How to navigate and pay off student loan debt in a digital age.

• Sojourner White, 28, plans to travel as a remote worker this summer.
• She says living at home has allowed her to travel the world and still pay off her student loans.
• White is one of 15 million digital nomads and 60 million Americans who live in multigenerational households.

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

That’s why she spent January through April traveling from hostel to hostel around America working remotely — and plans to hit the road again next summer.

While this lifestyle can be expensive, especially with more than $42,000 in student debt, White arranges her life in such a way that she can work year-round, save for the year, and travel for the rest. .

During the months White lived at home with her mother, stepfather and brother in Milwaukee – she worked remotely as a social worker. She makes about $80,000 a year, but she says it’s the savings she’s accumulated from living at home that has allowed her to travel as much as she wants, while also paying off half of her original $70,000 student-debt burden. As a federal Pell Grant recipient, White expects her debt to drop to $22,000 with President Biden’s latest aid announcement.

“As long as I don’t see rent becoming affordable, which I’m honestly not sure it will ever go down, I plan to live at home and move around,” she said.

White, like other millennials, is exploring an economy that offers labor flexibility — but increases costs. She is growing among digital nomads or remote workers who use their flexibility to travel while working. More than 15 million Americans describe themselves as digital nomads, up from 42% in 2020 and 112% in 2019, MBO Partners’ 2021 State of Freedom study found. Driving this trend is the flexibility of remote work, the desire to see the world and the desire to reduce costs.

White is also one of many young people who live in multigenerational families — families with two or more generations of adults. Eighteen percent of Americans — about 60 million people — will live in these households by 2021, a number that has quadrupled over the past five decades due to the cost of living and other factors. 31% of Americans aged 25 to 29 are doing so. With home prices, rents, student loan debt — and inflation more broadly — all at record-high levels, this option is becoming increasingly attractive to many.

“Staying in one place doesn’t seem to make sense to me.”

Weird white

In the year After receiving her master’s in social work in May 2020, White moved home because she was “home free” and wanted to ride out the pandemic with her family.

Her team — which evaluates youth programs across the U.S. — is permanently absent until the end of 2020, a period that requires only approximately 10% of physical activity.

In the year By the end of 2021, she was restless — her travel woes were blaring — and began planning her four-month winter trip.

Her travels took her to Charleston, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, Seattle and Portland. Aside from staying with her father for a month in Dallas and an Airbnb for a week in Seattle, White stayed exclusively in hostels, where she enjoyed the low cost and social atmosphere. She chose single rooms for privacy and the convenience of remote work—which ranged from $50 to $160 a night, depending on the hostel’s amenities.

Overall, White was able to save a lot while living at home, so the trip “wasn’t difficult financially,” she says.

“If you decide not to live free anymore, any place becomes expensive,” she says. “But for me, I kept it. And it was like, if I’m going to make a very expensive trip, maybe now is the time.”

The costs also increased. She says that in her own experience, traveling in the US is more expensive than in Europe, where a private hostel room costs no more than $60 a night. If she makes the same trip again, she’ll consider staying in some non-private bedrooms to keep costs down.

“I feel like America is generally an expensive place,” she says. “In general, it’s more difficult to get around in the US. It’s a big thing that I’ve realized when I’m getting around, not just housing, but also public transportation. I’ve had to go to Uber, Lyft. That definitely adds up.”

But the ability to explore new places and escape the winter blues made it all worth it.

“Every time I travel, the idea of ​​staying in one place doesn’t seem to make sense to me.”

“I go because winter comes every year.”

Weird white

While White admits the nomadic lifestyle may eventually be “financially unsustainable,” she hopes to maintain her balanced approach — which prioritizes her family, budget and love of travel — “for the foreseeable future.”

For now, she is back home saving money for her next trip.

“I go because winter comes every year,” she said, adding that she has tentative plans to travel to Mexico for six weeks on vacation, possibly followed by Guatemala or Colombia.

While she sometimes misses the community that an office environment can bring, her team’s quarterly retreats help her “keep up.” When she gets tired of working from home, she explores a cafe or hotel lobby.

In addition to her social work career, White has made some money over the years as a freelance travel writer and through social media — she has more than 27,000 Tik Tok followers. She is building a digital resource to help people by answering the many questions she receives about how to become a remote social worker. She plans to launch later this year and hopes it can grow into a small business in the future.

The flexible nature of her work life – which allowed her to travel and live at home – helped her achieve all this.

“I’d love to have months where I can spend money and months where I can go home in the summer and enjoy the nice weather, but I don’t have to worry about paying rent,” she says.