4 May 2026
What Indonesia changed about our plan
We left with a clear goal. Two months later that goal was no longer the same.
When we left we had a plan: find a place in Portugal, live small, grow as much of our own food as we could. That plan was almost set in our heads.
In September ‘24 we went to Indonesia and Malaysia. We stayed longer than planned. And somewhere in those weeks we noticed the plan starting to shift.
Why it shifted
It wasn’t about Portugal. It was that we discovered how much we learned from places we knew nothing about. Food we didn’t know. Ways of living together we’d only read about.
[Add a moment here that stayed with you.]
What that has to do with money
More than we thought. Buying a house in Portugal means committing: money, time, place. As long as we kept travelling, everything stayed open. That asks for a different way of handling money, because there’s no fixed sum to work towards.
So we started calculating differently. Not “how much do we need for a house”, but “how much do we need per month to keep this going”. That number was lower than we expected, and it gave us room to breathe.
[Add here how you work that out now.]