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What if staying home cost more?
That’s one of the realizations that helped Crystal make the leap into full-time travel.
Crystal had been traveling extensively since 2017, but in November 2021 she made a much bigger decision: she became a full-time digital nomad.
Her children were grown. She was entering a new stage of life. And after looking carefully at what she was spending on rent, utilities and maintaining a conventional home base, she realized something surprising.
She could travel full-time for less.
So she decided to reset.
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From Tea Shop Owner to Digital Nomad
Crystal didn’t arrive at nomadism through a conventional remote corporate career.
Her professional life has been wonderfully varied.
She owned and operated a tea shop and tea room for 15 years. She’s worked in hospitality, retail and management. She’s also a Reiki practitioner and energy worker and has spent more than 35 years doing intuitive readings and coaching.
In other words, she already had something many aspiring nomads struggle to develop:
Portable skills.
But becoming a nomad still required changing how she thought about work, possessions, home and security.
Rather than making one enormous leap, Crystal gradually tested the lifestyle.
She traveled.
Then she traveled longer.
Eventually she decided to take a year and see what would happen if travel became her normal life rather than something she occasionally did between periods at home.
You Don’t Have to Get Rid of Everything
One thing I appreciate about Crystal’s approach is its practicality.
Digital nomadism sometimes gets presented as an extreme lifestyle transformation.
Sell everything.
Own 27 things.
Put your entire life into a backpack.
Never look back.
Crystal took a more measured approach.
She downsized significantly but kept a small storage unit. She maintained a mail-forwarding service so she could continue managing the practical side of life and business while traveling.
That’s an important distinction.
You don’t need to pass some ideological purity test to become a nomad.
You need a system that works.
For Crystal, that meant eliminating most of the expenses and possessions tying her to one location while keeping enough infrastructure behind to make life manageable.
The Economics Can Be Surprisingly Different
One of the most interesting aspects of Crystal’s journey is the financial calculation behind it.
Most people assume traveling continuously must be enormously expensive.
It certainly can be.
But it doesn’t have to be.
If you’re maintaining a house or apartment in an expensive city, you’re already paying for housing, utilities, insurance, transportation and all the other expenses associated with a fixed life.
Long-term travel changes that equation.
Instead of paying for a home plus travel, the accommodation you’re staying in becomes your home.
And if you travel slowly and choose destinations where the cost of living is considerably lower, the numbers can become surprisingly attractive.
Crystal experienced that firsthand in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, one of her favorite destinations.
She was able to find affordable longer-term accommodation while enjoying a walkable environment that allowed her to actually live in the destination rather than simply visit it.
She also particularly enjoyed Bath, England, demonstrating something else about this lifestyle:
Not every destination needs to offer the same experience.
That’s part of the adventure.
Start With Your Why
Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Crystal what advice she would give someone considering the digital nomad lifestyle.
Her answer gets to something much deeper than packing lists, visas or travel insurance.
Understand your why.
Why do you actually want to do this?
What are you hoping to experience?
How do you want your days to feel?
What are you moving toward?
Those questions matter because there’s no single correct version of nomadism.
Maybe you want constant adventure.
Maybe you want slower days.
Maybe you want warmer weather.
Maybe you want to experience different cultures.
Maybe you want financial breathing room.
Maybe your children have grown and you’re finally free to ask a question you haven’t been able to ask for decades:
What do I want now?
The answer determines everything that comes afterward.
Don’t Overdesign the Life Before You’ve Lived It
Crystal also recommends being willing to change your plans.
That’s important.
It’s tempting to build a gigantic checklist before beginning.
The perfect destination.
Perfect monthly budget.
Perfect accommodation.
Perfect work schedule.
Perfect climate.
Perfect community.
But until you actually live this way, you don’t necessarily know what matters to you.
Something you thought was essential may turn out to be irrelevant.
Something you never considered may become non-negotiable.
That’s why Crystal focuses less on constructing the perfect nomadic life in advance and more on identifying the feelings and experiences she wants from it.
Then she adjusts as she goes.
That’s not poor planning.
That’s iteration.
The Reset Can Happen at 55
There’s another part of Crystal’s story that I think will resonate particularly strongly with the Nomads 50+ community.
She didn’t look at turning 55 as a reason to settle permanently into the life she’d already created.
She saw it as an opportunity to reset.
Her children were grown.
Her circumstances had changed.
The responsibilities that shaped earlier decades of her life were changing too.
So rather than automatically continuing along the same path, she reconsidered the assumptions underneath it.
Do I need to maintain a conventional home?
Do I want to stay in one place?
What would happen if travel became my lifestyle rather than my vacation?
Could I afford it?
Could I work while doing it?
Would I enjoy it?
There was only one reliable way to find out.
Try it.
That’s what recalibration looks like.
Not necessarily knowing what the next 20 years will look like.
Just recognizing that they don’t automatically have to look like the previous 20.
In this conversation, Crystal and I explore:
Becoming a full-time digital nomad in your 50s.
Why grown children can create an entirely new window of freedom.
Discovering that travel can sometimes cost less than maintaining a conventional home.
Crystal’s 15 years running a tea shop and tea room.
Turning unconventional skills into portable work.
Reiki, energy work, intuitive readings and coaching.
Testing nomadism before committing to it.
Downsizing without getting rid of absolutely everything.
Using storage and mail-forwarding services while traveling.
The advantages of longer-term accommodation.
Why Playa del Carmen became a favorite destination.
Traveling through Mexico and Europe.
Finding destinations that fit your preferred lifestyle.
Why your “why” matters more than your itinerary.
Planning around experiences and feelings rather than rigid requirements.
Changing your plans once reality teaches you something new.
And why 55 can be the beginning of an entirely different life rather than the continuation of the old one.
If you’ve been looking at the cost, complexity or uncertainty of becoming a digital nomad and assuming it’s impossible, Crystal’s story offers a useful alternative.
Don’t begin by asking whether you can reproduce your current life somewhere else.
Ask whether you still need your current life at all.
The answer might surprise you.
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