Couple is seeing the world without going broke
They quit their jobs to travel for a year
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY NETWORK – WISCONSIN
It started out as a joke.
After a long day at work, Kelly Cueto might have suggested to her boyfriend quitting their jobs to travel. Or Max Blumenthal would say it before returning to the office Monday morning after a long weekend.
At the end of last year, the couple finished up their last days working in commercial real estate in San Diego. They sold some of their belongings, put the rest in storage and moved out of their apartment. As of Jan. 6, as they put it, the couple has been unemployed, homeless and happier than ever.
“It’s not like we hated our jobs at all,” Cueto said. “We hated the things that came along with working in those careers.”
The couple put in long hours at the office and couldn’t step away from their cellphones.
Cueto, 28, and Blumenthal, 34, are now more than halfway through a yearlong, worldwide trip.
It started with a road trip from California through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa, ending at Blumenthal’s parents’ house in Bayside, Wisconsin, where they ditched the car.
The international leg began in February with each carrying a rolling suitcase that converts into a backpack. Since then, Cueto and Blumenthal have crisscrossed India, climbed mountains in South Africa, island-hopped through Indonesia, walked the Great Wall of China, viewed the cherry blossoms in Japan and biked through farm fields in Vietnam.
In August, they stopped back in the U.S. for time with family and friends in California and Wisconsin. The next stop: Prague.
Regardless of the country they’re in, Cueto and Blumenthal get the same question: How are you able to do this?
They stopped thinking it was the end of their careers:
Cueto and Blumenthal talked about taking an extended trip such as this for three years before buying plane tickets and putting in their resignations at work. The scariest part of spending a year traveling was not the trip but what happens after, they said.
Blumenthal wondered what future employers would think about a gap in his resume. “Will they say, ‘ He’s a screw-up, so that’s why he just ran away for a year?’ ”
“We needed to get past it in our heads,” Cueto said.
They haven’t decided when they’ll have a permanent address again, and it doesn’t bother them anymore.
“The more that we travel, the more those fears we almost forget,” Cueto said. “It’s not like anything has changed. We still don’t know what’s going to happen when we come back, but we’ve gained confidence while traveling.”
Cueto is the money-conscious half of the relationship. She scoured travel blogs to come up with a workable figure for how much a yearlong trip would likely cost.
Her estimate was less than $40,000. But that was an aggressive budget.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Blumenthal said. “We wanted to enjoy a couple things, too.”
They settled on a $50,000 budget to
They established a budget:
cover lodging, food, travel, insurance and other needs for the year. Cueto and Blumenthal are taking from their savings, originally intended for a wedding and buying a home, to pay for the trip. That will all come later. They also saved specifically for the trip by making lifestyle changes, such as avoiding eating out, before leaving.
They stretch every dollar:
When Cueto and Blumenthal pick a destination and start looking at travel options, they use Google Flights. They search flights for their next destination and see where common stops are made. For their flight to New Delhi, a common stopover was in Shanghai.
“So then we start playing around with dates, so instead of booking a straight flight, we do a multicity stop,” Cueto said. “So we search O’Hare to Shanghai and then Shanghai to New Delhi and play around until we get close to the same price.”
The couple has paid for nearly all of the 17 flights taken on the trip so far with credit-card points. Blumenthal picked a travel reward card from Chase Bank, Chase Sapphire Reserve. At their departure, the couple had accumulated more than 700,000 points.
The card, which has a $450 annual fee, comes with a $300 annual travel credit. Travel purchases such as airfare and dining earn three times the points as other purchases. The card was named the best travel credit card in 2017 by Money magazine.
They stick to that budget:
Cueto has calculated about how much to spend on accommodation, food and exploration in each destination.
She keeps track of their spending by making a note in her phone every time they make a purchase to know where their money is going. Small purchases such as food, coffee and alcohol are the biggest budget killers, she said.
Staying within their budget on lodging is the easy part.
“That’s one time that you’re making a decision,” she said. “If you stay in budget on that, that’s easy. That’s done. It’s eating out that’s so easy to go over budget. For us, so often food is more expensive than accommodation.”
The couple tries to spend a significant amount of time in each location. They spent a month in Cape Town, South Africa. From their Airbnb, they tried to walk as much as possible to see the city, not just the destinations.
“Cars, Ubers, trains and planes can kill a budget,” she said. “So stay local. Really explore one or two places when you go somewhere rather than try to see everything where you’re going. You miss a lot, too. You see so much more walking.”
They travel slowly: