Living The Dream: It’s Not About The Money

Tom & Anna left their mundane lives in the Philippines to pursue a life of passion. In the past year they have trekked jungles, tackled Spanish in Ecuador and blazed through Europe. They are here to tell us how they are Living The Dream.

Anna and Tom

What was the first country you visited? Who with and why did you choose it?

The first country that we visited together was Vietnam. We actually met there when we were both backpacking. I was in the tail end of a yearlong solo backpacking trip while Tom was in the middle of his. We met in the sand dunes of Mui Ne and ended up traveling all of Vietnam and most of Thailand together. After that, I went back home to the Philippines while Tom carried on traveling through Malaysia and Singapore. We met up again after a couple of months later and the rest was history.

When did you start a travel lifestyle? What inspired that change?

At that time, we were both living in Manila, Philippines tired and bored going through the regular routines of a daily job. We had both just finished traveling and missed life on the road. During that time, we decided to start an adventure travel blog, Adventure in You as a way to stay connected to something we both loved. Little did we know that our little passion project would fuel our love for travel and adventure and open doors for us to do it full time. Despite good job offers that would mean financial security, we decided to take the leap once more and quit our jobs to take our lives back on the road. This was just a little over a year ago! Since then, we have trekked through jungles in Sumatra, visited 5 countries in one day in Europe, and most recently, tried learning Spanish while we are here in Ecuador.

Do you have a base you travel from? Or is it continuous travel? And why do you choose that style?

Currently, we are traveling full time. We did a 3 month stint in Indonesia, travelled all over Europe for a month and now have made our way here to South America. Although we travel continuously, we travel quite slow. We like to take our time in places. This allows us to make the most out of our time as we get to know locals and immerse ourselves in their culture.

How do you fund your travel lifestyle? Is it something you do when travelling or are you a saver?

People always ask us how we can afford to travel but to us, it’s about making the necessary sacrifices. We had both saved up money and used that to travel around during our solo backpacking trips. Now, we are living off whatever we make in the blog. We earn money also by doing freelance writing and consultancy. We try to stick to our budget as much as possible and have lots of little tips and tricks to help us stretch our money.

If you could tell yourself one tip before you started your travel lifestyle, what would it be?

As cliché as it sounds, for us, our advice would be to just do it. We were worrying and thinking a lot about our decision but as soon as we got back on the road, we couldn’t be happier. There is never a perfect time or moment. You will always worry about finances, timing, and most of all, your career. Since we’ve quit our jobs, we’ve found that so many opportunities opened up for us which never would have happened if we played it safe.

What does "Living The Dream" mean to you?

Since we pivoted the focus of our blog to reviewing adventures, we get to do a lot of cool stuff when we work with different companies! We feel unbelievable lucky that things like scuba diving with sharks, climbing volcanoes, or skydiving has become part of our “daily routine.” To us, living the dream means being able to pursue our passions in life. We may not be earning loads, but we have the freedom and independence to travel, grow our blog, and most of all, inspire people that regular folks like us can “live the dream.”