Why We Ditched the American Dream to Travel the World With Our Kids

Why We Ditched the American Dream to Travel the World With Our Kids

Like if we really can work from anywhere, like 
let’s go try something. Let’s go let’s go try Paris. Let’s go try London. Let’s go try like 
Hong Kong. If you had the ability to work from anywhere, what would you be willing to give up 
to see the world? That was the exact question we asked ourselves nearly 3 years ago when we went 
through what we call our quarter life crisis. We looked around at the ripe age of 25 and saw 
that we had our house, two cars, a trailer to play with. We had steady jobs. We were out of 
school. We had dogs. We had kids on the way. We felt like we had accomplished everything that 
we would want to have in our life at such a young age. We thought the only way the only place to go 
from here is just to be straight plateauing. And so we decided that we can’t be stuck here forever. 
We’ve got to take take our lives into our hands and choose how we want to live it. Yeah. I was 
just at work one day on like a random Tuesday and Kyle called me at noon and was like, “I work from 
home.” Like, “Yeah, you do. Are you home right now?” And he just said, “But why? Why are we home? 
Like, if we really can work from anywhere, like let’s go try something. Let’s go. Let’s go try 
Paris. Let’s go try London. Let’s go try like Hong Kong.” Anyway, it just sparked. I could I could 
hear it in his voice over the phone. He’s on to something. He’s He’s really excited about it and I 
just gotta I got to get on board and get excited, too. Why not? So, this Yeah, this is with our 
first baby on the way. So, and she was born and nine months later we packed up our house, rented 
everything out and set off for Europe for a year, not really knowing when we’d come back. Wow. We 
bought oneway tickets. Bought one-way tickets. Um, and that that decision changed everything for 
us. That year was the most incredible year of both of either of our lives. Um, we saw so much, 
experienced so very much, and just fell in love with this idea of being a digital nomad family. 
So, welcome. We’re the Dream Journey family. I’m Bailey and this is Kyle. And we’re coming to you 
from our home state of Utah. We live minimalist lives and occasionally rent out our home so 
that we can become a digital nomad family. And today we’re going to be talking to you 
about how we downsized our American dream to travel the world. You’re taught at a very young 
age that the American dream is to go to school, get a job, get a house, get a family, have lots 
of cars, you know, have lots of space and toys, and then life will be really happy. And to be 
fair, that is not a bad life. Kyle and I are very blessed. We’ve come from extremely loving and 
supportive families. Both of our families grew up on the same street, so we had nice homes and 
plenty of green space to run around. Our families gave us every opportunity we ever asked for. And 
we are just so blessed and lucky to have had them. And you know what? Times have changed a little 
bit where that dream is still there, but it’s getting a bit harder to obtain, especially as a 
with upcoming generations. And so the American dream is something that Kyle and I had embedded 
into us that we really were excited to create in our own family. But as we were obtaining it 
little by little, we realized just how long and how much this would take from us to make it 
a reality. And so though that dream is gold, it is amazing. Is what we want for our family, 
we realize it doesn’t have to be super sized. It doesn’t have to be the biggest house, the biggest 
yard, the biggest car, the nicest cars even, as evident by our car that is older, almost as old 
as we are. I think Oh, yeah. It’s not quite older. Not quite. Yeah. Pushing 20 years, though. I tell 
you that. And we just felt like we can still have this dream, but let’s downsize it. Yeah. One 
thing we decided early on in our marriage is that we wanted experiences, not things. Um, and 
so do more, not have more. Yep. We wanted to do more and not have more. And that’s where travel 
just fits in beautifully. So that’s what led us to our breaking point, the quarter life crisis that 
we talked about here at the start of our video. this this is the moment where we decided, you 
know what, it’s time to act on these feelings, you know, and and let’s let’s really make this a 
foundation of our family. Uh to prioritize travel over just accumulating things. So, again, right 
out of college, we bought our very first house and it was our it was a starter home. It’s well below 
average sized, about 1,600 square ft, built in the 50s and needs a lot of love. Um that’s a nice way 
to put it. Yeah. But we we love it. so much and it’s brought it’s brought us a lot of joy in the 
end and and heartache as well. But for us it was always that first stepping stone and we were kind 
of always talking about the next step. You know where where are we going to move to next? you know 
what what’s our big next bigger house going to look like and looking around after Reese was born 
we began to notice hey you know what this actually might work for us and we’ve got two kids now and 
it’s still working for us really well and we’re thinking of really making it our our lifelong 
home. We began to realize as we were traveling Europe just how ridiculous the home sizes are 
here in the US. Um, we live in the American West and the average home size is well over 2500 square 
feet, which is abnormally huge and not realistic, especially in today’s world where home prices 
have really skyrocketed. So, we’ve decided, you know what, let’s just let’s just be happy with 
what we have and and see how we can make it work for us. Um, and again, as you travel the world, 
you begin to see just how much we have. You know, I spent two years living in South America, and 
most of the folks there, their houses aren’t bigger than a twocar garage, and they have, 
you know, huge families all crammed into a, you know, single one-bedroom home. And they make 
it work. They’re very content and very happy. And of course, they’d I’m sure they’d like more space. 
Who wouldn’t? But we figured, you know what? If we could really if we could really optimize our 
income and rather than spending it on our space, let’s spend it on experiences, I think. And 
and and up to this point, that’s made us very happy. So, the American dream, we’ve loved it, 
we want it, but we’re going to downsize it. So, things that we’ve done, some practical steps 
that we’ve taken are things like commit to using one car. We have an extra bedroom and an 
extra bathroom that our kids don’t really need. uh we have them share a room so that we can 
rent out this extra space to traveling nurses and students doing studies abroad or semesters 
um away from their colleges. We have um our home looks like a yard sale came and dumped their 
leftovers inside and we’re totally okay with that. We buy used clothes, we buy used furniture 
and and we love it because it’s what we have, not because it’s what it’s not as nice as what 
someone else has. Um, and so that’s what we’ve done to save a little extra pocket change so that 
we can say we’re going to do more rather than have more. We’re going to go travel. We’re going to go 
have experiences as a family and then come home to our lovable shoe box of a house. A lot of this 
inspiration came from one of our stays while we were traveling abroad that first year. Uh, we were 
in Bristol in England and it was June. It was a really nice time of year to be in England. And uh 
we found this amazing place to stay on Airbnb. It was someone’s home, a young woman. Uh she decided 
to go sailing. She just packed up her clothes as all and then let us come into her home. So we got 
to use everything in her everyday life and just kind of step into the life that she had created. 
She was incredible. She did. She had upcycled and and secondhand furniture all around us. Her 
books, her cool vinyl CDs, her plants, like everything gave it a very authentic and very like 
I live in the moment vibe. Even in her kitchen, she didn’t have a microwave, which at first was 
so difficult for me. It was all about fast and quick meals. And we just it was really inspiring. 
She was she really taught us that you can make a beautiful life like aesthetically just by living 
a simple clean life. Um your things don’t have to be new for them to be loved. And so we came home 
and decided that that’s we can create that in our own home which is even like twice as big as hers 
was but we fit just fine there too. Yeah. And to be honest it can be kind of tough sometimes. Like 
we’re at the age now where our friends are kind of moving on from their starter homes and we’ve 
been to a few of them and they’re nice, you know, and they’ve they’ve they’ve moved on from the 
little tiny shoe boxes and here we are thinking, “Oh, man. Hold on tight cuz this might be what 
we’re what we’re riding out for the rest of it.” Yeah. And I think, you know, and we’re okay with 
that. Yep. And we’re happy for them. Yep. And we’re happy for them, too. Yeah. They’re They seem 
happy. Yep. They’re following their own dream. So, so that brings us to now. Um, we are two weeks 
away from leaving back to Europe. Um, we’re going to be traveling for the next 3 months uh through 
Slovenia, Croatia, Portugal, and France. Um, and we’re excited to take you along with us. 
Subscribe if you haven’t already. We’ve got some great videos coming over the next few weeks. We 
hope to produce this podcast series once a week, and we’ll be releasing those on Fridays as we’re 
going through all their our travels. But here we are over the next six months. We’ve rented out our 
house again. Europe for the next three months and beyond that. We’ll see where the wind takes us. 
And uh we cannot wait. We’re nervous. I’m nervous. We’ve done that. We’ve been on through this all 
before. Um but every time before a big trip like this where you we’ve packed everything up um and 
we’re we’re living out of carryons for the next while, it’s it’s hard. Like this is not the easy 
route with kids. This is not the easy thing to do. But boy is it worth it. Um, travel for us, I 
mean, it is maximum thrills per minute. Just the most pure form of living. It really is just 
our favorite thing to do. So, I’m excited. I’m excited more than anything. And we realize just 
how lucky we are to be able to have the resources to do this. We know that not everybody can just 
or has a job flexible enough that allows them to go travel the world or has the resources um to 
be able to do that. But we what we do hope is to offer at least an outline of of some possible 
things you can do to travel and see more um using the resources that have been given you. So for me 
it was a light bulb moment right when I realized hey we could really actually make this work. I 
I knew that there was there was nothing that was going to stop us but it it was Bailey wasn’t so 
easily convinced. Yeah. I I hadn’t really captured the vision yet. And for me, pregnant with my first 
child and currently at the time working, I was not sure if it was going to work. I thought like we 
have no idea what it’s like to have kids. We have no idea what it’s going to mean. Like how do we 
take them take our kid to health care appointments and how do we make sure we can afford, you know, 
their the things that they’ll need on the go, let alone at home? Like what about don’t they need 
all these things? So, they need the changing table and the crib and don’t I need the, you know, 
all the fancy mom tools and have babysitters all the time? Like, don’t I need this help? And 
though I do, and I I did then, and I still do, and I’m very grateful for the many resources that 
we do have, it was it was scary. I wasn’t totally on board. And it it didn’t seem like an easy uh 
life to live with with our kids. Yeah. And there’s there’s so much to unpack here, and we realize 
that. So, please, if you have any questions for us, we’d love to hear them. Please leave them down 
in the comments below. We’d love to answer them in future videos and start a community. We would love 
to get to know some of you who also have desires to travel or maybe have hesitations. Share those 
with us as well because maybe we’ve had the same hesitations and we can know to share um what we’ve 
done to overcome them uh with you through these videos. And it would also help us to prevent 
future roadblocks as well to hear maybe some advice that you have regarding traveling with kids 
who are of school age. I just I’ve got to share um this moment that we had in Greece. We rented a car 
and drove the Pelpeneisian Peninsula and we were in the the city of Naflio. We were sitting at an 
old church overlooking the city with a castle up on the hill and it was just this beautiful sunset 
and I was reflecting on our time that we had there in Greece and in Europe as a whole. And here’s 
what I wrote in my journal. After being immersed in history, having seen thousands of years 
of civilizations pass before my mind’s eye, I’m reminded that time passes too quickly and that 
these moments with our girl will disappear all too soon and that we will miss them profoundly. We 
we know what the most important thing in life is. And for us, it’s spending time with our 
girls and making as many memories with them as possible before they grow up and are gone. 
I mean, it is already happening too fast. They are just they’re just growing up so quick. And I 
just want to grasp onto every moment that we get with them and traveling and living minimally like 
we do. I think it gives us the chance to do that. So today we’ve talked about the American dream, 
what it meant to us, and how we’ve chosen to downsize that dream, where our breaking point 
happened, steps we’ve chosen to take to live a life at home that allows us to be able to 
leave our home and travel with our kids. Um, as well as talk about some hesitations that we’ve 
had and how we’ve overcome them. We again open up our comments to you. We want to connect with you. 
We want to learn more about our audience and where you’re from and what you’d like to do with your 
family, with your lives, and build a a community together. Thanks for watching. We’re so excited 
to start these podcast videos with you. And as always, dream big and enjoy the journey. Nice. 
Nailed it. That was fun. That was really fun.

What would you give up to travel the world with your kids? Three years ago, we downsized our American Dream—selling our home, leaving behind routines, and choosing a minimalist lifestyle—to become a digital nomad family. In this video, we share the real story of how we made family travel possible, what we gave up, and what we’ve gained along the way.

Thank you for watching! Journey along with us by subscribing, we appreciate your supporting our channel.

As always, dream big and enjoy the journey!
– Kyle and Bailey

Dream // Journey

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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
02:20 The American Dream
03:50 The Breaking Point
06:23 Downsizing
09:06 Why Travel?