How Selling My House to Travel the World Changed My Life

Hint: It was for more than a holiday

In 2019, the world was a different place.

The world was open for business. Travel and tourism flourished around the world at unprecedented levels.

It was also the year I sold my house to travel the world. It wasn’t a simple or easy decision, but I’ll be forever glad I made it.

This is that story.

‘For Sale’

I scratch my head sometimes, however, I sold my house with the sole intention of travelling the world with my partner and one-year-old.

Any reasonable financial planner would suggest I was crazy. Irresponsible even. And they wouldn’t be alone. Advice came thick and fast.

Reactions to the move were, let’s say, polarising. Many people were supportive - some even admitted they dreamed of doing the same thing.

Others called it irresponsible or immature. It was one or the other with very little middle ground - not that I cared.

The most important thing was to make a decision. I had to ask myself one question.

‘Whose rules was I playing by?’ The answer was easy.

At that moment, I understood I wanted to be in charge of my own life and experiences. To stop letting life happen to me and start living life on my terms - at least for a while. Something needed to change.

I understood the sacrifice and risk this decision would bring into our lives. But there was more at play than dollars and cents.

To take control of my life and be the best possible version of myself, I needed a new start.

Having considered all that, it was a decision that I knew would change my life.

I just didn’t know how much.

‘Travel is Kid’s Play’

Ever since I was a boy, I dreamed of travelling the world.

Growing up in New Zealand, seeing the world is like that. A dream.

Our nearest country (Australia) was a three-hour plane ride away, a little over the distance from San Francisco to Washington DC. The rest of the world seemed so far away.

Because it was.

Family and friends would return from overseas trips, telling me stories of places they visited and bringing home small gifts. These small fridge magnets and toys from foreign places were treasured more than anything else.

At the age of ten, I had my first international travel experience as I jumped on a 747 jumbo jet and headed to the sunshine of California with my family. I heard strange accents that I had only heard on TV before. Visiting Disneyland and Universal Studios blew my mind.

It felt like a dream.

The seed for exploring the world was already there. My California experience only watered and nourished it.

A few years later, another trip took me back to the US. I was a teenager now, 16 years old and full of hormones and excitement. I visited other parts of the country and with a bit more freedom, I learned how travel experiences at that age can be so influential.

Little did I know, this was all a lead-up to the big trip. The one that would define my life going forward.

At the young age of nineteen, I left the safety and security of home for good to travel abroad. Initially, it was for only six months.

Six months turned into a year. One year became ten.

Everything I owned came with me in several backpacks, suitcases and plastic bin liners, which were discarded and collected over the years. Living in the UK and Australia, I moved from city to city, living the best life for a decade.

Opportunities to visit Europe, Asia and the South Pacific were all part of the journey.

My life had purpose and meaning.

‘Welcome to Reality, Kid’

Then I got back home to New Zealand and then bang!

The door slammed shut.

It felt like my life had stopped. The adventure certainly did. Walking the familiar streets of the town I grew up in, time seemed to have stayed still – it felt like I had hardly been away.

Slowly, I began evolving.

I changed into someone I barely recognised. The person in the mirror no longer smiled or laughed. The scary thing was I didn’t realise that I had changed at all.

A series of life events left me raising my son on my own. I went to work, learned how to be a Dad, all very normal things. But did this in a town and house that I did not want to be in.

Living with a mortgage, a couple of dogs and bills that emptied my account every month. I would look at my mortgage payments disappear every payday, knowing that everything I was working for went to someone else.

I felt trapped.

‘You must be happy, Marc. You are doing so well.’

People would say stuff like that to me all the time. And I get it. I was, after all, living the Kiwi dream. Homeowner, settled job and family around me.

But at what cost? My mental well-being and happiness were the answer.

If this was what I had to look forward to for the next thirty years, you could count me out. I would be sixty by then - if I got that far. That was me until retirement. Panic set in. A feeling I tried to ignore.

But I felt the walls closing in fast.

‘Time to Change Sh*t Up’

A mindset shift was required - and difficult decisions needed to be made.

So I changed course. And this was when life started happening again.

I sold my house and moved town after meeting someone special. We bought another home and settled down again.

Still living the Kiwi dream.

The reality was that I had just shifted the goalposts a bit. Other than the change of postcode and the fact that I was living with someone now, I still felt I was facing many of the same demons that I thought I had left behind in my old town.

In the wise words of Confucius: ‘No matter where you go, there you are’.

Realising nothing else had changed, it was still depressing to look at the debt I owed and my bank account that ran dry every month. I wasn’t truly living, I was merely existing.

I often lay in bed at night, wondering how it had all come to this.

Is life worth stopping only to follow the linear path that society expects me to? I knew the world offered so many opportunities to those willing to try.

I just had no idea how to make them happen for me.

‘Travel is Best with a Mate’

For years, the seed to travel again waited patiently beneath the surface.

Hidden away, deep in my subconscious, it was waiting for the right time to emerge.

My partner, Sarah, was from Scotland and had many travel experiences of her own. We would talk late into the night as she described her own incredible travel experiences.

About the time she took the perfect photo of the big five on an African safari, living with the Sapa hill tribes in Vietnam and hot, dusty outback tours of Australia.

Sarah’s free spirit was envious. Her drive to explore and follow her dreams was inspiring. I recognised that was what I used to be like.

Our relationship blossomed despite us being in very different places in our lives. When I met Sarah, her personal belongings fit in a small box. She was happy. I felt like I was living in a box that I couldn’t escape.

Then life happened.

We had a baby together. We bought ‘stuff’. Like normal people do.

Despite all this, there was still a common spark between us. The spark to keep living our lives.

Lives that we would look back on with gratitude for our experiences rather than regrets about the ‘what-ifs’.

Tragedy had affected both of our lives at a young age. We both had a similar determination to make the most of our time on this planet.

Still, life continued on a monotonous routine of Monday to Friday and weekends - every day felt exactly the same.

Like before, the mortgage and pressure of living the life that I was leading was only pushing me deeper into a hole. A hole that I knew would get harder and harder to escape, especially with a young family to support.

‘I Have a Dream’

One day, sitting alone in my driveway, I took a deep breath.

My day at work had been particularly rough. I didn’t want to go inside my home or go back to work. I felt utterly lost.

Clenching my teeth and gripping the steering wheel, I stared at my house and asked myself the same question I had in my old town.

‘Is this truly what I want? Do I want thirty more years like this?’

Nothing about the way I was feeling had changed for years. Something had to give. That evening, I mentioned an outrageous idea that had been in my head to Sarah.

“What if we just sold up and disappeared for a year or two? See the world.” I casually suggested sitting on the couch in front of the latest Netflix marathon.

She just laughed at first before noticing that I meant it. Then her expression changed.

“Are you serious?”

“We could, you know” I said, glancing around the house.

“This isn’t us. Is this going to be us for the next thirty years?”.

She didn’t say yes, but didn’t say no either. I became excited while Sarah grew nervous.

The whole scenario sat in the back of our minds for a while. A few weeks later, I started talking myself further and further into pursuing the idea. The fog in my head began to lift. A hint of sunshine came through the clouds.

I started to keep myself awake at night, dreaming about the possibilities.

'Time to Make This Happen’

Where could this journey take us?

To Europe? Definitely. What about North America? Maybe. Even Asia? The list went on and on. Every continent was within our grasp.

The decision was ours. It felt empowering.

I pulled out a couple of old travel books for inspiration. ‘You Only Live Once‘ alongside the ‘Ultimate Travelist’ from the Lonely Planet only fuelled our wanderlust. Images and stories from all over the world within the pages of these two books reminded me of the passion I had for exploring faraway places.

The conversations began about a trip of this magnitude and what it would involve. There was so much to consider.

Most importantly, our son had just turned one.

Soon, we were all in as we realised there was much more to gain than to lose. We could make a home anywhere. The town we moved to had not been kind to either of us.

It felt like the perfect time to hit the reset button.

The opportunity to enjoy the open road for an extended period was something that we knew would not come along every day.

So we said ‘Yes’.

We said yes to life and put the house on the market.

As we moved out, there were no regrets. Not a single moment of reflection wondering if we had done the right thing. On the final walk through the house, I felt nothing. It was just an empty house.

The difference between a house and a home is the people – we would make our home somewhere else.

Someone else would make our old house their home.

‘21 Countries Later’

That was in 2019. Ten months later, we would return to New Zealand.

After visiting Australia, South-East Asia, Europe, the UK and the United States, we returned with a new purpose.

It had been the most incredible experience of our lives.

The times we shared with friends and family, as well as seeing the places I had only ever read about in those books I read as a boy, were all I dreamed they would be..

The direction of our lives had shifted due to our experiences together. The people we met on the journey inspired us. The challenges we faced made us resilient. Not once did we think about our old house, our old lives.

We were too busy living in the present but keeping an eye on the future.

Returning in March 2020, little did we know that a once in a lifetime pandemic would unravel the same world that we had just seen within a month.

Borders closed and planes were grounded as Covid-19 ravaged some of the places we had only returned from.

‘Home Again’

Despite all that has gone on, there is one thing above all else that I am grateful for.

I am grateful that we had the courage and determination to do what we did - not many others would.

Sometimes, as the pandemic proved, second chances don’t always come around.

People we met on the road were inspired by our willingness to live our lives. In turn, we were inspired equally by their own stories and hospitality. Every single day gave us a memory.

Ultimately, it’s the memories that matter.

Travel does that to you. It opens your mind and gives you a different perspective.

The whole journey enriched our lives, our relationship and our futures. The greatest gift, above all else, is it has made us better people. That is the gift that I will never take for granted.

So, now it’s your turn.

My story is unique. I understand that. But I don’t think all of it is.

Is anything holding you back from your own travel adventures? Or are you a long-term traveller who when returning home felt, well lost?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this or anything else raised in this post in the comments

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