About Us

We’re Josh and Shari, a married couple from Atlanta, Georgia, and we spent a year traveling around the world before moving to Mexico.

We roughly split the year into thirds and spent approximately 1/3 in Europe, 1/3 in Asia, and 1/3 in Latin America. As Shari is terrified of temperatures below 50° Fahrenheit, we sort of chased a bit of an endless summer.

why we did it

Super lucky to work for ourselves as creatives (Josh is a commercial and editorial photographer, Shari’s a graphic designer), we realized a few years ago that we could technically work from anywhere in the world. At first, we thought we’d just relocate somewhere foreign and exotic – yet very hooked up to the internet to allow us to work – for a year, but then couldn’t decide on a place because, duh, we hadn’t been to most of the locales we were considering.

So the idea morphed into saving a sh*t-ton of money and traveling for a year, seeing and experiencing as much as we possibly could, and kind of taking a sabbatical, because, let’s be honest, who wants to work when you’re munching croissants in Paris or laying on a beach in the South Pacific?

what’s up with the name?

We decided to call this blog “Society of Everywhere” because we wanted something aspirational and inspiring. No, we were not going everywhere in the world – in fact, we actively decided to skip India and Africa on this trip for various reasons – but at some point in our lives, we hope to have gone everywhere!

It was also important to us to bring our family and friends along as much as possible. Not physically (although we did have some amazing people join up with us along the way!), but in an experiential sense. We were super curious about how people live differently from us, and we love storytelling, so we hoped to be able to share different ways of life and give some insight into what we were experiencing as we moved around the world.

How we did it

Traveling has always been a priority for us, in that pipe-dream “someday, when we have money” sort of way, until about 5 years before our trip, when we dipped our toes into the travel hacking pond, which then quickly became the equivalent of a full-on baptism in the ocean. Since then (and up until this trip), we traveled to about 15 countries for a fraction of the price we “should have” paid.

Find out more about travel hacking

We saved up a decent bank of points and miles that covered us for most of our big flights and some accommodations, but certainly not enough for a full year.

So that left cold hard cash. When this trip was still just a faint glimmer in its parents eyes, we got super serious about our finances and paid off about $75,000 in “good” debt, and then started throwing money into a savings account to fund it. We sold a bunch of our stuff including a car, Airbnbed out our extra bedroom, started Digit accounts, and licensed work to make extra money.

Find out more about trip financing

Our savings goal for the trip was $52,000 – a $1,000 for each week. Obviously Europe is more expensive than Latin America, and Tokyo will drain our pockets much more than Thailand, but that’s the average for which we’re shooting. We know it’s possible to travel much more economically (and, um, the opposite of that, although we’re not the caviar-for-breakfast type), but we thought we could be comfortable, and (how has this not come up yet?) we love, love, love to eat, and food tourism doesn’t always come cheap. Don’t even think we didn’t spend waaaaayyyy too much money on fancy sushi in Japan.

We also hoped to save money on accommodations here and there by WWOOFing and house sitting.

But here’s the thing – this was all an experiment. We tracking our spending pretty religiously and adjusted as necessarily.

follow along with our spending tracker

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