I'm not going to lie to you, I love long-term travel but I really have no intention of ever doing a long-term trip ever again.
Considering we founded this site to be a long-term travel blog, it poses a bit of a problem for us when it comes to the topic of what we're going to do next. Do we shut it all down and call it a job well done, change the theme altogether, or do we migrate to something that we are still passionate about that still keeps our 1,000+ articles relevant?
Naturally, we chose the latter.Since traveling is still in our blood, and always will be, migrating this site over to become a lifestyle design blog only makes sense. While we may not be aligning our goals to take off for another year of travel, in a way, we kind of are. Our new goal is working towards a life that allows us to travel whenever we want.
Lifestyle Design vs Long-Term Travel
When I think of the concept of lifestyle design, I think of it as building a business that allows you to do what you want, when you want, all while having the funds to fulfill your any want and desire.
This is a very similar thought to those who want to take a long-term trip, with the exception being that for long-term travelers the money will run out at some point and then you are left with the question of " what happens next? "
Lifestyle design, to us, is answering that question with the response of "I no longer have to worry about that."
The unfortunate downside with many lifestyle design bloggers in the travel market is that they think they've made it because they can live perpetually in a cheap destination like Chiang Mai, Thailand (on $10,000 per year), or by jumping house-sit to house-sit, and claim to be able to "travel" perpetually because of this. There is nothing wrong with this, but in the theme of lifestyle design w e do not believe this is being fair.
To us, our ideal lifestyle design goal allows us to maintain our residence where we want (the USA), while also being able to afford everything else on top of that whether that means a $30,000 trip to Antarctica or a $500 weekend trip two states over.
Naturally, this is an uphill battle for us, but is one that if we do achieve it will mean that we've reached a level that so few bloggers can say they're at.
This is where things have to change.Our New Roles on Living the Dream
To achieve our lifestyle design goal, we are going to shift our focus with how we operate Living the Dream and we have a few announcements that need to be made (even if we've been dreading this inevitability for the past year or so).
Overall, when it comes down to it Angie's heart was never really into writing for Living the Dream. Unless it had to do with culinary travel, she really found it to be too much of a chore to write for the blog here. (I totally understand her viewpoint.) As such, she will not be writing articles on Living the Dream anymore except for very rare instances. Instead, she is going to focus her effort on our local blog, Discover the Burgh, as there are many more topics near and dear to her heart that she can write about.
When it comes to blogging, being passionate is one of the keys to success, and she is going to rock it over on that site.
I will still be writing about travel here at Living the Dream; however, the majority of my articles will be focusing on the behind the scenes work on how I'm converting our blog into a business to achieve our lifestyle design goals. This means that for the foreseeable future I'll be writing more about these behind the scenes steps, plus blogging tricks of the trade, while down the road I'll begin to pick up more and more travel content once our goals are met and we can begin traveling as much as we desire.
Don't worry, we also plan on taking several trips between now and when we reach our final goal. So I'll still be writing about travel destinations quite a bit- just not as much as I was when traveling full time.
For all the travel addicts in our audience, I have to apologize for this, but we do have another outlet setup that will help you with your travel fix: our staff writers!
Our Staff Will Still Cover Long-Term Travel
Although Angie and I will not personally head off on another long-term trip any time soon, that doesn't mean our feelings on the topic have changed. This couldn't be further from the truth. We believe everyone should explore the world on at least one (or more) long-term trip(s).
As it is, we do not want to ever get away from the topic of long-term travel on this site as it is what has inspired all of our goals since this site was founded in 2008- including our new quest for a perfect lifestyle design. To continue our pursuit of this, and help encourage others to follow in our footsteps, we're planning to always maintain a team of staff writers to help cover their own long-term trips to help you on your way to long-term travel and (if you want later on) digital independence.
The Morgan family just finished their first long-term trip in early 2016, Rylei will be traveling for another year (or more), and we're in talks to bring on a new writer in the next few months who is going to be going on another incredible journey that we simply can't wait to talk about.
Our love of travel has not changed, but for us personally we are looking for something deeper than giving up everything to travel, come back, work a bit, and do it all over again.
You may not be there yet in your life, and that is completely okay, but for us, we're moving on to something new.
I hope you'll continue following along with our journey as we make this new goal a reality. If (or rather, when) we achieve this, we can assure you that the best adventures are still to come.
