“The best thing about doing it on a budget is that it enables you to connect with people,” said Logothetis. And there’s a new crop of startups aimed at helping people test out the digital nomad lifestyle before fully committing.
Couch surfing is one way to find free lodging, as are volunteer programs that provide food and housing in exchange for work. While Logothetis doesn’t advise everyone to hit the road without any money, traveling on a shoestring is within reach for many. Budget travel isn’t just good for your wallet.
“Social media is a beautiful thing, but it's easy to manufacture what you want people to think of how you're doing.” 6. “I don't want anyone to think that it's all hunky-dory, because it's not,” said Logothetis.
The rewards are so great if you get it right, and if you get it wrong, you go back to work.” to lose that opportunity when you feel like there was this momentum to shift the way you live your life. “It forced me to say, you know what, whatever the risks may be, it is more risky for me to sit here and live another person's life,” he said. Making a big change is a risk, but doing nothing is also a risk.Īre you unhappy at work, and constantly shutting down an inner voice urging you to see the world? Logothetis recently advised a friend: "Do you want to look back when you're 90 and think to yourself: You had this urge to go out and live you had this urge to go out and travel, but you never did it?”įor him, pain was the motivating factor. He added, “The most important thing is what you give to another human being and what you give to yourself: how you treat others and how you treat yourself.” 2. “I could lose all of my money,” he said, “and if I did lose all of my money, and I started to be mean to people because of it, then everything I've done in the past decade was pointless." “I felt very alone, very depressed, (with) no real sense of purpose … I felt like I was living someone else’s life.”Īnd you don’t need money to be kind. “I was wearing a mask, as many of us do,” he said. As someone who worked in finance, Logothetis appeared to have everything he could possibly want, but it was a different story on the inside. “I started doing this because I was in a lot of pain - emotional pain,” he told TODAY. Leon Logothetis traveled the world in a yellow motorbike in "The Kindness Diaries." Leon Logothetis So far, he’s visited nearly 100 countries.
Logothetis, 40, instead relied on the generosity of strangers for food, transportation and lodging - a journey documented in the Netflix series “The Kindness Diaries.” Though the show’s travels took place in 2013, Logothetis is comfortable on the open road, having quit his job as a London broker back in 2005. But for Leon Logothetis’ globe-trotting adventure, his allowance was simple, and stark: $0. For many travelers, setting a budget marks one of the first steps of a journey.