financial independence because this is kind of a hot topic in the personal finance world right now. And so I’m curious, what does financial independence mean to you?

GILLIAN: So for us, at a high level, we would say that financial independence means that the returns or investments are enough to fund our lifestyle, on an ongoing basis. Of course, beyond just meeting our needs day-to-day there are also some other kinds of calculations that can be done around, you know, what, what percent you would spend per year but in broad terms, that’s loosely how we how we define it for ourselves.

MICHELLE: Okay. Tell us a little bit about how you got there, like, how did you decide you wanted financial independence, first of all, and then what steps did you take to prepare yourselves for this lifestyle?

STEPHANIE: Sure, our story goes back a little ways. I always like to tell people that 

seven years ago, we were a very average couple. Yes, we were career-focused, but we were very average. We were in middle-class Canada, we had a condo, we had an old car. And the only other thing that we had that made us maybe a little bit different was we had dreams of working internationally. Actually I had the dream, and I sort of pulled Gillian along with me. So we were able to make a fairly significant leap to move from Toronto, Canada, all the way over to Singapore, which was something that we did by building up our networks. There was no company that moved us over. It was not an easy road, but we managed to make it happen. 

So for me, financial independence, I had never even heard of this concept. I didn’t know what early retirement meant. But it was only when I finally reached a bit of a burnout point at work. I was working in a very competitive, highly stressful financial services situation, and I was ready to finally have a conversation with Gillian. So that was when the whole concept of financial independence was really first introduced to me and became a goal and that was really only a couple years ago.

MICHELLE:  Oh, wow, that escalated quickly.

 [00:05:02] GILLIAN: I mean, I would say for me, the part she didn’t mention was where she heard about this financial independence concept and retiring early was actually from me, because this has been something that I had been thinking about for a long time. Before I discovered the whole community around it, I had always dreamed of, you know, stepping away from the corporate world and living some different kind of lifestyle, didn’t know exactly what that would look like. But it was a topic I had raised with Stephanie over the years. And she said at a certain point, she was feeling burned out. Around that time, I actually found some of the resources that we now have online and I started saying, hey, like, maybe take a look at this stuff. Is there something here you know, that we can work on? So yeah, that’s how we kind of got into the whole thinking about financial independence.

MICHELLE:  Yeah, I’m curious about your experience moving to Singapore in particular, like what made you choose that location.

STEPHANIE: I would love to say there was a little more strategy behind it. But in fact, I was so hungry to have an international job of some kind. I was hungry to travel. Like everyone else who has the Monday-to-Friday 9-to-5, we had a couple of weeks a year where we could go on a trip. So really it was something I had always wanted to make happen within my career, I thought that was the best route to getting more exposure to traveling internationally and being immersed in different cultures. And I looked at a list online of all of the countries around the world that speak English. I discovered that there’s this wonderful country in Asia called Singapore where English is actually the primary language, so Singapore made it easy for us to to take our careers and transplant them over again. The part that wasn’t that easy was actually, you know, sitting in Canada trying to find a job in a new country. But it was a high-growth market in Singapore, there were a lot of opportunities. So after many nights of networking and making lots of phone calls and trying to pave the way there, we were able to both get jobs, which was very exciting. And it was, it was truly a life-changing opportunity for us.

MICHELLE:  Yeah, that’s awesome. What a neat story. I have many times dreamt of finding a job abroad and moving somewhere more exotic than Atlanta, Georgia, and have not done it yet. So I’m super envious. That sounds awesome.

GILLIAN: And it definitely was great. We were there working for six, just over six years. So we really made the most of our time, doing tons of travel. And just…yeah, really enjoying life in the tropics. So yeah, we’d recommend it to anybody. Mm-hmm.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. So some of the huge benefits were exactly as I hoped they would be. Suddenly, we had this whole region to explore, we were taking a lot of trips, and we were able to tick off a lot of bucket list items in terms of traveling to almost all of the countries through Southeast Asia, and then hitting some countries in northern Asia as well. So that part was really exciting. But just as it was an enriching experience, it was also highly pressurized. And it, you know, eventually became very stressful because, of course, we’re still there to work. And we were there to – well, at least I was, to climb the corporate ladder and try to do the best I could and hopefully work forever and, you know, eventually, be at the pinnacle of corporate success. But eventually, I found that was an extremely draining thing. And, as I said, I was ready to have a conversation with Gillian about how else we might try to live our lives.

MICHELLE: Yeah, that’s highly relatable. I feel like the corporate environment in general can be interesting and enriching, but also very special. Fleeting and extremely stressful?

STEPHANIE: Yes, absolutely. So it took a rather tough year of working a lot of weekends and a lot of evenings before I looked up one day and I thought, you know, all these Saturdays, these beautiful Saturdays and Sundays are going by and we’re sitting in this beautiful country and the sun is shining and the birds are singing, and I’m behind my computer. There just has to be another way. So that was really, for us, the tipping point. Gillian had already been there a very long time. But suddenly we found ourselves on a path of changing our lives, becoming more frugal, planning out what that new life might look like.

MICHELLE:  Yeah, so talk to me about that transition. It sounds to me like when you were first in Singapore, there was a lot of travel and expert exploration and really enjoying that region. But my guess would be that if you decide to pursue financial independence, you have to make some pretty drastic lifestyle changes in order to make that happen. So talk to me about that transition. How did things change for you when you decided to commit to financial independence?

 [00:10:12] GILLIAN: So fortunately for us, way before uncovering this whole financial independence/retire early concept, we had always been savers. We had saved money through our whole working lives. And so we definitely worked in debt. And we did have, you know, a solid nest egg at that point. That said, particularly after moving to Singapore, we had gradually seen some lifestyle inflation between the weekend trips . You know, just generally life in Singapore is a high-cost-of-living place. We definitely weren’t saving as much as we could have been. So we recognized that and started being really proactive. 

First of all, taking a look at what we were actually spending our money on. Because at that point, we didn’t actually know exactly how much was going out each month, and what it was going towards. So that was the first step, saying, okay, like, exactly how much are we spending? And on what? And from there we were able to kind of chip away and say, you know these things we’re spending money on, are they things that we really value? Like,  just to give an example, you know, on a Friday night? How often would we say oh, like, don’t feel like cooking tonight, maybe we’ll just get some takeout. And you know, doing that every Friday and making that habit gets really expensive, it really adds up and the value that it brings, was not worth the money to us. When you figure that, later on, if we just took that money, carry it forward to maybe a lower-cost living place in the future, that would buy so much more. 

So we started exploring, kind of that concept of what has value to us and that made it actually really easy. To start carving away at those, those line items that were really taking it out of our budget. So yeah, we were at that for a couple years, meanwhile, increasing our savings rate and kind of dialing in on how much we thought we would need to live off after leaving Singapore. So yeah, those were the things we were working on.

MICHELLE:  Was there anything that you did in the interest of frugality that maybe you look back on and say it wasn’t worth it? That might be a hard perspective to have if you’re currently in the midst of slow travel and enjoying life, but at the time, was there anything that was challenging for you?

STEPHANIE: One of the things – well, I’ll share with you one of the things that was challenging, but in the end, it was worth it. One of our line items in our budget, which was very significant, was our boutique CrossFit gym. We love doing In CrossFit, we had been doing it for years before coming to Singapore. And it wasn’t just where we got our, you know, our workout every morning, it was actually like our social scene, it was a community. But it was also a lot of money. 

So that was one where we hung on to that expense through this whole frugality push as long as we possibly could. And we had many conversations where we both said to each other, we’ll never give this up. It’s worth the spend, let’s keep it in. But in the end we finally decided, you know, it was just too much money when we compared it to the alternatives. And we took it upon ourselves to become educated more in how we could approach our physical fitness and what kind of programs we could be following. So that one was very difficult. I always thought that one would have to be pried out of my fingers. But when we finally made the change to doing self-directed work workouts and going to a regular commercial gym, it actually wasn’t so bad. And in fact, it has been something we’ve carried through in our slow travels.

So through this whole effort we picked up a new skill, essentially, which is you know how to do our own physical fitness how to how to program for ourselves, and we’ve carried it forward and now it’s something that, no matter what location we’re in, we can call on that skill and, you know, maintain our fitness without having to search out the nearest CrossFit gym.

MICHELLE: Yeah, that sounds like excellent practice for your current lifestyle.

GILLIAN: That’s an example of what I think of as experiments. So during that year, there were a lot of things that we were, you know, trying out. Sometimes we would say, oh, this is something that we want to cut out, but in some cases we would try it and then we decided actually, this is something that we value and that we want to keep. So instead of prejudging, it’s just about trying something differently and then deciding for yourself what is right.

MICHELLE:  Yeah. So, a couple of other questions about your process to get to financial independence I.’m wondering about your decision to save money, like what was your savings rate like? And then how were you actually saving? So obviously, if you’re saving only in a workplace 401k, it’s not really an option for you to withdraw that money early. So how do you balance the desire to potentially save taxes with a desire to save for something that you can use more in the short term? Do you see what I’m saying?

GILLIAN: Yes, so the first part, I think you’re asking how much we were saving. So, you know, we didn’t know when we – I mentioned we had always been savers. And we think we were saving something in the neighborhood of 40% of our income even more before starting this so we’re very grateful that we had built up that savings habit ahead of time. And then in the last few years, we really became very frugal. Like we literally were not eating a single meal out, like just really cutting down on expenses. And we got up to, I think, nearing about 70% savings rate. So, yeah, especially during that last year.

And then the second part of your question, so because we were in Singapore, we didn’t have access to some of the tax-sheltered savings options that we would have had in Canada and that you have in the US. But the good news was that our tax rate was extremely low in Singapore, which was the other good reason to move there. So we weren’t paying much in taxes, we were just putting the money directly into our investments. Which, you know, we just have investment accounts, so you just save through their direct investing – while we did still maintain our retirement savings plans from before, in Canada, that we just had kept our investments in there and just not touched throughout that time.

MICHELLE:  Okay. And then how did you know when you had enough money to actually start the process, quit your jobs and move on to slow travel.

 [00:17:16] STEPHANIE: There, we did a lot of calculations, and then we redid them, and then we redid them again. So, it was a long process and we – it was interesting that when we began first thinking about hm, what would it take to walk away and, you know, do the early retirement thing, we had such an inflated sense of how much we would need, and part of that comes from being based in a high cost of living market. You know, we were in a place where rents are so high, where literally anything you wanted to buy had been imported, so obviously there was just a huge, you know, surcharge upon everything. So it took a long time and a lot of research for us to take away the layers and understand, what did things really cost out there? 

And what we discovered, because it sort of marries up with our slow travels, we discovered that as you look at different countries and different cities around the world, you know what your dollar buys there is going to be completely different than what it buys at home. So we started to understand the kind of budget that would be feasible for us over two to three years of slow travel, a budget that would be still very comfortable and we could enjoy some, you know, luxuries along the way, but still feel like we were being frugal when it when it was important. We would still be hunting out deals. So that was the budget that we were working with. We did see our retirement in phases. The early phase of it, these next few years, will be focused around slow travel and spending a little bit more time in lower cost of living countries where again, our dollar goes much further. And then later on in life, we would expect to spend time in higher cost countries or maybe spend more on healthcare or spend more on taxes, just as those needs arise. So that was our strategy as we moved forward with coming up with, “how much is enough for us to do early retirement?”

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MICHELLE:  Yeah, that makes sense. So I think that’s a really nice segue into talking a little bit more about your slow travel adventures. You mentioned low cost of living areas. So I’m curious, what types of places would fall in this bucket for you, that you have particularly enjoyed visiting so far?

[00:20:04] GILLIAN: So when we were talking about Singapore, we mentioned that we had a chance to spend a lot of time in Southeast Asia which, for the most part, most of the countries would be lower cost. So although it is a very popular place for travelers to go, we felt we were ready to move on and, you know, visit some other places. So we had in mind to come to Europe. And I know that most people think, oh, gosh, you know, Europe is so expensive, and it can be, but the eastern side of Europe is definitely a lot less and in our experience so far can actually be quite competitive with Southeast Asia. So I would say, the Balkans, all of the countries in the Balkans generally are quite reasonable. And that’s an area that we plan to spend time in once we’re able to travel again. But so far, we had a chance to visit Poland and Ukraine, both of which are very affordable. And as well, Turkey, we spent a few months in Turkey, which was a great place to be over the winter. Because especially if you head all the way down to the southern coast, the so-called “Turquoise Coast,” it’s actually pretty comfortable temperature-wise and the cost of living there is really very low. So I think so far, I think that’s been one of our favorite places to visit that’s so neat.

MICHELLE:  I also am curious if you’re comfortable sharing some of these numbers. So when we talk about a low cost of living, can you talk a little bit about what your monthly budget might look like in any of these places? Like what it costs to live a month there, how you’re spending your time – and, you mentioned a little, luxuries? Like what kinds of things do you enjoy treating yourself to, in your budget?

GILLIAN: Sure. So, budgets in different places are different; people will spend quite different amounts. So certainly certain travelers would go to some of these places and could spend much less than we did. Or maybe they could spend quite a bit more. So I will say, we like to be comfortable where we are at, you know, have comfortable accommodations and so on. And so the, the rough kind of numbers that I’ll give you are sort of in that kind of comfort level range. So for us, I think in most of the places, on average, we come in around $2500 a month, that’s U.S. dollars. And, when we travel through higher cost of living places – like we’re in, we’re in Italy now. And we tend to trim back a little bit on those things that we’ll call the “luxuries,” which most of the time is…eating out is probably the thing that we really enjoy, but that’s the thing that we’re willing to kind of flex on and cook more at home. But when we were somewhere like Istanbul, we were eating out every day, like sometimes twice a day. Because the food is quite inexpensive and, you know, readily available, so although we will spend a little less in the lower cost places, we also tried to kind of adjust our spending habits as we go, as well to kind of keep our costs around even.

STEPHANIE: So just to maybe illustrate it very quickly. So Istanbul, it’s a low cost of living city once you get the rents out of the way. And then Florence is relatively high cost, in comparison. We actually spent about the same amount of money in each place, so $2500 U.S., but what we got for that was just so different. As Gillian said, in Florence, we ate almost all our meals at home, we ate out maybe once a week, and we certainly didn’t do any private tours or anything fancy like that. So we just, you know, toured ourselves on our own around the museums.

GILLIAN: And we should also mention, we were there in the low season, so I think we got a really good deal on our accommodation. And since we were renting by the month, you know, costs were quite low. It would definitely cost a lot more in the summer in Florence than Istanbul. 

STEPHANIE: And so in contrast, in Istanbul – again, same amounts of money – there we had a one-bedroom apartment centrally located, just like Florence. But what we got for our money was so different. So we truly were eating out one to two times a day for sure. And very nice meals at that. And we had a couple private tours and some other special experiences and all sorts of excursions. So we would say that beautiful cities, both of them, but obviously our dollar just went so much further in Istanbul.

MICHELLE:  Yeah, that’s a great perspective. That’s so interesting, because I would definitely expect for your budget to fluctuate wildly depending on where you are, but that’s such a fascinating perspective that you really can commit to the same budget. It’s just that it will stretch farther in some places relative to others.

[00:25:08] GILLIAN: Yeah, we are willing to flex a little bit as long as we keep sort of the same average amount throughout the year. But yeah, it’s just good to know that we can have that flexibility and it helps us feel a little bit more in control of our finances.

MICHELLE:  Yeah. So what’s your favorite place you’ve been so far?

GILLIAN: I think Turkey so far has been our favorite. Istanbul, as Stephanie mentioned, but as well on the southern coast, which, you know, it’s just beautiful down there. And there’s a lot of hiking opportunities, which is an activity we enjoy a lot. So yeah, the Turquoise Coast – it was, there were so few tourists around. Beautiful landscape. We were on the ocean with the mountains in the background, and just a place we hadn’t really thought about visiting. But now I’m already thinking of when we might go back. So, yeah, I definitely enjoyed the Turquoise Coast of Turkey.

MICHELLE:  And as I understand it, you are actually traveling with two dogs. Tell me a little bit about your dogs. I definitely want to know how cute and fluffy they are, but also some of the logistics involved with taking your fur babies with you on the road.

GILLIAN: Yes, so Jasper and Huxley are two twin poodles. They’re three and four years old, and they are looking rather fluffy right now. I think they’re due for grooming soon. But yes, so we, when we were first thinking about what we wanted to do during our retirement, we definitely wanted to include travel. But it didn’t occur to us at first that we’d be able to bring them with us until we started digging into it and we realized actually, our dogs are small enough that they can fly in the cabin with us. Really makes a big difference. For us at least, the idea of having them travel, you know, very frequently going into the cargo section of the plane just wouldn’t make us feel that comfortable. It’s one thing to shift one time, moving somewhere. But if that was going to be like a repeated thing, we weren’t really open to it. 

So once we realized they could fly in with us, we felt a lot more comfortable to start planning our travels. We do prefer taking trains where possible, just because we enjoy that experience more, but at least we are able to fly as needed. And in terms of the paperwork, once you’re in Europe, in particular, you can get a EU passport, which has all of their documents inside and it’s actually pretty easy to travel around once you get that. In order to get it there, the requirements aren’t too onerous. Just a few things, like making sure their rabies vaccination is up to date and everything. But yeah, once you jump through those hoops, then then you’re good to go.

MICHELLE: Your dogs have passports and that’s basically the cutest for today.

GILLIAN: Yeah, it is. It is pretty cute. And they’re little blue booklets, so whenever we go to a border, we’ve got our four little blue booklets that we pull out. It’’s, it’s pretty fun.

MICHELLE: Oh my god, that’s so precious. I love it. So I know that travel can be an opportunity for exploration and adventure and we tend to think of this as maybe almost like a glamorous lifestyle, being able to move from place to place and really take a lot of time there and enjoy it. But I’m sure it comes with some downsides as well. So,  I’m curious about how you’ve been handling things in a world where Coronavirus has altered a lot of people’s travel plans. How has this impacted y’all?

STEPHANIE: Well, it –  I mean, it impacted us quite significantly because we were in Italy and, in fact, we are still in Italy. So when the first reports of the outbreak happened – and of course Italy was the major center after China – so we, to be perfectly honest, we had no idea that it would be such a huge issue. We were very dismissive of what the possible implications would be for us. Even though we were in Italy at the time, even when the northern part of Italy was quarantined, we thought, oh, well, we’re here in the south, right, which shouldn’t be a problem. So we really didn’t know the meaning of the words “global pandemic,” but we woke up to it pretty quickly when the national quarantine came down and we – all of a sudden it truly dawned on us: wait a second. Borders are starting to close. This can be a problem for us. We’re trying to build a slow travel lifestyle focusing on Europe for the next year; that is our plan. 

So we decided okay, let’s try to get to another destination in Europe, something that is on our list to get to eventually. Let’s go there now, so that we can sort of outrun what is happening in Italy. Well, we were actually too late. So we did actually book flights to Hungary as soon as the national quarantine came down in Italy, but we found out it was very dramatic. Actually, we found out at midnight that the borders to Hungary had been closed and our flights were canceled. So we quickly had to scramble and make our plans. So here we are now, we are very safe and sound uncomfortable at a friend’s holiday home in Lake Como and we’re very grateful to be here. But as you can imagine, the last couple of weeks have been quite stressful for us as we’ve been wondering, oh, what do we do now? 

In the end, we decided that our best move, even though we do we still see ourselves as nomadic and we plan to continue working our travels once it’s possible, the best move for us now is to go back home to Canada. And we’re in a better position to support our families and be available to them during this time. So we are leaving, and leave finally on April…mid-April. But as you can imagine, this whole thing has been, you know, quite something for us to…to think about, and to reevaluate our plans.

[00:31:24] GILLIAN: And we did book round-trip tickets with a flexible return date, so we definitely plan to continue on with our travels. But we just thought since we don’t know when we’ll actually be able to move between countries, and that is something we’re going to need to be able to do, it makes good sense to go back, spend time with family and, to be honest, we haven’t actually spend any period of time with family aside from,you know, short, sort of two-week times with them in the last six years. So it’s actually a good opportunity for us to kind of slow down, you know, post-our corporate careers, actually sit down and spend more time with people. So we’re really seeing it as a positive opportunity from that perspective.

MICHELLE:  Yeah. In addition to maybe some stressful logistics involved with Coronavirus, I’m curious how you, as retired people, are managing your money in this climate.

GILLIAN: Yes, so I definitely know the slowdown, global economic slowdown, is a huge concern for really everybody. And it’s something that we definitely don’t take lightly, I will say that. Fortunately, our strategy always has been in terms of our money invested in the market to be invested for the long run. So in fact, our day-to-day expenses are covered by our fixed-income investments, which are, you know, continuing to come in so that we actually don’t need to be selling off any equities. Every year, so we’re able to just keep our investments in place, we do have confidence that at some point, the market will come back up. And so yeah, fortunately, that has been our strategy and we’re able to stick with that plan.

MICHELLE:  Before we close out, I’m curious: chances are there’s probably more than one person who’s listening, getting really excited about their potential for early retirement and or slow travel. So I’m curious if you could leave us with some parting words of wisdom. What’s one tip you have for somebody who wants to recreate your success?

STEPHANIE: Sure, I would suggest starting where we started, and that is creating a budget, understanding your current financial situation, understanding where your money is going. You know, we had always thought of ourselves as relatively financially savvy people. Well, a financially savvy person does actually track their spending. And we only started doing that a couple of years ago. But for us, that was really the turning point, because it helped us understand what does today look like but also, where do we build from here? What can tomorrow look like? What does our early retirement look like, what will be financially possible for us? So it’s really simple and it’s accessible to everyone. But just to track that spending, create a budget, analyze the numbers, see where the opportunities are, see where you’re overspending, see where you can create some savings. It’s such a basic thing, and it’s really I think anyone can get started with it at any time.

MICHELLE: Yeah, I think you’re totally right, that is a really accessible starting point. And even if you might do those numbers and realize that your income is not where you want it to be, or doesn’t quite support your long term strategy, you at least are putting the tools in place to make really proactive decisions as things shift in your career. So that’s great. I love it. Cool. Well, thank you guys so much for coming on. I was so excited to chat with you. And I really hope that you get home safely. I wish nothing but speedy and safe travels to both of you, as you’re making your way back home for a little while to regroup.

 [00:35:14] GILLIAN: Thank you so much for talking to us today. You mentioned that your listeners, you know, might be keen to learn more on some of these topics. So I just thought I would mention that we do have a YouTube channel where we share how-tos on some of these topics, including financial independence, slow travel, including some of the costs for slow travel. And we also talk about traveling with dogs. So if that’s something that people are interested in doing, yeah, we share about how some of those logistics works. So yeah, any of those topics they can check out our YouTube channel, called Our Freedom Years. And we also have Instagram, which is also called Our Freedom Years.

MICHELLE:  Awesome. And for folks who are listening at home, this is just your friendly reminder that a full transcript of this episode, along with any resources that are mentioned, including their YouTube channel, Instagram, anything else that came up in this episode, you can always find those full episodes and resources at youngandscrappy.com/blog. So be sure to check us out online. Be sure to check out Stephanie and Gillian online. And to everybody listening, I hope you have an abundant day. 

 END CREDITS: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Young Scrappy Money podcast. If you want to read about my work as a financial advisor and financial coach, you can do so at www.youngandscrappy.com. That’s www.youngandscrappy.com. Thanks again for listening.

Made with love by Jesse in Atlanta. [SMOOCHING SOUND]