Think it’s called a trust fund

Born into wealth. This is honestly the most likely answer

Beneficial living situation (e.g living with parents) that allows them to save up a significant amount while having minimal expenses. Eventually, they can just take all that money and travel for months on end.

A job that travels with them. Successful vloggers make money through their vlogging, for example

People here are all saying rich or trustfund or something. But in my experience people who do that are often still young and living with their parents, which allows them to save a lot of money and have no rent to pay.

And where I’m from many of them travel to backpack countries like Thailand or Indonesia. Plane tickets to those countries are not cheap but once you’re there you can live really cheap if you want to. You can get pretty decent hotels for 10-20 euros a night in those countries (can be even cheaper if you’re willing to sleep in hostels. And food and activities can also be really cheap. So if you save up a couple thousand bucks you can live/travel in these kinds of countries for quite a while.

I’m American and of the Americans I know who traveled longterm or lived abroad, or traveled for free or on a budget:

• They were part.of a student exchange in High School and.lived in Europe.for half a year(program was competitive and free)
• They were part of a program in college that included an annual international trip (program was free)
• They went.to college or university abroad and would travel during breaks (had to pay for school and for the travel, but traveled on a broke student budget)
• They were a nanny for a wealthy family in Europe
• They taught English as a second language in countries like India, Thailand, South Korea and China, usually living there from 1.month (very short cultural.program when hey were in college) or several years (working FT in private ESL schools), which allowed for a lot of inexpensive travel.in Asia
• They perform on cruise ships full time and visit the locations where they stop
• They live frugally,.save a bunch of.money and vacation days, then travel to the places with the cheapest airfare and COL, also typically not during the busiest tourists times (off season or.shoulder season)
• They go where they have friends and can crash on their couch, or travel.with friends and split the costs
• They are “digital nomads” and work remotely while they travel
• They are vloggers and their travel is a part of their content; they make.money on YouTube etc. (this also can include digital nomads - they may work their FT gig and.do the content creation on the side)
• They are retirees, some relatively young (military or nonprofit/governmental pensions,.money saved in Roth IRAs or.other retirement accounts that they can tap early), traveling for.months at a time or living abroad and doing a lot of traveling from that jumping off point)

Of the above, if they have student loans that they are paying off, they usually don’t travel longterm anywhere. The lifestyle requires little to no debt.

ETA: Thinking of a few more, one already mentioned by PP:

• They saved up summer job money and backpacked in between High School and college
• They visited family abroad periodically throughout their childhoods over the summer
• They work for companies that had branches in foreign countries, or for the State Dept., or for NGOs, or are in the Peace Corp

Being rich is often the answer, but also, it is possible to travel much more inexpensively than most tourists do if you don’t care so much about comfort and predictability. Go in off seasons. Ride the cheapest class of public transport to get around. Couchsurf or stay in sketchy hostels. Cook your own food or eat where the locals eat instead of at the places where the staff speaks perfect English.

Do they already have savings enough to support until they retire?

No reason to assume they won’t get jobs after they’re done traveling.

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I kinda did this with my wife a very long time ago, so long ago I doubt any of my experience is still relevant. And we had saved up considerable money before we left and still had a nest egg to return to. So, not exactly low budget but not trust fund either.

I met a lot of people who had almost no money however. The principal I learned is that if you have a) enough money or b) enough time, you can get to almost anyplace you want to go to. The people with no money had enough time. They would often stay in one place and work for two or three months to earn enough money to move on to their next destination. These people were pretty chill, except for the ultra minimalists who had like one pair of underwear and would ask to “borrow” yours. Those people sucked.

Trust fund, wealthy parents, etc. The average person can’t afford to travel like that.

Lucky spawn point

Here in Germany we have a concept called “sabbatical year”. I think it actually comes from the US, where it was/is a thing for university professors.

Rare in the private sector, but I think civil servants that work for the government have a right to it, if they so chose. Especially “Beamte”, which is a special form of lifetime appointment. That for example also includes teachers in some states, which is one of the professions where it is more common.

One model how it may be structured is that the person either works more or takes a pay cut for a number of years and then has 1 year free. For example taking a pay cut of 1/7 for 6 years and then have 1 year free at the same pay. That also means that you take a pay cut during the whole period. But that is definitely doable.

The upside of this structure is that you have a job to go back to. And since you also count as employed during the sabbatical year it doesn’t mess with things like health insurance

I traveled for a year with a group of 50 remote workers. By the end of the year, we had about 25 remote workers and 25 people running off their savings accounts. Two big things.

1. Life abroad can be relatively cheap, we were able to get housing, office space, and air travel for under $2k a month, which is cheaper than I was paying for my apt in the US.

2. When you live in a different time zone like in Europe, but work US hours, you get those extra hours to do fun stuff. I typically started work around 4pm and worked until 12am, meaning I could wake up late, go take a 1 hour walking tour of the city, try out some of the restaurants and still be back for my morning meeting.

This also means that evening exhaustion only applies to your work rather than your fun and no one ever says they wished they had worked harder on their death bed…

If you’re genuinely interested in an anecdotal reply, I’d be more than happy to share my experiences that started with: buying a ticket to Frankfurt on a whim (Xmas bonus check) and that led to years of travel throughout Europe. I’m not sure how much of the details will help in this day & age, but LMK if you’d get some benefit from my perspective and I’ll write it up tomorrow, certainly. 🤓🙌🏽

An alternate answer to “trust fund baby.” My job covered half of the costs for me and my family to work from an office in another country. The half we covered was still expensive, but we managed to cover our part without dipping much into savings. We couldn’t have done it without my employer covering some of it.

I backpacked around the world twenty years ago. No house, girlfriend or other commitments. Found a well paid job and saved everything I could. Picked places that were interesting but also where the currency exchange was favourable i.e. not Europe. Stayed in hostels and the occasional guest house, never hotels. Travelled overland rather than flying. Cooked my own food. I didn’t want to work while I travelled but met many that did.

You don’t have to be super rich or be a trust-fund baby to travel around the world for months. I find the general estimates for a more frugal world-traveling for a year are $20.000 to $30.000. This is obviously not doable if you really live paycheck to paycheck, but if you have a relatively well-paying job and live very frugal it is not impossible to save this amount of money. Also there is the more irresponsible solution of taking on debt.