Sell the house, live out of an RV, move abroad, homeschool the kids, run the business from wherever the wifi works. You have said it out loud to a few people, and the pauses told you what they think.
The fear is not the logistics. You could figure out the mail and the insurance. The fear is that everyone you respect thinks you have lost your mind, and the question quietly stops being ‘what if this fails’ and becomes ‘what if they stop seeing me as someone worth taking seriously.’
There is another one under it: that the life you have is just how life is. Same Monday, same meetings, same commute. It does not feel like fear. It feels like being realistic. But the walls are painted on. You have a passport, a credit card, and the legal right to go almost anywhere, and most people never try the handle.
I know this one from the inside. In 2017 I sold most of what I owned, bought an RV, and spent fifteen months crossing 48 states, my wife navigating. People who loved me thought I was in crisis. This firm was built from that rig, and the first book came out of it. My kids are growing up bilingual between two countries, and I homeschool. None of it was reckless. All of it went through the same four questions I will hand you below.
The spreadsheet is not the decision, but it should be in the room; these four put honest numbers under the parts people shout about.
Your current spending, your destination cost, your time horizon: it shows what moving somewhere cheaper is actually worth and what the savings compound to if you invest them, and it does not pretend the math is the whole decision.
If selling the house is part of the plan, run both modes; honest mode puts back the realtor’s cut at sale and the opportunity cost of your down payment, and shows how violently the answer swings with how long you stay.
Leaving an employer plan before 65 opens a coverage gap; this compares COBRA, the ACA marketplace with subsidy, and HSA paths, and shows how much your planned income moves the cost.
Walk-Away Money is the number where you could leave the job today and float at your current lifestyle; if a cheaper life lowers that lifestyle cost, watch how much closer the number gets.
Four Field Manual pages, each one a rule for the part of this decision that is about identity rather than money.
This is the exact test I ran before wiring a deposit on an unbuilt condo in another country during a pandemic; it interrogates your own overconfidence as hard as it discounts the crowd’s fear.
Draw the system holding you where you are, the forces, the exits, what blocks each one, so you can see whether the wall is real or painted.
The house, the city, the career track: ask whether you would choose each one again today with no memory of how you got there, and let the honest answer sit for a full minute.
If part of what holds you is the title, the office, or the zip code, this is where you find out whether you could deliver your work without them; I run a practice with no office at all, and the answer is more often yes than people expect.
Worst realistic case with a dollar figure on it, whether you can survive it, the upside, the asymmetry. A catastrophe with numbers on it is just a scenario.
Cost of living at the destination, housing both ways, the healthcare gap, taxes across states or countries, and how the business or the income travels with you. The gap is real, and so is what it costs you.
A cash buffer, a review date, and the conditions under which you would come back. Written now, so the first hard month does not get to make the decision for you.
Half-day $750, full-day $1,500, no minimum, by video from anywhere or in person on limited RV tour dates, credited toward any later engagement; the full day is built for transitions like a geographic move or a career pivot.
If you want someone to validate the move without pushback, or you are running from a problem that will travel with you, this will not be comfortable. Sometimes the four questions come back with fewer than four yeses, and I will say so.
Often yes, but by less than the cost-of-living sites claim; those single-number headlines are almost always too rosy. The Geographic Arbitrage calculator takes your current spending, destination cost, and horizon and shows what the move is worth, including what the savings compound to if invested. I spend significant time in Playa del Carmen because a thoughtful, minimalist life there costs roughly half what the same life costs in the U.S., and that number is part of my own plan, not a theory.
Yes. Maryland is the regulatory home, most client work happens by video, and the firm offers advisory services in other states where exempted. I split time between Maryland and Mexico myself, and in-person sessions happen on RV tour dates and for clients who want them.
$750 for a half day (2 to 3 hours, one or two big clarity questions) or $1,500 for a full day (4 to 6 hours, the wider picture of life, work, relationships, and money, with a first draft of a plan structure). No minimum, in person or virtual, and the fee is fully credited toward any later engagement.
Run the calculators first; they are free and they do not ask for your email. If the numbers raise more questions than they answer, that is what the conversation is for.