Is a Home Base Worth Giving Up Full-Time Travel?

I'm missing a home that no longer exists.

I’ve started writing FOUR different Freedom Diary entries, only to get a couple of sentences in and decide I wasn’t feeling up to it.

Or the topic wasn’t bursting to be written.

To be honest, I’ve been really struggling with my creativity lately.

I have tons of ideas, but when I sit down to write, it feels like the printer is jammed.

Jammed.

That’s a word that resonates right now.

My energy feels jammed.

That, and displaced. Uprooted. Untethered.

We’ve been living out of suitcases for nearly 9 months now and fine cracks are forming in the vision Flynn and I created for our life.

We dreamed up this life of nomadic family travel, popping home to Vancouver for a few months only to reorganize our suitcases just in time to catch another flight abroad.

But the small hairline crack in our vision has become a fault line in the foundation that has caused us to sit and ask, "What needs to change?”

And what’s REALLY jamming the energy flow in this dream life that we worked for years to create?

We think it might be a deeper craving for something sturdy. Stable. Ours.

A home base to come back to.

On the Move

When we went on our first “long trip” to Panama in January of 2024, I felt homesick multiple times throughout.

I missed my bed.
Our home gym.
Our car that we could hop in and go anywhere at a moment’s notice.
My stuff in its place.
Our routines.
The park down the street.
My favorite grocery store.
The family walk neighbourhood loop.

But last Summer when our landlord sold our home and we decided to become nomads instead of settle again, we made a decision to release all of the familiar.

We committed to a future of Airbnbs, moving homes, new neighbourhoods, & uprooted routines.

We haven’t been anywhere longer than 60 days since last year.

But it’s interesting. During our 3 month trip to the Dominican Republic that we returned home from just weeks ago, I didn’t feel homesick.

I thought this was peculiar.

To be honest, it was nice not having that heaviness of missing home spoil the adventure of a trip…

but maybe, just maybe….

…it was because I had no home to miss.

In Someone Else’s Home

The cracks that I began to see forming in our dream vision life became apparent after returning home to Vancouver early April.

We bounced around for a few nights, starting at my parents house and then to an Airbnb.

But this is what we are grappling with about this lifestyle once we return home - it’s never our home.

It’s someone else’s stuff. We park in someone else’s driveway and use (and sometimes break - we have kids) someone else’s bowls.

In Vancouver, there is this rule that an Airbnb home has to be at the principal residence of the owner.

What this means is we are always in someone’s house, usually the basement, paying Vancouver prices for a tiny living space.

Back in October, we paid $3200 for 28 nights in a basement suite that had 3/4 underground well windows that were blocked by a built up deck and a hot tub.

We literally lived in the dark for a month and you couldn’t tell if it was night or day.

In our current home, there are 2 rooms and the kitchen, which is so small there is only room for 3 chairs.

We’ve had fun with it and pushed the 3 chairs together to create a bench so the four of us could eat, but these experiences continue to rub at the part of me that feels raw right now.

I miss having my own space to come home to.

An Uncomfortable Choice

So why, you may be thinking, don’t you just rent a place and have a home base to come back to?

Why do you have to be full-time nomads? Why not just be a travelling family that also has a home?

And that is the goal.

That’s the way our vision has evolved.

We want to have a 2-3 bedroom home that we rent year round to hold all of our stuff, our things, our routines and our life.

Somewhere stable and consistent that we can return home to.

Somewhere with our own dishes, my shampoo waiting for me in the shower, a space for my girls to call their own with their own toys, available for them to play within instead of packed into a storage locker.

A home base that we can keep year round while we continue travelling 5-7 months per year.

So why don’t we do that?

If we chose to set up a home base here in Vancouver, we’d have to give up travel.

Our income doesn’t stretch that far right now.

If we added a 3 bedroom home year round at $3500/month (yes, that’s an average 3 bedroom home in the suburbs of Vancouver right now), we would only be able to travel one, maybe two months per year.

So we are faced with a choice: a home base or travel.

A Leap of Faith

On a Vision Money Date Walk last week, Flynn and I asked each other the big question:

What’s the bigger priority to you right now, travel or a home base?

It was a no brainer for us.

Travel.

Why? Because we can, right now.

The four of us are here, in good health and able to travel.

We have the location and time freedom to live anywhere in the world.

We have the dividend income to fund it instead of having to work.

Our family back home is in good health.

Our marriage is strong.

One day, we may not have this opportunity.

We may have aging parents who need our care.

Our girls may grow older and want to spend less time with us and instead, create rooted friendships and routines in one place.

What if now is that special window in time where all of the stars are lining up, telling us to explore and adventure?

What if we are supposed to fulfill this season of our life and show our kids a life that Flynn and I never grew up knowing existed?

What if this is what we are supposed to do NOW?

So we’ll travel.

The idea of missing out on this life right now is so much more uncomfortable than living in basements and cloudy weather while we are back in Vancouver.

It’s the discomfort we are choosing.

This Isn’t the Easy Choice

The hardest part of choosing this path is the pressure I get from my family to stay, to travel less.

I feel guilty “taking the grandbabies away”, especially at this stage when they change so rapidly in a 3 month time period.

I am constantly battling with the fear that I am missing out on family time while they are on this earth, healthy and happy.

My deepest fear is that I will be upset with myself if something were to happen to my parents or my Gramma or my sister and I didn’t spend as much time with them as I could.

Instead I left. I travelled.

I missed out on time with them.

But it’s not so black and white.

If I don’t travel, I’ll live with the regret of a life played small, of experiences missed and the opportunity to give my kids a wonderful childhood immersed in life abroad.

It feels like either way, I lose.

So I choose to see it differently.

Either way, I win.

Maybe I’ll never feel like I did “enough” to satisfy either side of the equation, but I’m doing the best I can to walk the line between my deep connection with my family and the life that’s waiting for me on the next flight.

Maybe I need to make peace with this dissonance, this war between my two selves.

Maybe it’s just a heart that has the capacity to experience it all and be blessed enough to have it so good that I want more of both.

So Here’s the Plan

Right now, Flynn and I are like those homing missiles, locked onto a target.

Our field of vision narrowed to the next evolution of our life.

We’ll call it Plan Home Base.

Because we are not willing to give up travel right now, we need to create more income and luckily, that’s a problem I know how to solve.

We haven’t run the exact numbers yet, but we would need to come up with the additional cash to rent a home here in Vancouver year round, plus utilities and internet etc., even though we don’t live in it half of the year.

The vision is sharpening, I feel like the target is within view.

If you’ve been reading my Freedom Diaries, we are carving out that path to create this dream live on Substack.

You can catch up here: Inside the Making of Our 5-Day Challenge for Future Cash Flow Investors.

For now, we’ll huddle together on our 3 chair bench at the kitchen table and make peace with the homes we live in.

Because while we may be without a house, we are never without a home.

A house is just a vessel to hold our physical things.

A home is wherever the four of us are.

Tanessa

P.S. - Are you interested in being a part of our challenge and making your first $100 in monthly dividend income? Let me know via DM or comment and I can reach out to you directly when we go live!

Our 5 day paid Cash Flow Investor Challenge goes on pre-sale in one week (May 21st) and we’ve got some awesome bonuses and discounts!

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