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e - Berlin: $1180 , including round-trip airfare from JFK and a one- week stopover in London. How do these numbers compare to your current domestic monthly expenses, including rent, car insurance, utilities, weekend expenditures, partying, public transportation, gas, memberships, subscriptions, food, and all the rest? Add it all up and you may well realize, like I did, that traveling around the world and having the time of your life can save you serious money. Fear Factors: Overcoming Excuses Not to Travel Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy. —FANNY BURNEY (1752-1840), English novelist But I have a house and kids. I can’t travel! What about health insurance? What if something happens? Isn’t travel dangerous? What if I get kidnapped or mugged? But I’m a woman—traveling alone would be dangerous. Max excuses not to travel are exactly that—excuses. I’ve been there, so this isn’t a holier-than-thou sermon. I know too well that it’s easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction. I’ve since met paraplegics and the deaf, senior citizens and single mothers, home owners and the poor, all of whom have sought and found excellent life-changing reasons for extended travel instead of dwelling on the million small reasons against it. Most of the concerns above are addressed in the Q&A, but one in particular requires a bit of preemptive nerve calming. It’s 10:00 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? The prime fear of all parents prior to their first international trip is somehow losing a child in the shuffle. The good news is that if you are comfortable taking your kids to New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., or London, you will have even less to worry about in the starting cities I recommend in the Q&A. There are fewer guns and violent crimes in all of them compared to most large U.S. cities. The likelihood of problems is decreased further when travel is less airport and hotel-hopping among strangers and more relocation to a second home: a mini-retirement. But still, what if? Jen Errico, a single mother who took her two children on a five-month world tour, had a more acute fear than most, one that often woke her at 2:00 A.M. in a cold sweat: What if something happens to me? She wanted to prime her kids for worst-case scenario but didn’t want to scare them to death, so—like all good mothers—she made it a game: Who can best memorize the itineraries, hotel addresses, and Mom’s phone number? She had emergency contacts in each country whose numbers were loaded into the speed dial of her cell phone, which had global roaming. In the end, nothing happened. Now she’s planning to move to a ski chalet in Europe and send her kids to school in multilingual France. Success HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013961