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Fresh Perspective Interview with Adam Baker

Written by Aaron Pinkston, Mon, Jan 25 2010
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I’ll skip the lengthy Fresh Perspectives introduction because Adam Baker from Man vs. Debt and I talked for a long time. Also, I’m trying an experiment by uploading the raw audio from our call. Check it out if you want to hear my nerdy voice or the parts I cut out of our interview.

AP: You’re known for writing about personal finance and also about life in general. One of your boldest moves was selling most of your material possessions and moving overseas with after getting married and having a new baby. As a two part question, first what lessons do you think regular folks can learn from your experience of selling your stuff?

AB: Well, I guess first of all, I consider myself a regular folk. So I don’t want it to appear as though we’re not. And I’m not saying what’s right for anybody else, this is just our story.

I think it helped us focus a lot – on things that aren’t materials possessions. You know, things like a house, a bigger car… and that’s the path we were on. So I guess the process of selling our stuff and traveling, living minimally, and learning flexibility has taught us that we don’t need a lot of those things to be happy.

For instance, I used to have the fancy cell phone with all the unlimited whatever and internet and I was constantly plugged in. I thought I couldn’t live without it. We still have my laptop. But now we just use a cheap cell phone where we have to switch the SIM card out when we change countries. Now if I jump on a motorbike in Thailand, I don’t even take it with me. I’ll get back to it when I get home. It’s more relaxed.

So we’ve learned how to be flexible and we’ve learned how to focus on other things like, you know, living and how to actually get along with each other. So maybe that’s something people can pick up on as they start to pare down their possessions.

AP: And when you went to Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand, what did you gain from that experience that ordinary people who don’t travel extensively could learn from?

AB: The biggest thing is the flexibility. When we first went to Australia, our plan was to actually live in Australia. We knew we had to work jobs and produce income because we don’t have some huge retirement fund or anything. And that plan didn’t work out at all. And we wanted to find Courtney, who has a full teaching degree, a job in education. So we tried to plan the whole thing out from the US, even picking out apartments and so on.

But when we got on the ground, we realized that all the planning in the world wasn’t going to help us. It may have relieved a little stress, but things were changing too rapidly. The most valuable thing we had going on was anybody we knew in the area. So we found that through a website called Couch Surfing (which is like a Facebook for travelers) where families can host traveling families and we would stay with them. They’d also help show us the area and orient to the place and gave us great advice.

The whole community was so great, that gave us that little bit of an in to help us. And that was much more valuable. So the difference is that we tried to plan and script this thing out, but when we got on the ground, we had to adapt.

Flexibility and to go with the flow and also be responsible were the biggest things that changed in the last year for us.

AP: So you can make plans, but then plan to modify.

Right, this is a good example: When we got to Thailand, we stayed with my friend Cody McKibben who runs Thrilling Heroics for the first few nights. We reached out to him because I knew he was in Bangkok and we’d never been to Thailand. But after the first few nights, we didn’t plan one single day for the entire time we’ll be in Thailand. That was just a learning process for us.

So, give yourself some time to get your bearings straight. When you travel, especially if you do long term travel, the more you plan out, the more frustrating it can become.

AP: Okay, but you left the comfort and security of North America with a new born baby!? Most people think babies are expensive and need a stable, nurturing environment where they can be coddled 24/7. You up and left the country with no prospects for a job, or anything. How is that going?

AB: It’s going really well. Australia was a little crazy for us and we wound up having to jump over to New Zealand because there was a shortage of primary school teachers in New Zealand. So we wound up jumping over there because of the shortage, and Courtney got a job for about 6 months.

And I want to make it clear we’re not trying to change locations every day. One, that’s not good for us from a work standpoint because I work online and need a little bit of a consistency - much more than Milligan needs, in my opinion. And with respect to Milligan, if we’re going to have big travel days, we want to make sure that she gets to rest after that. So we spent around five and a half months of our one year trip so far in one place, in an apartment, in New Zealand. We have had period of rest in between our periods of travel.

As far as Milligan, she’s doing really well. She’s starting to enter a little bit of the terrible-two’s but it has nothing to do with travel. She’s just becoming more independent and learning to talk and express herself, which is a really interesting experience on the road. It’s been great for her. She gets exposure to both parents almost full-time, which will hopefully help her out long term. She gets to meet new people and interact with different cultures. She’s become great friends with the Thai woman who runs the bungalow we’re staying at now for a week.

I’m no parenting expert. This is our first child, but I think it’s going to have a positive effect on her long term, having experienced all these things.

AP: Yeah, that’s a neat point too. It sounds like you and Courtney need more of a stable environment than she does because every day she’s still learning and growing, but you guys need that stability to do your job and to write and be creative every day.

AB: Absolutely. It seems to be much more important for us than it seems to be for her.

AP: You’re a fan of people doing what they want to live. In fact, you have a video series called “Do (Stuff) You Love”. Besides subscribing to your website (obviously), how can someone take the steps needed to do the things they love?

AB: Well, we had a catalyst. There are some people who are a big fan of catalysts and some who aren’t. I’m a big fan of catalysts for change. When something happens in my life, that’s a catalyst and I can use that opportunity to change my environment completely. That can lead to burn out, and in my former life I was the poster boy for burn out, but it can lead to successes.

What happened when Milligan was born, we realized we didn’t want the current life path we were on. That’s the biggest thing for us, and it might sound cliché. But you really only have one shot at this thing, depending on what your religious beliefs are. We just weren’t comfortable with the path we were on, so wanted to find a path that was still responsible but allows us to explore because we had not idea what we want to do. How could we explore more?

And I think a lot of people are in a those same shoes similar situation, and that’s why it resonates with a group of people. We didn’t just leave our house and ditch our family and travel. We wanted to clean up our finances here and pay off everything but our student loans, we’re going to organize this. We’re going to sell out stuff over the course of a year, but for the last three months we lived with a family to make that easier. Every thing was loosely planned out. And then we traveled for a year.

We’re getting ready to go back home after about a year, in March. I doubt we’ll buy the white picket fence and settle down, you know. But everything was sort of planned out. The biggest criticism I get is people saying, “Well, I couldn’t just sell everything and travel around for a year.” Well, we didn’t do that either.

We just decided that we didn’t like the path we were on, not because we hated it, but because we wanted to know our other options. If you’re on a path where you just got out of college and you’re working your way up and you’ve got the house and the car – there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. But at 24 and 25 years old, we just didn’t know what we wanted out of our lives. You know, did we want to live overseas all the time?

I could not be happier about where I came from, but on the other hand, my only experience of life has been Indiana and maybe Cancun during Spring Break. There’s so many other experiences and viewpoints out there in the world.

Pursuing this online venture and meeting people like yourself and people from all walks of life has been great. There’s no better way to get shotgun exposure than to go online, start meeting some people in communities, and then to travel and meet these people and meet these cultures in real life. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll narrow it down as time goes on, especially as Milligan gets to be school age. We’re going to settle down eventually and have a home base because we like those benefits too.

To get back to your question: Just figure out what you’re not happy with and change it. You won’t start out and just decide to be a doctor, but you might find a part of your life where you want to expand your options and get exposure to more opportunity. Maybe start a side-business or something – I don’t know what it is. Just expand your horizons and then find out what you want to do.

AP: It sounds like you set a method to discover the pathways that were there so you could really choose the one you liked.

AB: Yeah, we just needed to open up our world view was the big thing for us.

AP: So I always try to throw something in these interviews about mortality or something like that [laughter], but I forgot what I wrote. I’m just going to read it.

Getting life insurance can be tricky if you travel to other countries for long periods of time or go to the wrong countries. There are specialty markets for that sort of thing, but not even Clarifinancial is set up for people who aren’t permanent residents of USA or Canada. How did you get the international life insurance coverage your family needs or did you already have a policy in place before you knew about your globe-hoping adventures?

AB: We did have a policy already in place before we were sure we were going to leave. Then we had to renew it or something before the first of the year. We just have short-term term life insurance, is what we have right now at this young age.

I let them know and we called four different places to get quotes, and three of the four just said they couldn’t do it. I had no idea. Obviously, you know about the industry, but I had no idea. I was very surprised that no one was willing to give us the insurance just because we were planning on traveling six months to a year. Finally, the company we were with checked into some things and they said we could extend it another year.

I try to competitively shop whenever I shop. But when I called a couple other places, they were like, “No, we can’t do that.” I don’t have any awesome advice if you’re in that situation. I guess you are really going to have to shop around for that sort of life insurance, if you don’t have some plan already bought.

AP: Yeah, I actually get a decent amount of international traffic outside the US and Canada. So I actually wish I had some markets for that, or the site was set up to allow for those markets because I know they’re there.

AB: I think the biggest thing for them was were taking such an extended trip – you know up to a year. I don’t know the terminology for non-permanent resident of the US is, it might be different from company to company, but it was an issue.

AP: Right, well you did the right thing by telling the truth when you were shopping for life insurance. In fact, I’ll point to an article that explains why you shouldn’t lie on your life insurance application.

AB: That’s usually good advice. If something went wrong with a family member while they were traveling, having to deal with the repercussions of lying on your life insurance application would probably not be good.

AP: Well, thank you. It was awesome and it was great talking with you.

AB: Sure thing, it was great and I hope it really helps you, even in some small way.


[Transcription cuts off here (22 minutes). Baker and I start talking about Clarifinancial and his history selling insurance. Check out the audio if you want to hear more.]

Last week, I talked with Mark Hood, one of the survivors of the Hudson River crash about that day and if it changed his life. Check it out.