“Travel Is the Only Thing You Buy That Makes You Richer.”
My mom and I were talking the other night and she said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. She said — you know what’s interesting about all the traveling we’ve done? We’ve never come back with less than we left with. And I thought about it for a second and I was like… yeah. That’s actually exactly right.
I want to talk about what that quote actually means. Not in a “go see the world, it’ll change your life” kind of way — I find that kind of talk a little vague. I want to talk about what it’s actually looked like for me growing up the way I have. I’m 14. My mom and I have been to 20 countries across 5 continents together. And I’ve been trying to figure out for a while how to explain what that’s done to how I think.
The Quote Gets Misread
It’s not saying travel is worth the money because of what you see. You paid for a ticket to Rome, you saw the Colosseum, that was worth the price. That’s fine but that’s not what the quote means.
It’s also not saying you need to travel to a lot of places to be a smart or interesting person. That’s not it either.
What it’s actually saying is that when you spend money on travel, something comes back with you that didn’t exist before. Something that compounds. Something that keeps giving you things long after the trip’s over. The richness it’s talking about isn’t money. It’s the way you start to see things differently. Ask different questions. Hold your assumptions a little more loosely. Notice things other people walk right past.
Five Places. Five Things That Stuck.
Kathmandu was one of the first places that made me genuinely question something I’d taken for granted. I’d grown up thinking — without really thinking it, it was just background noise — that having more things was obviously better. More stuff equals more comfort equals more happiness. And then I’m in Kathmandu looking at people who don’t have a lot by any material measure. And there’s something in how they’re moving through their day that I couldn’t quite name at first. It took me a while to figure out the word for it. It was ease. Like they weren’t carrying as much as I’d expected them to be carrying. That confused me in the best possible way. And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
You’re walking through a city that was completely alive one morning and gone by that afternoon. Bread still in the ovens. People still mid-step. It’s the strangest feeling — like time just stopped and you walked into the middle of it. I came home from Pompeii thinking about time differently. About how you’re spending yours right now. Not in a heavy way. Just in a — oh, it actually matters what you do with today — kind of way.
Mumbai was the first place that felt genuinely overwhelming. The scale, the noise, the contrast between parts of the city that existed about ten feet from each other. It was the first time I understood in my body, not just my head, how big the world actually is. And how small my version of normal actually is inside it. When your normal feels like the only normal, everything that’s different from it looks strange or wrong. But once you’ve seen enough different normals, you stop doing that as much. You get curious instead of confused.
Standing at the places the Inca built and thinking about what it took. With the tools they had. The knowledge they had. At that altitude. It recalibrates what impressive means. What people are capable of when they actually commit to something. I think about Cusco when I feel like something’s too hard. It usually isn’t.
This one might sound a little strange — Paris taught me that beauty can be a choice. That a city can be designed with intention and it changes how people feel just to exist in it. I think about that when I think about how I want to design my own life. Intentionally. With some actual care about what it looks and feels like day to day. None of that came from a class. It came from being in that place with my mom and actually paying attention.
None of It Happens Without the Money Side Being Handled
Here’s the part I always want to be honest about. Because I think it’s the part that actually matters for most people reading this.
My mom and I didn’t have some big travel budget or a special savings account just for trips. What we had was awareness. We knew where our money was going. We’d found the holes — the subscriptions, the forgotten charges, the small amounts leaking out every month that added up to something real. We’d plugged them. And we’d made sure we were always spending a little less than we had coming in.
That gap — that small space between what we earned and what we spent — is what made the travel possible. Not a big income. Not a lucky break. Just financial awareness applied consistently over time. That’s the F and the A in F.A.T.E. Financial Awareness. Applied. And the T is Travel — not as a goal you work toward. Travel as the natural result of not losing the money you already have. That’s a really different way of thinking about it. And it’s the true version of how it happened for us.
The quote says travel makes you richer. I’d add — financial awareness is what gets you there. These aren’t two separate ideas. They’re the same idea at different stages. The awareness creates the margin. The margin funds the travel. The travel builds something in you that changes how you see everything, including money. It all connects. That’s what F.A.T.E. actually is — not a framework someone invented. Just what my mom figured out over nearly a decade, and what I’ve been living inside my whole life.
Know where your money’s going. Stop losing it through holes you haven’t found yet. And use what’s left for things that actually build something in you. That’s the whole thing. That’s F.A.T.E.
This is just what worked for us. Nearly a decade of it. You can choose to do what we did.