I’d already traveled through Asia, South America, Central America, of course the US, and a few islands, but this trip was different. It was next level and I would have put money on it that it changed me from the core and it did

There were so many moments that I really caught myself breathing, taking it in, being present, and wanting to seal in this moment in my brain like a branding. I didn’t want to forget.

But it was a week before we were due to return to California that that feeling started to creep in. It’s so subtle. It’s like an itch, an irritant. Scratching it isn’t enough because you’re not actually getting to it and then it moves. Plus, I’m busy, right? Busy packing, getting ready and making arrangements so I don’t really have the time to focus on it but it’s noticeable enough.

Days pass and we’re getting closer and closer to coming back and my breathing has changed. Fear sets in. Fear that very soon this will all be a distant memory, that I will forget how I lived all these weeks and I will fall back into those habits and patterns and routines that made me sick in the first place. I definitely didn’t want that.

We arrived back in the U.S. and within 48 hours my throat was tight. I didn’t know if I was having a panic attack, a heart attack, or just heartburn. I was frustrated and angry.

My peace was disrupted.

For a moment, however brief that moment was, the thought crept into my head: “You know what you could do, Brandi, and then you wouldn’t have to feel this way.” That voice I was very familiar with.

There have been times in my life when that voice was louder than anything external. I heard it while I slept. I heard it during the day. I heard it in between tears. Here I was, two days out of an amazing eleven-week adventure, a life-changing adventure, and I could hear it again. It never left. It was just muted but in such a beautiful way I couldn’t hear it because I was living. I was enjoying my life. I was soaking it in.

Every part of me wishes I was back there, because how I feel right now does not feel good. I’m reaching for tools and things to help make it better but I know I just have to move through it because 11 weeks of traveling through Europe, the UK, and Africa was not the solution. It was merely a very expensive band-aid. It wasn’t always this way.

I could say it was two years of living through a pandemic that did it. I could say it’s a decade of running on fumes, of hustling and building and disappointment and burning things down and starting over. I could say it’s from a childhood of growing up in a home with a severely ill parent, another parent deep into substance abuse, volatile, high stress, and always on survival mode. Learning how to parent myself while parenting a parent at the same time. I could say it’s generational and epigenetics and something I just couldn’t escape, but honestly I don’t know.

All I know for sure right now is that I have traveled all around the world and the depression is real. The thoughts are real. Our second day back and I learned of another celebrity who took her life. It was so fitting because this was the hardest day for me and I thought, as I always think when I hear these stories, what was the turning point for them? What was so bad that this was the day? That moment that they went forward, that they responded to the voice and said, “Okay.”

How will that moment be for me? Will I have that moment? How close am I to it? I feel like I’ve teetered on this edge for a long time. Is it just a matter of time?

This all sounds very depressing but I want to show people that the thing we always say, “external things don’t fix the core problem” — is actually true. This is as real as it gets.

Mental illness, mental health is more than a mindset switch. It’s more than just the body. It’s all of it together. It’s also something that doesn’t end when the trip is over or when the trip begins. It’s constant. There were moments during the trip when I was sad and not sad for the same reasons but sad becuase I felt so good right in that moment. What if this doesn’t last?

The loop is real. The damned if you do and damned if you don’t is constant.

I don’t know what the solution is. But I know what’s next. I’m calling 988, just to talk to someone, no big production. And I’m calling my doctor about a referral. It doesn’t mean I failed. It just means I need backup again.

If you’re in this loop with me right now, reading this at your own 2am, that’s your permission too. Call the person. Make the appointment. You don’t have to move through this alone.

I’m with you,

Brandi

You know that moment when your GPS says “recalculating” because you took a wrong exit?

It doesn’t panic. It doesn’t send you back to the driveway. It just quietly finds a new way there.

I wish we gave ourselves that same grace.

Every January, we go in, create a sacred space and draw a map.

“This is the year I finally leave the 9 to 5. This is the year I se…

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Somewhere right now, a woman is sitting in a break room, scrolling through photos of a beach in Portugal, or a sweet little cafe in Paris, thinking “must be nice.”

It’s not luck. It’s not nice. It’s a decision she made on a random Tuesday.

This is why we started, Well Traveled to conver the things everyone else skips because it’s not sexy: th…

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Traveling the world full-time at sixty-nine is not easy. It hurts. My knees are primed for replacement. I am in pain more often than I’m not.

And it is still one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life

.

I’m not going to pretend this is effortless, because that would be a lie, and I didn’t bui…

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Same city, same four walls, same “someday” I kept promising myself while the someday-fund stayed at zero. I wasn’t unhappy in a dramatic way. I was just... done pretending “stable” and “alive” were the same thing.

Here’s what nobody tells you about starting over at 44: you don’t feel ready. You feel scared, slightly ridiculous, and about a decade behind some imaginary schedule for when you’re supposed to have your life figured out. I felt all of that. I started anyway.

I didn’t have a map for this. I built one as we went — and two years later, we’ve saved over $100K, traveled to 14+ countries, 5 states, and 5 continents, and right now I’m writing this from a house sit in Delft with a dog named Lyra asleep by my feet.

If you’re standing where I was — good news, here’s actually how it works:

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San Diego, 2-bedroom, 1-bath: roughly $3,000 a month. That’s not the “OMG WOW” apartment. That’s just... an apartment. $36,000 a year, gone, before you’ve bought a single grocery, filled the car with gas, or done anything that actually resembles living.

Now here’s the number that changes everything: our rent right now…

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That’s the question I’ve been sitting with.

Not because I don’t know what to build. Because I don’t know what to build for anymore.

For years the compass was achievement. Revenue. Growth. The next launch, the next milestone, the next thing that would finally make me feel like I’d arrived.

I’m in a…

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Eight months before I said yes to a new way of living, I wrote something in my notebook. “Make my life a masterpiece. I only get one canvas.”— E.A. Bucchianeri

I wrote it down. Then I kept living the same way I had been living.

Because that’s what we do. We collect the truth. We write it down. We let it sit on the page while we go back to everything we ha…

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How long can I keep going like this?

When is life going to look different?

When will I ever have the money to see more of the world?

When will I get off this hamster wheel?

When will I finally be able to rest and catch my breath?

Every day felt heavier than th…

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Nobody tells you that the hardest part of this life isn’t the leaving. It’s the landing.

You spend months dreaming about Lisbon, or Oaxaca, or that little town in the south of France. And then you actually arrive jet-lagged, sweaty, dragging a suitcase over cobblestones, holding a phone with no signal and a tiny voice goes: what have I done.

…

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Here’s the thing almost nobody in our world connects:

You already know how to house sit for free. There’s a whole quiet market that will pay you $1,000–$2,500 a month to do the exact same thing.

Wait — people get PAID to house sit?

Yes. We use platforms like TrustedHousesitters to swap our pet-and-plant care for free stays. Beautiful. But that’s the entry level.

One rung up is paid property caretaking — looking after estates, ranches, farms, vacation homes, retreat centers, even private islands while the owners are away. Same skills you already have. The owner just hands you a check on top of the free roof.

The numbers are real, not hype:

• Longer caretaking commitments (a month or more) commonly pay $500 to $2,500+ on top of free housing.

• The average U.S. live-in property caretaker earns around $3,300/month.

• Gigs exist in all 50 states, Canada, Mexico, and dozens of countries.

Your $1,000/month is sitting on the low end of this. That’s how doable it is.

This type of content and more is LOVED by our paid community - if you’re ready to live like a local and travel the world rent free sign up and become a Boujee Nomad too. We can’t wait to have you inside

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Standing in the middle of a "must-see" European city, surrounded by a thousand other people all doing the exact same thing, taking the exact same photo, eating at the exact same café that showed up on the exact same algorithm — it doesn't feel like travel. It feels like a theme park.…

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I remember sitting there thinking:

That will not be me.

I don’t want to reach the end of my life and realize I spent decades living someone else’s version of it.

But here’s the truth I didn’t want to admit at the time.

I didn’t know how to fix it.

I didn’t know how to stop the life I was living from becoming the life I would…

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Hey gorgeous.

Welcome to Well Traveled — the newest editorial from The Boujee Nomads.

Every Saturday edition is free. But if you want the deeper playbook on digital nomad life, come sit with us as a paid subscriber — that’s where the real detail lives.

Because we have so much to share that never makes the highlight reel.

N…

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If you know, you know. It’s the number that makes you stop. The one that shows up on the clock, the receipt, the license plate ahead of you in traffic — the universe’s way of leaning in and whispering, pay attention. You’re exactly where you’re meant to be.

So I paid attention. I sat with my coffee and let it land: eleven hundred and eleven human b…

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Let me paint it for you.

The first morning, I woke up to a call to prayer drifting over the rooftops, the sky that impossible shade of rose it only seems to turn here. The smell of mint and orange blossom and something cooking three doors down. I stepped out onto the rooftop terrace with my Moroccan coffee and just… stood there. Heart wide open. And I thought: this is what being alive is supposed to feel like.

We’ve wandered the souks until we were gloriously lost — a maze of color and spice and lanterns and voices, where every turn is a small adventure and nobody’s checking the time. (By the way, they’re designed to disorientate you.) We’ve shared tagine with strangers who became friends by the end of the meal. We’ve sat on rooftops at golden hour watching a city that has been alive for a thousand years go about its evening, and felt so impossibly small and so impossibly free all at once.

Life-changing isn’t an exaggeration. I mean it.

And here’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about, the thing I have to say to you directly:

You were not built to live small.

Somewhere along the way, the world handed you a script. Do the right things. Stay in the lane. Want the things you’re supposed to want. Be grateful for the life that looks fine on paper. And maybe you’ve followed it beautifully — and maybe, in the quiet moments, there’s still that whisper. There has to be more than this.

There is. I’m standing in the middle of it.

Stepping outside the box isn’t reckless. It isn’t selfish. It isn’t too late. It’s the most honest thing a woman can do — to look at the life everyone else got comfortable with and say, I’m allowed to want something that’s actually mine.

But I’ll be just as honest with you: the whisper doesn’t wait forever. The women who end up here on the rooftop, lost in the souk, fully alive, are the ones who finally stopped waiting for permission and acted. Not someday. Now.

If something in you is leaning toward the screen right now, I don’t think that’s an accident.

This is why I created the Freedom Blueprint Session.

Because wanting a different life and knowing how to build one are two very different things — and most women get stuck in the gap between them.

The Freedom Blueprint is a 90-minute deep dive where we decode your energetic blueprint, align it with what your soul actually came here to do, and map a real, personalized roadmap for your next chapter. Whether that’s a career pivot, a slower and more intentional life, or the freedom to wake up in a city like this one and call it home.

This isn’t generic life coaching. It isn’t a surface-level reading. It’s your design, your next chapter — built around the woman you’re becoming, not the one you’ve outgrown.

If Marrakech is stirring something in you… if you’ve felt that restless pull while reading this… let’s turn it into a plan.

👉 [Book your Freedom Blueprint Session here] — and let’s design the next chapter you actually want to live.

The world will always tell you to wait. I’m telling you it’s time.

With love from Marrakech,

Brandi 🤍🌍

In middle America, a “stable lifestyle” runs about $2,800 to $3,200 a month. And before you picture oat milk lattes and avocado toast — no. That number is healthcare. Rent. Groceries. Getting to work and back. The lights staying on.

That’s it. That’s the whole list.

No vacations. No “treat yoursel…

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A gorgeous home in San José, Costa Rica. Lush garden. Beautiful pets. The kind of sit that makes you pinch yourself and whisper this is actually our life.

We settled in, found the WiFi password on the little card the homeowners left us, typed it in and that was it. We were connected. Emails loaded. Instagram refreshed. Work continued.

What we didn’t ask (what nobody in the house sitting world talks about) is what we actually just connected to.

Not just the internet.

A network.

Someone else’s network. With their devices. Their router. Their history. And potentially, their access to ours.

The moment we found out the truth, we immediately got a VPN. And we’ve never sat without one since.

Here’s what we learned and what most house sitters are completely ignoring right now.

The feeling of safety is the actual danger.

Hotel WiFi feels sketchy, so you’re cautious. You know you’re on a shared network with strangers.

But home WiFi? It feels private. Trusted. Cozy.

That feeling is exactly what makes it risky.

When you connect to a homeowner’s network, you’re also connecting alongside their smart TV. Their security cameras. Their baby monitor. Their kid’s gaming console. Every device that has ever been given that WiFi password ~ the cleaner, the neighbours, the previous house sitter, the dog walker from 2022.

You don’t know when that router was last updated. You don’t know who else is quietly on that network. And you don’t know that the router is likely logging every website destination your devices visit.

Not your passwords. But the map of your digital life.

Which health sites you visited. Which financial platforms you logged into. Which communities you belong to online.

All of it. Sitting in a log. Whether anyone ever looks at it or not.

We’re Brandi and Sandra — a daughter and mum team who have been full-time international house sitters for years, saving $40K+ annually while living in beautiful homes across the world. If you’re new here — welcome, love. This is the real stuff we wish someone had told us.

🔒 This is where it gets good — and where most people stop reading

The full breakdown — what to actually DO about it — is below for paid subscribers.

Including:

• The two VPN settings most people never turn on (one of them protects you even when your VPN drops)

• The one conversation to have with every homeowner before you unpack (takes 2 minutes and changes everything)

• The smart speaker situation nobody wants to talk about

• The exact 8-step security checklist we now run through at every single sit

• Plus — how to get 25% off TrustedHouseSitters, the platform we use to find our sits worldwide

If you’re a house sitter, an Airbnb regular, or anyone who connects to WiFi they didn’t set up themselves — this is for you.

[Upgrade to read the full guide]

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Most Women Don’t Need A Bigger Business

They need one simple stream of income that makes life feel lighter.

Something that helps cover bills. Reduces pressure. Creates options. Something that doesn’t require showing up every single day.

Because freedom doesn’t usually start with six figures.

It starts with your first $1,000.

The first proof. The first moment you realize — oh. I can actually do this.

And here’s the truth most women don’t want to hear: you already have what you need to create it. You’re just overcomplicating it.

You think you need a huge audience, a complicated funnel, a giant course, perfect branding, more certifications.

You don’t.

You need one thing. One specific problem you can solve. That’s it.

The best digital products are simple. One problem. One solution. One clear result. Not ten modules, not 47 bonuses, not a six month mastermind.

Simple sells. Because people buy clarity.

✨ Want to see exactly how we built ours? The Location Freedom Blueprint walks you through the whole thing, one clear path, one purchase, lifetime access. $47 gets you in right here.

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