We left corporate jobs and a 6-figure salary to travel full-time. It took years of saving.

Haley and Shane Mahabadi left corporate America and are traveling full time in Southeast Asia. 

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Haley and Shane Mahabadi, a married couple in their late 20s who lived in Denver until August when they started traveling full-time in Southeast Asia. Haley left her corporate job in 2023 and Shane left his this year so they could travel.

Haley: After graduating college in 2019, we did a two-and-a-half month-long backpacking trip through Southeast Asia. It was extremely life-changing and impactful.

But of course, we had that tug of responsibility that brought us back to working and doing what everyone else was doing. We started working in corporate America 9-to-5, five days a week, no flexibility, no freedom, just feeling chained to the desk. And I just wondered, “Is this what the next 40 years is?”

We started wondering, “What if we could make traveling full time work?” After five years of daydreaming, planning, and saving, we made it happen this year.

We’ve been traveling around Southeast Asia for over three months. We were in Indonesia for a month, Thailand for month, Vietnam for a few weeks, then the Philippines.

We’ve had some of the most incredible adventures. We’ve met really interesting people. We’ve gotten to meet locals and try local cuisine and do all these things that we always were daydreaming about. So it’s kind of a “pinch me” that we’re actually out here.

I just thought, if we never take this leap, I wonder if, when we’re in our fifties and we’ll look back and say, “Why didn’t we do that?”

We kind of joke that we’re pulling a year forward from retirement and traveling now while we’re young and able.

Leaving a job with a six-figure salary was hard

Haley: In 2023, I was working as a creative director at a marketing agency, and I just found myself unhappy and feeling a little bit unfulfilled. I decided to quit my job to freelance and work my own hours.

I am still able to work while traveling. For clients, I do social media management as well as photography and video creation.

Shane took a massive leap because he was getting a high-paying six-figure job in corporate America.

Haley and Shane Mahabadi left corporate America and are traveling full time in Southeast Asia. 

Shane: It was definitely scary to take the leap because I was doing well in my career and moving up, but we’d been fantasizing about it for five years.

I was working as a manager of strategy and analytics at Dish Network, where I’d worked for about four years.

I really liked the role. I loved my team, loved the department I worked in. I guess the downside was it was just like an old-school job — five days a week in the office, not much flexibility. I wanted something that would allow me to travel more or work from other places. I thought if I don’t do this now, before we probably start a family, it’s going to be essentially impossible to do it then.

People at work were sad to see me go but they were supportive. My boss offered to write a letter of recommendation and to help me when I want to reenter the workforce. That was a big relief to know that I have people on my side who can vouch for me that I was a good worker and I’m not just a crazy guy traveling the world without plan.

When I come back, it might take a little bit of time, but I think I’ll be able to find something eventually.

Our goal is to travel for a year. We’re paying for it with savings, and then Haley’s consistent stream of income. If something crazy happens and we’re able to make a bunch of other streams of income that are doing really well, we could potentially extend it.

When we were planning I made a spreadsheet with roughly what I thought we would spend per day on hotels, food, activities, flights, and jotted it out from there.

We also saved our credit card miles for the past few years, so we really haven’t had to spend money on any of the big international flights.

The cost of living is so much lower here in Southeast Asia that you don’t need quite as much saved or you don’t need to be making as much to extend your time and travel for longer.

We hope we can keep this flexibility forever

Haley: We don’t plan to travel forever. We miss our families and community back home. But now I’m wondering how we can we make this flexibility work forever.

Our main priority right now is traveling, but we are also trying different things in our free time and seeing if we can create multiple streams of income, because even when we go back to the states, it would be amazing to continue to have a more flexible lifestyle.

We’ve been trying all these things that we probably wouldn’t have if we didn’t have all this free time. We’ve been hiking, swimming, snorkeling, scuba diving.

We did the Ha Giang Loop in Northern Vietnam. You motorbike for three days through the most incredible landscape you’ve ever seen. Just driving on the back of the motorbikes with the guide, wind in your hair, down winding mountain roads. You just felt like you were living.

I think in that moment I felt so glad we did this. There was not even a question in my body of regret.

Shane: Deciding to do this was hard, but one of the things that mentally helped me was saying, “What’s the worst that can happen?”

The worst that can happen is we’re going to lose out on some amount of money, but we’ll have traveled the world for a year.

That’s not that bad of a worst-case scenario.