Most of us say “I can’t afford it” about a trip before we’ve ever sat down and worked out what it would actually cost. I promised you a money episode, and I wanted to talk with someone who has done that math many times over, so I reached out to Jillian Johnsrud, the author of Retire Often. Jillian never expected to be able to retire early, so she hatched a plan to retire often, and she and her husband Adam have taken more than a dozen mini retirements.
What I love about how Jillian thinks about money is that she doesn’t start with a big scary number. She starts with the trip itself, broken into pieces, and then she asks a question, which sounds like a version of: do I want Chipotle every Friday for lunch, or do I want to spend a month on the beach in Mexico eating street tacos, learning Spanish and learning how to salsa dance?
You might not be planning to take a month off work, and that’s fine. Everything Jillian says about pricing a trip works for five days or ten days just as well as it does for thirty, and later in the conversation she talks about exactly where to start if two weeks is what you have.
In this episode:
- Mini retirements, not holidays
- The à la carte price list
- Chipotle or salsa dancing in Mexico
- The $12,000 math mistake
- A $20,000 week in Paris
- Starting with a one- or two-week trip
“You can make those choices, and it doesn’t feel like deprivation. It feels like you’re choosing your biggest, best life.” (Jillian Johnsrud)
What does a mini retirement actually look like?
When Jillian talks about a mini retirement, she means a month or more away from work, and what struck me as I read through her examples in the book is how few of them were holidays in the way most of us picture them. She describes a mini retirement as something like a Swiss Army knife, because it can do a lot of different jobs. People come to it burned out and needing rest, or wanting more time with family and friends, or simply aware that they haven’t travelled or learned anything new in a long time.
She also talks about seasons that have an expiration date. Almost ten years ago she took a ten-week road trip to ten national parks with her kids in a pop-up camper, and near the end of it she realised that the season when they would all happily pile into a camper with her was almost over. That really resonated with me, because when I went to Australia and New Zealand with a friend about three years ago, she wanted to hike and climb more hills than my forty-something knees were up.
Is there a trip on your list that belongs to an earlier season, or one that won’t wait for a later one? I’ve talked before about how your adult gap year doesn’t have to be a year, and Jillian’s idea of a mini retirement sits very comfortably next to that.
How do you price a trip à la carte?
I found this part of the conversation especially useful. Jillian says that when we have a bucket list dream, we tend to assume it will cost an obscene amount of money, so much that we can’t even think about it, and so we stop dreaming. What she encourages instead is to price each piece of the trip separately. What does the flight cost, and how much is an Airbnb for a month? She had just booked flights to Australia and New Zealand, and she found an Airbnb for a month for $1,500 and a rental car for $550.
Once you write the prices down, you start asking how you could make it happen. Maybe you use credit card points for a flight, or you go with a friend and you’re each only in it for about $700 for the Airbnb, which Jillian points out is like $50 a month over a year. You could dog sit once or twice a month, or choose the $300 car payment over the $600 one. That’s where the Chipotle question comes in, and Jillian is clear that she can’t make that choice for you, but you can make it for yourself, and it doesn’t have to feel like deprivation.
Why doesn’t a month away cost four times as much as a week?
One of the biggest errors Jillian sees is that people price a longer trip from their last vacation. If a week in the Caribbean cost $3,000, they assume a month will cost $12,000, and she says a mini retirement doesn’t scale that way. When you have the luxury of time, you don’t need the five-star hotel, because you aren’t trying to squeeze everything into three days. She usually rents out her house while she travels, for about what an Airbnb costs, so the rent covers her housing and the main new cost is the flight. Spread over a year, a $3,600 trip is about $300 a month.
This summer brought my own version of this surprise. With ten days between leaving Ghana and going to Brazil, I decided to go to Rwanda, where I found a clean hotel room with wifi and breakfast for $25 a night. I had no idea that was available to me until I was open to it and started finding out the details. Part of the 40+ solo travel advantage is knowing what you want well enough to price that, and not some generic version of a trip.
What if you only have a week or two?
I asked Jillian what a woman should think about first if she isn’t ready for a mini retirement but she is ready to take a one- or two-week trip. Her answer was to start with your intention for the trip. Do you need rest, or learning, or creativity, or better connection with people? Then you can start practising that in your nights and weekends, with a watercolour class or a Saturday morning walk with a friend, so that you have some momentum before the trip.
She also told a story about a woman who dreamed of a week in Paris with a five-star hotel, shopping and fine dining, and who had worked out that it would cost $20,000. Jillian’s response was that she could just go, see the Louvre and Versailles, eat crepes on the street and picnic by the Eiffel Tower with wine, cheese and a baguette from the grocery store, and do the bigger trip later. I like to remind women that the intention matters here too. If what you really want is to stand under the Eiffel Tower, a lot of the other stuff is extra, and it’s worth teasing that apart before you decide a trip is out of reach. It’s a lot like the question of what really makes a solo trip worth it.
Your invitation for this week
Jillian’s invitation this week is to start with the dreaming. Take twenty minutes, write down every trip idea that’s been floating around in your head, and get them out on paper. Then choose the one that pulls at you most and start pricing it line by line, so that you’re deciding about a real number instead of a someday. If you’ve taken an invitation from a previous episode, you might already have a list, so review it and then do the rest of the exercise.
Where can you find Jillian?
You can find Jillian and her newsletter at jillianjohnsrud.com, and on Instagram her username is @jillianjohnsrud. Her book, Retire Often, has formulas and examples to help you plan the money side of a mini retirement, and you can use them for intentional solo travel too.
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