11 Truths for Older Nomads

Most of the advice about nomad life assumes a 28-year-old body, a 28-year-old budget, and nobody back home who needs you. Lisa and I have been doing this for eleven years, across 120-something countries, and I’m 65. Plenty of that advice still works. The parts that don’t are the parts that cost money, involve doctors, or show up at 3 a.m. with a family phone call.

Here’s what changes when you do this later in life.

1. It’s not always cheap.

Published nomad budgets tend to come from people sleeping in hostel dorms and eating street food. Lisa and I want our own space: an apartment or a decent hotel room, a king bed, air conditioning, and a pool. I’m happy to let her take the credit for those standards while I enjoy them.

Some parts of the world are less expensive, but Western-style comfort in a developing country is often priced in dollars. The Mandarin Oriental in Kuala Lumpur costs less than the one in New York. It isn’t cheap.

We also eat in the restaurants people are talking about, shop in the good grocery stores, and take the tours. (Can you say “helicopter”?) If you’ve waited your whole career to see a place, you’re going to want to see it properly, and that has a price tag.

The low budgets also leave out retirement. A 28-year-old can skip that line for a few years. You can’t, whether you’re still building the account or drawing it down. And if you’re drawing it down, it’s probably in dollars while your groceries are in baht or euros, so exchange rates now show up in your monthly spending.

The one economy I do practice: the rate you booked isn’t the rate you’re stuck with. Hotel prices keep moving after you reserve, and almost nobody goes back to check. I use AI to track the rates on hotels I’ve already booked, and when the price drops, I rebook.

2. Insurance is a real line item.

Look at the 28-year-old’s budget and see what’s missing:

• health insurance
• life insurance
• renters insurance (an umbrella policy usually requires underlying liability coverage)
• a personal articles floater
• non-owner automobile insurance
• an umbrella liability policy
• medical evacuation and repatriation coverage, which move you to adequate care, or home, when the provider agrees it’s needed (read what your evacuation membership actually covers)

When insurance shows up in that budget at all, it’s usually a cheap travel policy with thin coverage. You can skip the rest, but then you’re putting your assets at risk, and at our age there are more of them to lose.

Age changes the insurance itself. Travel medical plans price by age band, and many cut the maximum benefit or stop selling altogether as you get older. Pre-existing conditions, which most of us have by now, are excluded by default. Coverage for them exists only where the policy expressly grants it, usually through a waiver with conditions attached. If the application never asked about your health, assume you’re not covered.

3. Medicare stays home.

If you’re American and over 65, Original Medicare generally doesn’t pay for care outside the United States. Some Medigap plans include a foreign travel emergency benefit, and it’s small: 80 percent after a $250 annual deductible, with a $50,000 lifetime cap, for emergencies in the first 60 days of a trip. Some Medicare Advantage plans offer worldwide emergency coverage that goes further. Read the plan’s own language before you count on it, because “emergency” and “urgent care” are defined terms, and the definitions are narrow.

Either way, it’s a start on a hospital bill abroad, not a plan. You keep paying for Medicare, because dropping Part B can mean a late-enrollment penalty for life when you come back, and you buy separate coverage for everywhere else. I wrote up how we put ours together in The Medicare Stack.

4. Medical tests aren’t the same everywhere.

Testing varies a lot from country to country, and some places simply don’t have the equipment for certain tests. I get one test a year that’s only offered in the United States and a handful of other countries, so I fly back for it. Plan for that possibility.

Even if you’re healthy, you may prefer to do routine screening somewhere familiar. Colonoscopies and mammograms aren’t fun anywhere, and they’re more stressful in a language you don’t speak. The same goes for vaccines: get the shingles, pneumonia, and RSV shots your doctor recommends before a long run of travel, not halfway through it.

The flip side is real, too. Plenty of routine care abroad is faster and cheaper than at home. Last year I saw a doctor in Málaga the same afternoon for $35, a visit that would have meant a three-week wait and a $100 copay in the States. Know which kind of care you need before you decide where to get it.

5. Prescriptions are a project.

We’re all falling apart; at 65, mine is just more obvious. I wear glasses and take four prescriptions, the legacy of a heart attack at 37. Lisa takes medication too. Getting an insurer to reimburse drugs bought in another country is a hassle. Sometimes they’re so cheap we don’t bother. When they’re expensive or hard to find, expect to jump through hoops.

Mailing drugs across borders usually runs into customs and postal rules, so it isn’t the easy fix it looks like. Carry enough to bridge the gaps, keep the original labels, and carry a copy of each prescription with the generic name on it. Brand names change from country to country, and even generic names sometimes do: acetaminophen is paracetamol almost everywhere else. Carry the active ingredient and the dose. Your medication is a logistical project, and it deserves the same planning as your flights.

6. Comfort costs money, and it’s worth it.

My backpack lasted about two weeks before I gave up and bought a Rimowa carry-on with spinner wheels. The backpack’s argument is that it lets you cross rough ground on the way to the hostel. I’m rarely going anywhere I can’t roll a bag.

The same goes for the seat. I’ve flown in the back, and overnight it leaves me sore and cranky. We pay for most of our business-class seats with points, which means we skip some of the cash fare sales. Economy is tolerable a few times a year. When flying is a regular part of your life, decide how much of your body you’re willing to spend to save money.

7. See the hard places first.

This is the one I wish someone had told me. Plan your travel around the body you’ll have, not the one you have now.

Some places ask a lot of your knees, your lungs, and your balance: altitude, heat, broken pavement, steep stairs with no railing, a bus with no air conditioning. Others are built for easy walking. So do Nepal now and save Australia, with its smooth sidewalks, for later. India this year, New Zealand in twenty. The Patagonia trek now, the cruise later.

Driving belongs on the same calendar. Some rental companies cap the driver’s age, often somewhere between 70 and 75, and the limit varies by country. If a road trip is on your list, it may have a deadline you didn’t set.

Nobody gets to pick the year their mobility changes. You do get to pick the order you see the world in.

8. The family doesn’t stop needing you.

You’ll want to see your kids and grandkids. You can fly them to you, but you’ll go to them too, and that has to be built into the plan.

Parents are the other side of it. If yours are still living, there will be times they need you, sometimes urgently. The advantage of this life is that you can get anywhere quickly and stay as long as you’re needed. The cost is that someone has to be ready to drop everything, and that someone is you. Keep enough slack in the calendar, and enough refundable bookings, that a call from home doesn’t cost you a fortune.

9. Write down how everything works.

At our age, the realistic risk isn’t a lost bag. It’s that one of you gets sick or dies far from home, and the other has to run everything alone, in a foreign country, on someone else’s time zone.

Most couples split the work. One partner handles the money, the insurance, and the passwords, and if that person is suddenly gone, the other is standing in a hospital corridor in a country where they don’t speak the language, trying to remember which bank holds what. I wrote a memo for Lisa that covers all of it: accounts, policies, who to call, and what to do first. Make sure your powers of attorney and healthcare directives are current and that a copy lives somewhere both of you can reach from a phone.

10. Borders are easier, but the rules still count.

There’s a lot of talk among nomads about onward tickets, proof of funds, and hard questions at immigration. In our experience, older travelers draw less scrutiny at routine crossings, though that varies by passport, route, and history. Most countries are glad to see quiet visitors with money to spend.

Being welcome doesn’t exempt you from the rules. Schengen’s 90-days-in-180 limit applies at any age, and retirees with open calendars are exactly the people who run into it. Count your days.

Spend money on time, too. Americans should have Global Entry for coming home. Since 2019, Americans can use the UK’s eGates without enrolling in anything, though American visitors now need an Electronic Travel Authorisation before they travel. The Schengen area’s new Entry/Exit System records your fingerprints and face the first time you cross its external border, so expect that first entry to take longer.

11. Stay connected to home.

Connectivity used to be the hard part. Now it’s mostly a matter of money: an eSIM before you land, a local SIM when you’ll stay a while, and a better room or coworking space when the hotel Wi-Fi is bad. We’ve had good connections in places known for bad ones, like Laos and Myanmar, by paying for them. Islands are the exception; sometimes no amount of money fixes the connection.

The connection that matters more as you get older is the one to your US phone number. Banks, brokerages, and government websites send security codes by text. Keep that number active, keep it on a phone that’s with you, and don’t let it lapse to save a few dollars a month. Losing it can lock you out of your own money from the other side of the world. Here’s how we set up our phones, numbers, and data.

Most of what’s written about this life is useful at any age. The differences come down to bodies, money, and family, and those are exactly the things that are expensive to get wrong from 8,000 miles away.