When we announced our plan to travel full-time, after the initial “where are you going?”, the next most common question was “how do you even do that?” Fair question. This post describes the Financial Stack of tools we use to manage our finances while living out of Airbnbs across multiple countries.
We bank with Chase exclusively. One checking account where everything flows through. We choose to pay for Chase Private Client ($35/mo) in order to have a dedicated Account Manager we can call at any time and much higher limits on money movement and remote check deposit. Could we squeeze out an extra 0.5% APY by spreading cash across a bunch of Neo Banks? Probably. But the added complexity simply isn’t worth it to us. Chase is internationally recognized, with branches all over the world. And we like the peace of mind.
The checking account is our operating hub — deposits, if any, land here, credit card bills get paid from here, and we keep enough of a buffer that we never think about timing. Approximately 4-6x per year, we move money from our Fidelity accounts as needed to pay our our credit card bills.
This is where most of our actual spending happens, and we’ve optimized for three things: points, zero foreign transaction fees, and airport lounge access.
My wife carries a Chase Sapphire Preferred. I carry two cards: a Chase Sapphire Reserve and a Capital One Venture X. All three waive foreign transaction fees, which is non-negotiable when you’re swiping in foreign currencies. All of these cards rewarded us with big sign up points bonuses. I hate that I have to play this game but we travel often enough that it’s useful to play the points game for the occasional business class ticket on longer flights.
The real unlock, though, is lounge access. Between the Sapphire Reserve and the Venture X, we get Priority Pass memberships that cover most major airports. When you’re traveling as much as we are, having a quiet place to sit, charge devices, and grab a meal between flights isn’t a luxury — it’s infrastructure.
One note on strategy: my wife will be opening the same cards as me in her name when we return to the U.S. later this year. The welcome bonuses alone will fund a meaningful chunk of our 2027 travel.
Our brokerage accounts live at Fidelity, including our IRAs and a separate LLC brokerage account that is our big nest-egg and the engine of our retirement. Don’t read too much into the LLC brokerage account; it’s a holdover from a time we thought we might own more real estate and wanted some legal separation between our assets. A personal brokerage account works just fine.
Regarding asset allocation, we are use a conservative Barbell Strategy: 95% in boring index funds, 5% in riskier investments. 95% of our investments are in low-cost, broad market index funds, with a 12 month cash buffer held in SPAXX (Fidelity Money Market Fund) to avoid selling in a downturn. We’re partial to VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF), VXUS (Vanguard International Index ETF), and BND (Vanguard Bond Index ETF). The riskier 5% is in more speculative individual stocks and some Bitcoin.
We make annual Roth IRA contributions and have been running a Roth conversion strategy to take advantage of low-income years — a common FIRE tactic that converts pre-tax dollars to post-tax at favorable rates. This is also where establishing residency in a no-income-tax state (Washington) makes an enormous difference. We’ll save thousands on state taxes that Oregon would have claimed. Within 5 years we will have converted all of our Traditional IRA’s holdings to our Roth IRA’s and will pay zero taxes when we eventually start drawing on them.
For a deeper dive on the strategic side, I wrote about our AI-powered wealth manager setup earlier this year — it’s how we handle quarterly reviews, asset allocation, and estate planning without needing to pay a human advisor.
We use Origin to track everything. The cost is ~$99/year but I think right now you can sign up for $1/yr. Origin aggregates all our accounts — Chase, Fidelity, credit cards — into a lovely net worth and spending dashboard. No spreadsheets, no manual entry, no arguing about who spent what on tacos.
Once a month we open Origin together, scan the categories, and make sure our spending roughly aligns with our safe withdrawal rate. That’s the extent of our budgeting. We don’t track line items or set monthly caps. The SWR sets the guardrail; Origin tells us if we’re drifting.
We recently sold our house to make this dream happen. No mortgage, no property tax, no homeowners insurance, no surprise plumbing disasters. Our only housing expense now is whatever Airbnb we’re in. This allows us to hunker down for the holidays near family, and up and leave whenever we want with few logistics to organize other than choosing our next Airbnb.
One minor complexity is around receiving mail. While we are using my parents’ house in Washington as our primary residency, it would be burdensome for them to be manage our mail. So we setup a mailing address using Post Scan Mail — they receive our mail, scan the envelope, and we decide whether to shred, forward, or open and scan the contents. We spend $10/mo for this service and the convenience is incredible. Between Post Scan Mail and going paperless on everything, mail has been a non-issue.
Every piece of this stack was chosen for the same reason: it simplifies our life. Bills auto-pay from the Chase account. Cards work in every country. Origin surfaces problems without us hunting for them. The quarterly AI wealth manager review catches the strategic stuff we would otherwise miss.