How a 28-year-old digital nomad has arranged her life so she can travel for months at a time and still pay down her student loans

• Sojourner White, 28, plans to travel as a remote worker this winter.
• She says living at home has allowed her to travel the world and still pay down her student loans.

Sojourner White, 28, hates the cold and has the travel bug.

That's why she spent January to April traveling from hostel-to-hostel around the US while working remotely — and she plans to hit the road again next winter.

While this lifestyle can be expensive, especially on top of her $42,000 in student-debt load, White has arranged her life in such a way that allows her to work year-round, save money for part of the year, and travel for the rest.

In her off-months, White lives at home in Milwaukee with her mom, step-dad, and brother — working remotely as a social worker. She makes roughly $80,000 per year, but says it's the savings she's accumulated from living at home that's allowed her to not only travel as much as she does, but pay down nearly half of her original $70,000 student-debt load. As a federal Pell Grant recipient, White expects her debt to drop to $22,000 thanks to President Biden's recent relief announcement.

"Until I see rent become a reasonable price, which honestly I'm not convinced is ever going to go down, I plan on living at home and just hopping around," she says.

White, like all millennials, is navigating an economy that's offering increased worker flexibility — but also rising costs. She is among a growing number of digital nomads, or remote workers who use their flexibility to travel while working. Over 15 million Americans describe themselves as digital nomads, up 42% from 2020 and 112% from 2019, MBO Partners' 2021 State of Independence study found. Driving this trend is the growing flexibility of remote work, a longing to see the world, and the desire to cut costs.

White is also one of many young people living in multigenerational households — households with two or more adult generations. 18% of Americans — nearly 60 million people — live in these households as of 2021, a number that's quadrupled over the last five decades due to rising costs of living and other factors. 31% of Americans from age 25 to 29 are doing so. With home prices, rent, student loan debt — as well as inflation more broadly — all near record-highs, this option is looking increasingly attractive for many.

"Staying in one place didn't seem to make sense to me anymore"

After receiving her Masters in Social Work in May of 2020, White moved home because "home is free," and she wanted to ride out the pandemic with her family.

Her team — which evaluates youth programs across the US — became permanently remote towards the end of 2020, only requiring in-person work roughly 10% of the time.

By the end of 2021, she was restless — her travel bug buzzing loudly — and she began to plan her four-month winter journey.

Her travels took her to Charleston, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, Seattle, and Portland. Besides staying with her dad for a month in Dallas and in an Airbnb for one week in Seattle, White stayed exclusively in hostels, where she enjoyed the lower costs and social atmosphere. She opted for single rooms for their privacy and conducive ness to remote work — which ranged from $50 to $160 per night, depending on the hostel's amenities.

Overall, White says the trip "wasn't hard financially" because she'd managed to save so much while living at home.

"Any place is going to be expensive once you decide to not live free anymore," she says. "But for me, I had saved up. And so it was like, well, if I'm going to do this very expensive trip, now is probably the time."

And the expenses did add up. She says she found it more expensive to travel in the US than Europe, where a private hostel room was never more than $60 per night in her experience. If she does a similar trip again, she'd consider staying in some non-private dorm areas on occasion to cut costs.

"I feel like the US is just an expensive place in general," she says. "Overall, it's just harder to get around in the US. Not only with housing, but also public transportation is a really big thing lacking that I realized when I was traveling around. I had to Uber, Lyft. That definitely adds up."

The ability to explore new places and escape the winter blues, however, made it all worthwhile.

"The more I traveled. the idea of staying in one place didn't seem to make sense to me anymore."

"Winter comes every year, so I'll be leaving"

While White admits the nomadic lifestyle eventually becomes "not financially sustainable," she hopes to maintain her balanced approach — which prioritizes her family, budget, and love of travel — "for the foreseeable future."

For now she's back at home, saving money to put towards her next trip.

"Winter comes every year, so I'll be leaving," she says, adding that she has tentative plans to travel to Mexico for six weeks over the holidays, followed potentially by Guatemala or Colombia.

While she sometimes misses the community an office environment can bring, her team's quarterly retreats have "helped sustain" her. When she gets tired of working from home, she'll explore a cafe or hotel lobby.

In addition to her social work job, White has made some money over the years as a freelance travel writer and through social media — where she has over 27,000 TikTok followers. In response to a lot of questions she's received about how to be a remote social worker, she's building a digital resource to help people. She plans to launch it later this year and hopes it might develop into a small business in the future.

The flexible nature of her working life — which has allowed her to travel and live at home — has helped make all of this possible.

"I like having months where I spend money and then months where I can just go home in the summer and enjoy nice weather, but not have to worry about paying rent," she says.