The traditional plan says work until 67, then travel. US life expectancy is around 77, which leaves about a decade to enjoy the thing you deferred your whole life for, on the body you have at 70. I think that math is a scam, and our family opted out of it. We have been taking mini-retirements since 2017, traveling 3 to 4 months a year, now, while our kids are young and we can climb around inside a pyramid instead of waving at it from the tour bus.
In Egypt I watched busloads of older tourists step out at the pyramids, take a photo in the heat, and climb back into the van. We were there in our thirties with our young daughter, crawling through the passages. Same destination, completely different experience. The longer you wait for something, the less value it has.
Where the idea came from
I did not invent mini-retirements. I stole the concept from Tim Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Workweek. Instead of deferring one big retirement to the end of your life, you distribute it throughout your life in recurring chunks. Read the book and something breaks in your brain, in a good way. You stop asking "how do I save enough to stop working at 65" and start asking "why am I structuring my entire life around a finish line I might not reach?"
The math that made it urgent for me is the summers math. You get 18 summers with each kid. Except you really don't. Subtract the baby years when travel is mostly logistics, and subtract the teenage years when they may not want to come, and you are looking at maybe 14 or 15 summers that actually count. We are spending ours on trains in Europe and beaches in Asia, not waiting for a retirement party.
And here is the part nobody expects: the point is not just the trip. Mini-retirements give you something on the calendar to look forward to all year, and they force you to build a business that runs without you. You cannot leave for three months on hope. You need systems, processes, and people, and the deadline of a booked flight will get those built faster than any business book. The trip is the forcing function. The self-running business is the byproduct you keep.
The pushback (and what the brave ones say)
I have gotten a ton of pushback from friends on this. You are hurting the business. The kids need stability. Must be nice. I have heard all of it since 2017.
But the brave ones, the friends who actually did it, come back saying the same thing: it is life-changing. Their businesses grew while they were gone, because the systems they were forced to build turned out to be better than their daily firefighting. Their family connections are stronger, because three months of shared novelty beats three years of passing each other in the hallway. And travel forever changes you. You never come back the same person who left, and neither do your kids.
Here is how to actually start, learned mostly through our own mistakes.
Our first attempt failed
Our first real trip with a kid was 10 days in Switzerland when our daughter was 18 months old, with a train ride every two days. She was exhausted and grumpy, then we were grumpy. We came home and drew two conclusions most people never test: the problem was not traveling with a kid, it was the pace. And the fix was not a shorter trip, it was a much longer one.
The next trip was 10 weeks, and it was one of the best decisions we have made. Just go for it, make the mistakes, and go again for longer.
The slow travel rules
Everything we learned condensed into four rules:
- Minimum one week in any location. Families we know who have done a year abroad set their minimum at one month per stop.
- Maximum two hours of travel between stops. Long travel days are where family trips go to die.
- One region per trip. Southeast Asia, Europe, or Central and South America. Do not cross the globe twice in one itinerary.
- The first week does not count. Time zones, unfamiliar food, first-time-abroad nerves: week one is acclimation. Plan nothing ambitious.
The one-month trial run
If you have never traveled longer than a vacation, do not book a year. Book a month, in one region, with no more than two or three places. A month is a really good trial run: long enough to get past the acclimation week and find your family's actual travel style, short enough that nothing at home breaks.
Here is the efficiency secret nobody tells you: planning a one-month trip takes almost the same effort as planning one week. Flights, transport, lodging, activities, the workload barely changes, and once you are somewhere for a month you can figure out logistics locally instead of pre-booking everything. Longer is literally easier per day.
If your kids are in school, summer is the low-hanging fruit. I pull our daughter out a few days before the year ends and we travel the summer. Then a month becomes three months, and eventually you are the family whose friends ask "how do you afford this?" The short answer is cash-flowing assets and businesses that run without you, which is what this whole site is about.
Where to go first: Italy and Greece
If you want a first-trip recommendation, it is hard to beat Italy and Greece. Amazing food, good weather, and some of the friendliest locals on the planet. And if you are nervous about traveling with little ones, this is the region that cures it. Italians and Greeks genuinely love kids. Waiters will scoop up your toddler, grandmothers will fuss over your baby, and your children will be welcomed with open arms basically everywhere, in a way that makes American restaurant side-eye feel like a strange cultural glitch.
They map perfectly onto the trial-run formula too. One region, two or three stops, a month: a couple of weeks in Italy and a couple in Greece, with short flights or ferries between them instead of grinding travel days. Food that even picky kids will eat (pasta, pizza, and gelato negotiations are winnable), beaches and ruins within walking distance of each other, and enough English spoken in tourist areas that the language barrier never becomes a real problem.
Why slow beats fast
Beyond sanity, staying put changes what a place gives you. A family we know spent a month in Peru's Sacred Valley, and a three-week festival of parades and fireworks unfolded around them. A one-week visitor would have missed all of it. When you sit still and stay in one place, things come to you.
Slow travel is also cheaper per day (monthly Airbnb discounts, cooking at home, no premium on doing everything right now), and it is the version kids actually enjoy: familiar beds, local friends, routine. Kids clubs, by the way, are the best thing ever.
Once the month goes well, the practical questions get louder: what about the house, the job, the phones? That is the next article. And if you are still deciding whether to point your time at building the income that funds all of this, the free tools and calculators here are where I would start.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
