Tips for Travel in Retirement ~ Problems to avoid

for a lot of people the dream after retirement is to become a world traveler whether it's for a week or a month at a time and they're going to travel the world and see the sites but I'm here to tell you uh that it's not all rainbows and unicorns all of the time although there are some places where there's chocolate cono and and churos uh which I just had yesterday morning which were fabulous uh but I'm here to tell you there are a lot of things that uh just may not look like they do in the brochure when they sell you a lifetime full of travel and your retirement years so I'm going to tell you a few of the things that may cause you some problems some headaches and make your travel dreams a little bit more difficult than you might have thought we've been traveling through Spain for a month and I'm going to break down some of the things that we've run into that you need to consider before you travel whether you're a slow traveler or a fast travel it doesn't matter these are some of the problems that you may run into and I'm going to help you uh kind of fix some of them before you start traveling so get ready shut up and sit down just in case you're new here my name is Jeff this is the retire mentality channel it's a place where we're going to change your mentality about retirement and today we're going to talk about traveling in your retirement like I said I've been traveling through Spain for about a month now and we're actually looking for a place that we may want to live full-time in our retirement so if you're interested in possibly retiring in Spain uh be sure to follow along on that Journey but in this video we're going to specifically talk about traveling and some of the things you might encounter as a traveler okay the first thing depending on the age if you're going to be retired you know a lot of us uh we talked a lot about retiring early on this channel and I just turned 50 this year uh so I'm no spring chicken but I'm also not traveling at 70 years old so this is a problem that is going to get worse the older that you get but it's Comfort level and we found you know we've been staying mostly in airbnbs over the last month and crappy couches and crappy beds have really been the problem because we have crappy backs and you know after you spend a day exploring a European city you do a lot of walking here in Europe or you know in a lot of places in your travels you will and so maybe you walk four or five miles in a day and then you come home and you've got a crappy couch to sit on and then you go to bed and you've got a crappy bed and then you wake up and your back hurts worse than it did the previous day and it just sort of compounds itself and there's you can't even take a day off and lay on the couch because the couch sucks I'm actually in my in-law's house uh in Spain right now so this is actually pretty nice couch and we have a pretty nice bed here but the airbnbs not so good which brings me to a second thing which is basic inconsistencies in the airbnbs that we've been staying in you know crappy couches and crappy beds is one thing that has been consistent in almost all of the airbnbs that we've stayed in um but one thing that's been inconsistent is what comes with the house you know we checked into one place and we were only there for 3 or 4 days and it didn't have any dish soap um so we had to go to the store and buy dish soap but it's not a huge expense but it's a pain in the butt uh another place didn't have any shampoos or hand soaps or anything like that like we've been traveling for so long we do bring our own shampoo we bought shampoos and things when we got here but then we didn't have soap and we didn't have some of the other things that we needed some of the places had a washer and dryer but then they didn't have Dish or they didn't have laundry detergent so you have to buy a whole thing of laundry detergent just to do one load of laundry uh so there's a lot of inconsistencies throughout these airbnbs uh inconsistencies and Wi-Fi and television other thing which we're going to talk about in the technology section in a second here but you know I watch some other full-time Travelers on YouTube and I see a lot of them have videos that say we're quitting airbnbs and one of the main reasons is because of these inconsistencies and they just sort of add up and the frustrations add up and the check-in policies like couple of the people wanted to meet us and then they were running late or we were running late and after you've been on a high-speed train and a bus and another train and another bus you've been traveling for eight or nine hours the last thing you want to do is stand around with all your Luggage in front of a Condo building waiting for the Airbnb host to come let you in to show you how to unlock the door so these inconsistencies can just really kind of Stack up and make Airbnb a little bit more frustrating in a lot of these places that we've stayed I'll mention here also we did stay in one hotel um out of this whole time that we've been traveling and we're only there for 2 or 3 days but the hotel we stayed in had the most comfortable beds the most comfortable pillows the best Wi-Fi it was frustrating not to have a couch to sit on or a kitchen or a refrigerator to put a couple beers or or some snacks in uh but it was the most comfortable as far as beds and the best with the Wi-Fi so um you know it's it's a kind of a crapshoot what you're going to get out there okay the third thing I'm going to talk about here is technology problems I was going to break these all out into separate categories but I decided to put them all together in one category that will call technology problems and where do I start with this one I guess I'll start with our phones man I did not expect to have the problems with our phones that we've been having you know I watch Like I said I watch some other full-time Travelers on YouTube and they always say you get to a new city you get to a new country you go to the cell phone store at the airport or you find one by your hotel or whatever you go there you take five minutes they sell you a SIM card for $10 you pop it in your phone boom you're in business in wherever country on the planet you're traveling and your phone works and everything's hunky dory and it didn't work like that for us my phone it turned out is locked and I didn't have the ability to unlock it and uh I could have bought a eim card for it but that because it was locked the eim card wouldn't work we couldn't change out the SIM card so basically my phone only works when I'm on Wi-Fi every time we go into a bar or restaurant or a hotel I'm frantically trying to get the Wi-Fi password so I can get on the internet for 5 minutes while we eat lunch and then my wife is using one of my older phones and it had I think it had two SIM card holes in it but I don't know for some reason they didn't work and they couldn't convert it or whatever I don't know what the problem was with her phone so what we ended up doing luckily we found out these problems as soon as we got to Spain and for the first couple days of our trip we stayed with her parents we ended up borrowing an old iPhone from her dad and buying data for the old iPhone and then using it as a hot spot for our phone so we've been carrying three phones around all the time big pain in the butt moral of the story is get this all sorted out before you leave if you're new to traveling or you're going to a country you've never been to go to your local store wherever you live make sure your phone is unlocked make sure it can take eims or figure out how to do this before you get to the new country because we weren't able to sort out any of these problems here in Spain which we were already here so get it sorted out before you leave the next problem we've been encountering is Wi-Fi problems and there's not a lot you can do about this one I don't think unless you have some sort of an external hotspot that you're using but I don't know know if these people in these airbnbs just pay for the cheapest crappiest internet provider things you can get but two of the places we stayed in the internet was just so bad I tried to upload a video and it was going for over like two and a half days and it never even finished uploading the speeds were too slow I just literally couldn't even upload a video onto YouTube and we didn't try to stream anything uh we just uh tried to be on the internet and the speeds were so slow it was it was maddening so um expect if you're traveling through airbnbs and things to have H bad Wi-Fi and if you need to do work or if you're traveling uh and doing a little bit of work on the side or you want to upload videos or things like that like try to look into what the speeds are ahead of time or maybe I don't know if you can find that out from the Airbnb host before you check in one place that uh I booked normally my wife books everything and I always seem to make a mistake booking things dates or something and so I booked one and I didn't look to make sure that had Wi-Fi in the actual room it was kind of a hotel Condo building and it said in small print Wi-Fi only in common areas and the common area was only the lobby so we had to go sit in the lobby we would smuggle a bottle of wine into the lobby it said no glass in the lobby so that was another problem to this but anyway we'd have to sit in the lobby if we wanted to be on the internet so it was just not a good experience for 4 days we were in there with no Wi-Fi in our room and nothing to do but look at each other when we were in the room so check that and expect some slow Wi-Fi speeds another problem along with the Wi-Fi is having a VPN I'm not going to give you a VPN commercial here because we don't have a VPN and it caused us some problems I thought about getting one before we left but I didn't do it and there are certain websites that we couldn't get on to uh for instance we needed to pay our power bill at our house in Puerto Rico but the website was blocked because it said we were out of the country so we were unable to pay that power bill there were some other things banking things that we couldn't do I won't bore you with all the details but a VPN is a they're cheap they're a couple of dollars a month and I'll be getting one as soon as we get back and learn how to figure out how to use that because uh having a VPN would have helped us be able to get a few of the things done that we needed to do uh and also Loop in here a lot of the places we stayed at I expected most places to have a smart TV you know in the US in my airbnbs I don't pay for cable anymore I just have Smart TVs and then people can use their own Netflix accounts or Amazon account accounts or Disney Prime accounts or whatever they want and they can watch their own things and here they don't do that they all just have local Spanish TV I don't know if I would have brought a fire stick if I could have plugged it in if I still would have needed a VPN or not but I wish I would have brought a fire stick for some of the TVs because it's a little frustrating if you don't speak the local language and all you can do is watch the local television and you want to sit on your uncomfortable couch in the evening after a long day and watch a little TV and maybe have an adult beverage and you can just watched the news in Spanish and it was a little frustrating for me I was going to talk about luggage but uh this is getting a little bit long so I'm going to just say quickly we have backpacks and there's some places having the backpacks are great there's some place we wish we would have had a wheelie thing so I don't know if there's some sort of backpack wheelie thing that would be nice for luggage I'll just throw that in here quickly so um we just have backpacks and we travel only with a carryon we don't check any bag so think about you got to think about how much it's going to cost for a carryon versus a checked bag depending on you're going in the airlines cuz some of them charge you more for other ones so do a little bit of research on that you might be surprised what you find and the last thing I want to talk about which hasn't been a problem is our credit card we have a great travel credit card and it's worked everywhere that we've gone and uh we only took $200 in euros with us I told my wife we're going to go blow through that super fast and I was wrong she was right our credit card worked everywhere we went a tip here if you use a travel credit card a lot of places use it it's going to ask you if you want to pay in like we're in Europe so it said do you want to pay in Euros or do you want to pay in dollars always pick the currency of the country that you're in you get the best conversion rate like that uh so our travel cars worked good uh and actually we also get access to the airport lounges so we get free food free cocktails free drinks in the airports which has been a game changer for our travel and uh you don't have to notify them when you're traveling from different countries they it's a travel card so they expect it so if you don't have a good travel card uh looking to getting one I'll put a link down below to mine it does cost $500 a year but you get $300 in vouchers back right away this isn't sponsored by them or anything uh but I just think it's the best travel card out there um like I said I'll put a link down below I do get some points if you use my link so if you're looking for a new card you can use that and check it out so that's it those are my tips um hopefully these might give you some things to think about you may not have thought about if you're considering traveling outside of the US for retirement travel for a month for a week for a year for a whole lifetime whatever it may be hopefully some of these may have helped you a little bit if you want to see some more about our trip through Spain and looking for a place we might be able to retire in go click on this video over here otherwise consider subscribing and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: TheRetirementality

Views: 5,319

Keywords: Real Estate Investing, personal finance, retirement, puerto rico, FIRE, Financial indepence, retire early 500k, retire early financial independence, retire early lifestyle, travel over 50, travel at 50, travel at 60, travel over 60, travel after 70, travel after 70 years, slow travel retirement, slow travel family, fast travel, full time travel tips

Id: 8-DMhRZtUxA

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2024