What a year of slow travel in retirement actually costs.

If you've pictured a year or three of slow travel in retirement — a month here, two months there, no itinerary more ambitious than "let's see" — you've probably never put a price on it. Guesses tend to be wrong in both directions. So here's what two retired couples who actually do it publish about their spending, the Medicare rule that catches people off guard, and what a few travel years do to a $1.4 million retirement plan.

What does a year of slow travel actually cost?

Two weeks at a resort tells you nothing about living on the move. The best data comes from retirees who do it full time and publish every dollar:

• $24,891–$41,673 a year for two people. Ellen and Theo of Earth Vagabonds retired early in 2015 and have traveled continuously since, mixing cheaper regions (Asia, the Mediterranean) with pricier stops. Their ten-year tally shows yearly totals from $24,891 (2019) to $41,673 (2025), $306,824 in all. Their 2025 report calls it their most expensive year yet: about $114 a day, with roughly three months of vacation-style "fast" travel and about $3,000 of unusual health spending.
• $48,000 a year for two people. Harry and Sharlene of 2TravelWithoutOrders, a retired military couple living on a military pension, break down a $4,000-a-month 2025 budget, and say country cost and travel pace are the biggest drivers.

Two couples aren't a survey, and neither is a typical American household: Earth Vagabonds, for example, were 62 and 54 when they published their ten-year totals, with rental income from a home they kept in the U.S., and weren't yet on Medicare. Treat these as real-world data points, not a forecast for your own travel. The pattern both share is that where you go and how fast you move matter more than how you travel: Earth Vagabonds' own page says their budget runs about $2,000 a month in places like India and Nepal and $3,000–3,500 in more developed countries.

What costs do slow travelers forget?

Does Medicare cover you abroad?

Almost never. Medicare.gov's page on travel outside the U.S. says Medicare "usually doesn't cover health care while you're traveling outside the U.S." and that you pay all costs in most cases. The rare exceptions assume you live in the U.S. — for instance, a medical emergency while you're in the U.S. when a foreign hospital is closer than a U.S. one — so they don't help a full-time traveler. Medicare drug plans don't cover prescriptions bought outside the U.S. either.

The main insurance workaround is Medigap. CMS's Medicare Coverage Outside the United States says most Medigap plans (C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, M and N) provide foreign travel emergency coverage with a lifetime limit of $50,000: they pay 80% of billed charges for certain emergency care abroad after a $250 yearly deductible, and only if the care begins in the first 60 days of a trip. Plans E, H, I and J are no longer sold, and Plans C and F are closed to people who first became eligible for Medicare in 2020 or later. Whether Medicare Advantage plans cover anything abroad varies by plan, so check your plan's own coverage documents. A separate travel medical policy is the other route.

Real-life health costs show why this matters. Earth Vagabonds pay out of pocket rather than carrying travel health insurance, and their ten-year totals include $37,143 of health spending — about $10,000 of it for breast cancer treatment in Croatia in 2018 and about $4,800 for a broken wrist in 2022. That's workable at their budget and with a healthy margin of savings; it isn't a plan to copy without one.

Should you keep Medicare Part B while living abroad?

You pay the Part B premium whether or not you use it: $202.90 a month in 2026, or about $2,435 a year per person (12 × $202.90), according to Medicare.gov. Dropping it is tempting, but Medicare.gov's penalty page says you'll pay an extra 10% for each full 12-month period you could have had Part B and didn't (unless you qualify for a Special Enrollment Period), and that late-enrollment penalties are usually charged for as long as you have that coverage — for most people, a lifetime penalty. The same page says Part D works similarly if you go 63 days or more without creditable drug coverage. This is a real fork in the road, not a casual choice.

What about trips home?

Flights back for holidays, weddings, and family emergencies are easy to leave out of a travel budget. In Earth Vagabonds' ten-year totals, "travel" (airfare, trains, buses, visa fees) was $22,596, or 7.4% of the $306,824 total, far behind housing (29.6%) and health (12.1%) — but they are one couple, so your mix may look very different. Put a line in your budget for them either way.

How does a travel year change your withdrawal plan?

Take a $1.4 million portfolio and a 4% withdrawal plan: $56,000 a year of spending. Add one $50,000 slow-travel year on top and you're withdrawing $106,000, a 7.6% withdrawal rate for that year ($106,000 ÷ $1,400,000, before Social Security). That arithmetic sounds alarming, so Runway's engine can show what it actually does over a 33-year retirement. Here's the result for one example household, tested at two sets of return assumptions:

Two things stand out. First, for this household, travel years barely move the odds of the money lasting: it stays at 98.4% or better in every case, because a $1.4M portfolio plus Social Security is a robust base. Second, when you spend matters more for what you leave behind than for whether you run out: three early travel years cost about $829,000 of median ending balance under the default assumptions ($351,000 under the conservative ones), versus about $255,000 ($231,000) for the same three years at 75–77. That's the cost of early dollars not compounding for three decades. A smaller portfolio or a lower-income plan would show a bigger effect on the success odds themselves — which is exactly what the stress tests in this guide are for.

There's a tax angle too. The years between retiring and the age your required minimum distributions begin — 73, or 75 if you were born in 1960 or later — are often the best window for Roth conversions, because income and brackets are low. Every dollar you pull from a traditional IRA to fund a year in Portugal fills the same brackets a conversion would use. The fix isn't to skip the trip: it's to sequence on purpose, funding travel years from taxable accounts (where only the gains are taxed) or from Roth withdrawals, and bunching conversions into years you're not traveling.

How were these numbers calculated?

• Earth Vagabonds figures: the couple's published ten-year and 2025 expense reports (linked above); the category percentages are arithmetic on their totals. Their 2025 total includes about $3,670 of cash spending they estimated after losing their expense records, which they disclose in the report.
• 2TravelWithoutOrders: the $4,000-a-month budget is the figure they state in their 2025 video; I haven't independently audited it.
• Medicare rules and the Part B premium: Medicare.gov and the CMS publication linked above, as of October 2, 2026.
• The 7.6% figure: straight arithmetic ($56,000 + $50,000, divided by $1,400,000). It ignores taxes, Social Security, and market returns.
• The table: computed with Runway's Monte Carlo engine for a married-filing-jointly couple with $50,000 in cash, $450,000 in a taxable account ($300,000 cost basis), $700,000 in a traditional IRA and $200,000 in a Roth IRA; Social Security benefits of $2,400 and $1,600 a month at full retirement age, claimed at 62 (the engine's default when no claiming age is set); a 60/40 stock/bond allocation; returns in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, with a 16% standard deviation on stocks and 6% on bonds; a fixed random seed. The travel spending is assumed to be on top of regular spending, as if you keep a home base. Withdrawals are taxed by the engine, but state income tax and health-care costs are not modeled.
• RMD age: IRS for age 73; the age-75 rule for people born in 1960 or later comes from SECURE 2.0.