It’s Here: Budget Slow Travel in Retirement Is Now Available for Pre-Order
Eight years ago, Jeff, our Yorkie, Cookie, and I packed a Toyota with two suitcases and a rooftop bag, and drove from New Jersey to Mazatlán to start our beachfront retirement.
Turns out there’s only so much time you can spend on a beach. So we started traveling — and eight years and 100 countries later, we still haven’t stopped.
Somewhere along the way, this blog and our Facebook group, Budget Slow Travel in Retirement, grew into a community of 170,000 people who were all asking the same question we were: what if retirement didn’t have to look like the script we were handed?
Today I’m thrilled to share that everything we’ve learned — together, as a community — is now a book.
What’s Inside
Budget Slow Travel in Retirement: How 170,000 Members Retire Young and Travel Smart isn’t a memoir. It’s the collective operating manual of the largest budget slow travel community in the world — real people, real numbers, real strategies, tested across every continent.
Inside, you’ll find:
- The four traveler archetypes — Full-Timer, Hybrid, Snowbird, and Deep Diver — and how to figure out which one actually fits your life (Jeff and I are Hybrids, for what it’s worth)
- The complete financial architecture, including the three-card banking system that works in any country and the credit card strategy that funds flights with points
- The home exchange system that’s kept us out of hotels for 51 exchanges across 14 countries
- Healthcare and logistics abroad — visas, banking, long-term packing, and the realities of medical care overseas, including our own emergency in Spain
- The stories that don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet — the oxygen tank in Cusco, the Bali monkey, the Romanian bear forest, and more
A doctor’s visit in Mexico cost 30 pesos. A 22-day transatlantic repositioning cruise cost $25 per person, per night. Swapping your condo for a palace on Lake Como isn’t a fantasy — it’s a Tuesday. This book is how.
Why Now
For a while, health issues forced Jeff and me to pause our travels and stay put. I used that time at home to finally sit down and organize the hard-won wisdom this community has built together over the years — the questions people ask most, the mistakes worth skipping, the strategies that actually hold up when you test them across a hundred countries instead of just one.
You wrote this book. I just organized it.
Get Your Copy
Budget Slow Travel in Retirement is available now for pre-order on Kindle for $9.99 — or free with Kindle Unlimited at launch. The paperback follows shortly after. Official release day is August 9, 2026.
Thank you for eight years of proving, every single day, that the traditional retirement script isn’t the only option. I can’t wait for you to have this in your hands.
— Lidia
