Seeing more of the world without spending your life savings.
Travel has always been a big part of our version of a good life.
But we’re not particularly interested in ticking countries off a list or spending a fortune on luxury holidays. We want to see interesting places, experience different ways of living and make memories with our family — while still keeping an eye on the bigger financial picture.
For us, travel is one of the reasons we’re pursuing financial independence in the first place.
What’s the point of building freedom if you never use it?
Here you’ll find our adventures, family travel, experiences of living abroad and the lessons we’ve learned about making travel work alongside a more financially conscious life.
🌏 Our travels
Africa — our first big experiment
Before A Way to Less became what it is today, we took a big trip through Africa.
It was an early example of something we’ve come back to repeatedly: sometimes the things that make life richer aren’t the things that make you wealthier.
Read about our Africa adventure →
🇹🇨 Living in the Caribbean
In 2022 we made one of the biggest changes we’ve ever made to our lifestyle: we left the UK and moved to the Turks & Caicos Islands.
Living abroad gave us a completely different perspective on money, lifestyle and what we actually value.
It also taught us that moving somewhere beautiful doesn’t automatically make life simple.
Explore our Caribbean experience →
🇹🇭 🇲🇾 🇸🇬 Six weeks in Southeast Asia
Our next adventure starts on 1 January 2027.
We’re taking our family to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore for six weeks.
We’ll be travelling with our six-year-old and two-year-old, travelling relatively slowly and — perhaps most unusually — temporarily taking our eldest out of school.
It’s a holiday, but it’s also another experiment in living differently.
We’ll be keeping track of what it costs, what the children learn, what works, what doesn’t and whether six weeks of family travel really is worth the disruption.
Follow our Southeast Asia adventure →
👨👩👧👦 Family travel
Travelling as a couple is one thing.
Travelling with a six-year-old and a two-year-old is something else entirely.
We’re interested in making travel work for the whole family rather than trying to recreate the holidays we used to take before having children.
That means slower itineraries, fewer destinations, sensible budgets, plenty of downtime — and accepting that sometimes the best plan is no plan at all.
You’ll find things like:
- Travelling with young children
- Family-friendly destinations
- How much our trips actually cost
- What we would do differently
- Keeping children entertained on long journeys
- The educational side of travel
- Whether expensive attractions are actually worth it
Explore family travel →
🏝️ Living abroad
We’ve now experienced life in the UK and living abroad, and the contrast has given us plenty to think about.
Living somewhere for an extended period is very different from being on holiday.
You start thinking about:
What’s the cost of living?
What does everyday life look like?
Would we actually want to live here?
How does it work with children?
Does a lower cost of living actually mean a better life?
Our experiences living abroad form an important part of the wider A Way to Less story.
Explore living abroad →
🎒 Adventures
Not every trip needs to be a six-week expedition.
Some of our favourite experiences have been much closer to home.
This is where you’ll find the shorter trips, weekends away, days out and adventures that make life more interesting without requiring a huge budget.
Because one of the things we’re trying to prove to ourselves is that you don’t need to wait for financial independence to start having a life worth living.
Explore our adventures →
💷 Travel & FIRE
Travel and financial independence can sometimes seem like opposites.
Spend less. Save more. Invest everything.
Or:
Travel the world. Have experiences. Spend the money.
We’re trying to find the middle ground.
We don’t want to sacrifice every experience today in the hope that we’ll eventually reach some magical point where we’re “allowed” to enjoy ourselves.
But neither do we want to spend recklessly and undermine the financial freedom we’re working towards.
So we’re experimenting.
We’ll share the actual numbers alongside the experiences — from the cost of living abroad to family holidays and our six-week Southeast Asia adventure.
The question we’re trying to answer:
How much freedom can we create today while still building towards financial independence tomorrow?
Explore travel & FIRE →
⭐ Was it worth it?
One thing you’ll notice throughout our travel posts is that we’re interested in more than simply telling you where we went.
We want to know whether the experience was actually worth the money, time and effort.
So we’ll try to answer:
What did it cost?
What did we get for our money?
Would we do it again?
Would we recommend it to another family?
Did it make our lives better?
Because sometimes the cheapest option isn’t the best one.
And sometimes the expensive thing turns out to be the thing we remember for years.
Where we’re going next
Our next big adventure begins 1 January 2027.
For six weeks we’ll be travelling through:
Thailand → Malaysia → Singapore
with our two children.
We’ll be documenting the trip as part of the wider A Way to Less experiment — including the costs, the logistics, the family experience and what happens when our six-year-old temporarily steps away from school.
We’re not sure exactly what we’ll learn yet.
That’s rather the point.
Follow our Southeast Asia adventure →
Travel shouldn’t be something you save for retirement.
We’re building financial freedom because we want more choices.
Travel is one of those choices.
And we’re not planning to wait until we reach our FIRE number before we start using them.
Spend less. Live more. Keep moving towards freedom.
[Start with our story →]