How We Became a Full-Time Travel Family With Three Kids

There wasn’t one single moment when we decided.

It was more like a slow accumulation of mornings. Weeks where the routine felt a little heavier. Seasons that blurred into each other. A question that kept coming back, lingering in the back of our minds: is this it? And then, eventually, it became easier to imagine leaving than to imagine staying.

This is the full storyof how we became a full-time travel family. The before. The turning point. The fears. The day we actually left. And where we are now. We’re sharing it because when we were at the beginning of this decision, we would have given anything for someone to tell us honestly how it went for them.

The Life We Had Before

We were a family of five living in the UK – two Hungarian-born parents already moved across countries, grown up and had built a life there. Who were through many hardships until they completed their family. And now with three kids all under the age of six. On the surface, it was a perfectly fine life. A lot of families would have been grateful for it. And we were – in that slightly disconnected way where you’re grateful but not quite alive.

The days were full. Full of logistics, of juggling, of trying to be present when your attention was constantly being pulled somewhere else. We both worked. The kids needed things. There were mortgages and car payments and school runs and bills that always added up however well you have tried to puzzle things. The evenings were short. The weekends disappeared. And the weeks blurred into each other in a way that made it hard to remember what day it was, let alone what you were actually working toward. There was a time when second job followed first job and then more work to build our dream life,the foundation of it.

We didn’t want a broken family. And by broken, we don’t mean divorced broken – we mean the version where both parents have to work opposite shifts just to manage the childcare, passing each other in hallways, barely seeing the kids at the same time, never in the same room when everyone is awake and not exhausted. Chasing money to maintain a life we weren’t actually enjoying. That’s a slow kind of breaking. And we could feel it coming.

We were sleep-deprived, tired from keeping everything afloat, and in the middle of trying to build businesses and still working for someone else, that needed more of us than the schedule allowed. Trying to build something meaningful alongside mortgage payments, car insurance, council tax, utility bills, school costs, and everything else that comes with a fixed life in the UK. We barely had quality time with each other. We barely had quality time with the kids. Something had to change – and we both knew it, even if we hadn’t said it out loud yet.

The irony is that we were working so hard for a life that was quietly taking everything it offered back again. The money went to maintaining the structures around us. The time went to filling the gap between structures. There was very little left over for the actual point of it all – which was supposed to be the family.

The Moment the Idea Became Real-How We Became a Full-Time Travel Family With Three Kids

There wasn’t a dramatic catalyst. No documentary that changed everything, no chance encounter with a travel family on holiday. It was more of a time period than a moment – a period where the accumulation of everything became undeniable.

We had both always believed in self-development. We read. We paid attention. And somewhere in all of that reading, a truth kept coming back: nothing changes if nothing changes. What does that mean for me?! Well one thing comes to my mind. 

There’s a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, “Dear saint-please, please, please…give me the grace to win the lottery.” This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, “My son-please, please, please…buy a ticket.–Elizabeth Gilbert

That concept is simple and almost too obvious to say out loud. But it has a way of sitting in the back of your mind and becoming louder over time.

There was also a quote that we kept coming back to: you have ten summers with your kids while they genuinely want to be with you. After that, friends and their own lives become the priority – as they should. But those ten summers are finite. Finite in a way that ‘we’ll get to it eventually’ doesn’t account for.

That made us choke. And when something makes you choke, you pay attention to it.

We realised we weren’t giving up our kids’ childhood to build something better. We were giving it up to maintain something that wasn’t working. We deserved to be present in their childhood. More importantly, they deserved present parents. So we said: whatever happens, happens. Let’s do this properly.

Even though we have to work harder now than we ever did in the UK – it’s for us. The kids get to be part of what we’re building while also chasing waterfalls and swimming in fresh streams with us. That is not something a school timetable or a 9-to-5 schedule can give them. And it’s priceless.

What We Had to Figure Out First

The practical list was long. We’re not going to pretend it wasn’t. But we also want to push back on the idea that this is impossibly complex. It’s not. It requires planning, research, and a willingness to make decisions and stick with them. That’s it.

Income was first and most important. Without a way to earn money that wasn’t tied to a physical location, none of the rest was possible. We had been building toward this for years – photography, filmmaking, content creation,and other areas – and we made sure we had at least one reliable income stream producing real money before we left. Not a hope. Not ‘we think this will work.’ Something actually working, actually earning.

Schooling was the next question. For UK families, this is more straightforward than most people assume. Parents have the legal right to deregister children from state school and home educate without any formal curriculum requirement. For us, worldschooling – using travel itself as the education, letting the world be the classroom – was the honest answer. Our kids were/are very young. The world has more to teach them right now than any room with thirty other children in it could.

Then there was the house, the car, the things. The accumulated weight of a UK life. We sold almost everything before we left. That part was less painful than we expected. Objects are easier to let go of than people imagine, once you’ve decided what actually matters. We didn’t want the extra weight or the extra responsibility of managing property from the other side of the world. We wanted to be free of it. So we freed ourselves.

The planning took a long time. Not weeks – this was years of research, of building income in the background, of non stop preparing for what was coming. I love planning and I was researching constantly, trying not to leave anything to the unknown. We made mistakes along the way,sure. We also proved how well prepared we were in ways we didn’t expect. You still can’t know everything until you experience it. But the quality of your preparation changes what kind of surprises you’re facing when you do.

There were other things on the list: what travel health insurance we will choose for all five of us. How we will stay connected to our family,’the real world’ even on our travel days. What will be the most reliable luggage we will trust with carrying the rest of our staff through continents and many others

Worldschooling – What It Actually Looks Like

One of the first questions people ask when they hear we’re travelling full time with three young kids is: what about school? And then, when we explain worldschooling, the question becomes: but is that actually legal?

In the UK, yes. Parents have the legal right to deregister their children from state school and home educate without any formal curriculum requirement. No inspections, no compulsory structure. You take responsibility for your child’s education and you shape it according to what you believe is right for them.

For us, worldschooling means using the world as the curriculum. Our kids are under six, so we’re not working through a formal syllabus. They are learning by being: by navigating airports, by meeting people who speak other languages, by eating food from a dozen different cultures, by understanding that ‘home’ can look like a lot of different things. They are picking up words from every country we pass through. They are developing a curiosity and an adaptability that no classroom schedule could engineer.

As they get older, the approach will evolve. More structure, more intentional learning, more use of the excellent worldschooling resources that exist online and in the growing community of families doing the same thing. But for now, the world is teaching them plenty. We’re paying close attention to what it’s teaching and we like what we see.

The Hard Part – What We Were Scared Of

We had all the usual fears. Income failing. Getting sick far from home. The kids struggling to adapt. What people would say. Whether we were making a terrible mistake.

But deep down, we just knew it was going to be okay. That might sound cavalier, but it wasn’t. It was the result of all the preparation, all the research, all the months of making sure we weren’t jumping into nothing. You can only trust your gut when you’ve done the groundwork. We had.

The hardest conversations were with family. Taking three small children away from their grandparents – from the extended family who loved them – carries a weight that doesn’t appear in anyone’s highlight reel. That was genuinely difficult. It still is sometimes. The kids miss their grandparents and so do we. That’s real  and no metter how much time passes it always will be and we don’t try to dress it up.

But what we kept coming back to was this: staying would have had its own costs. Costs measured in time, in presence, in the childhood they would have had versus the one they’re having. There is no perfect answer. You make the best choice you can with what you know and who you are.

The Day We Left

We were excited. More than we’d expected to be, given how long we’d been working toward it.

We had spent a month in Hungary beforehand – saying goodbye to family there, getting the kids settled into the idea of what was coming. Then we went back to the UK to finalise everything: the sale of our things, the last admin, the final goodbyes. We rented a bigger van for that last stretch in Hungary. It felt like a closing chapter that was also an opening one.

After saying goodbye to family in the UK, we flew back to Hungary for that final month before our first destination: China. Which was a bit of a surprise to everyone, including in some ways us. Not the typical first stop for a family of five with very young kids. But it turned out to be exactly right.

China is a story in itself – and there’s a full post about it here: [INTERNAL LINK: Two Weeks in China with Kids: Our Honest Family Travel Guide]. The language barrier, the logistics, the things we didn’t know until we were in it. What we didn’t expect was how well the kids would take it. They adjusted so well. First of all to the jetlag,which i was so nervous about. Of course I was. After going through many sleepless nights with three kids,this was something I was fearing-but turns out-for no reason.
They soaked up the culture, tried to pick up words, took it all in with a curiosity that still makes us proud.

The thing we were most unsure about going into all of this was how the kids would handle it. That fear disappeared within the first few weeks. They were more adaptable than we were. Children, it turns out, are remarkably good at living in the present.

Family Verdict – Was It the Right Decision?

Yes. Without hesitation. And we say that not as people who have had an easy ride, but as people who have had hard weeks and hard months and still come out on the other side of them thinking: we are exactly where we should be.
Funny side story:before we left,we got wish bracelets gifted and we put on our wrists on the day we left Hungary. For this to make sense,you have to know that Bali has been the main destination on our list,but still we were not sure if it will be our next base or not in the future. The bracelets from most of us wrists fell off soon after got to Bali. If you also believe in signs like me,what would you say that meant?!

Anyway, 

What’s been harder than we expected: 

The work-life balance is genuinely the hardest ongoing challenge. Building a business while parenting three under six with no external childcare, in constantly new places, with all the logistical overhead that comes with a nomadic life – that takes more from you than you can quite prepare for. We are still working out the rhythm. We probably always will be.

What’s been better than we expected: 

The kids. Every time. The way they’ve adapted, the things they notice, the questions they ask, the way they’ve grown as people in ways that have nothing to do with any curriculum. We are learning together – all of us. That feeling is something we couldn’t have predicted from where we were standing in the UK.

What do the kids think now?

They’ve learned to love travel days. They are adaptable in a way that constantly surprises us. They miss their grandparents – that’s the honest answer to what they’d change. But when you ask them whether they want to go back to a fixed home in the UK, the answer you get is not ‘yes.’

What we’d tell our past selves:

The income foundation matters more than the timeline. Build it first. Even imperfectly. Even slowly. The runway needs to be real before you jump, and the jump itself is far less terrifying than the time spent waiting to take it.

Also: start sooner. That’s the only regret we carry. Not that we did it – that we didn’t do it earlier. Every year we spent in the hamster wheel was a year we could have been here instead. We can’t get those years back, so we’re making the most of the ones we have.

If you’re wondering whether this is possible for your family – whether the idea in your head is something you could actually do – the short answer is: probably yes. But the first practical question is always the money question.

So read How We Afford Full-Time Travel as a Family (And What It Actually Costs next. That’s where the numbers live. And if you’re still wondering whether the lifestyle is really worth it once you get there, read The Honest Truth About Travelling Full-Time With Kids – that’s where we get into what it actually looks like from the inside.