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Our Story

Jake and I met in 2012 at a college in the middle of nowhere. After a month of me “chasing” this shy redhead, we started dating! Three days later I told him I loved him and after that, we were pretty much (and still are) inseparable.

We both moved abroad after that and for two years we wrote each other love letters from opposite sides of the globe: me in Chile and him in the Philippines. By the time we got home, we both had binders overflowing with letters and we were ready to be together again!

We got engaged a year later and actually ended up proposing to each other on the same weekend! (I knew he was going to propose, but I really wanted him to wear his ring before the wedding so I asked him to marry me by having Little Caesar’s spell it out in pepperoni! Picture for proof below!)

Anyways, after our wedding we only had a few months left of college and we both realized that we were not ready to buy a house, have kids, settle down, etc. So many people had told us that when we get married, that meant that late nights and travel were behind us… but we wanted to prove them wrong!

So Jake and I started traveling right after we graduated college! We had sold all of our belongings including 2 cars, a lot of Target furniture, our new mattress, and at least 10 full garbage bags of old clothes.

We were nervous, but had our first destination in sight: DUBAI! We didn’t have much planned after that, but we both turned down job offers knowing that we weren’t quite ready to be tied down to one place.

Our first trip, we planned everything ourselves (Kinda! Lol) We bought a package through Expedia that we thought was a great deal and then cooked most of our meals in our hotel kitchen when we got there.

We did so much wrong and could have saved way more money, which is the main reason we started this blog! We spent much more than we normally do now, we took pictures of almost everything, and we barely ate any local food. However, at the end of the trip, we were definitely far from done.

After Dubai, Jake had the idea of going to Europe! We didn’t have jobs and not a ton of savings, but we planned it all out meticulously (and I even wrote an ebook afterward!) and we pulled off $35 per person/per day!

WAY cheaper than our Dubai trip We were getting the hang of this travel thing and we wanted to go for even longer this time…

So when came home and bought two one-way tickets to Bali! (Check out this post to see how we got paid $39 to move abroad!) We had never stepped foot there, but we knew it was what we wanted to do. I applied for VIPKid (a super awesome online English teaching job that can be done anywhere!) and we hopped on the plane! (Well it wasn’t that easy, we needed a visa, but that’s for another post!)

Luckily, things worked out for us! Jake applied for VIPKID as well and we traveled around Bali and Indonesia for 6 months!

Since then we have lived in Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand while working online and have traveled to almost 30 countries all while SAVING money! We moved to France in January 2020 and hope to stay as long as the French give us visas!

We started this blog so that we could share all our experiences (the good and the bad!) and help as many people as possible to save more money and travel more often. And obviously to learn from the numerous mistakes we have already made for you! So come Happily Ever Travel with us!