Paying Off Debt with Travel Therapy
sharing 3 basic rules we used to become debt free
with travel physical therapy and travel speech-language pathology
welcome to our guest post series!
ryan and I are hosting posts written by fellow travel allied health professionals to learn from their lifestyles, experiences, and accomplishments!
Continue reading to learn how Rebekah and Tom Ebertowski paid off $186,981 of debt in 19.5 months of working as traveling allied health professionals.
Deciding to become travelers
Tom and I talked about wanting to do travel therapy on our first date. Granted, at that point it was a totally abstract idea, maybe more wishful thinking than anything. We were both working permanent jobs in North Dakota and, I mean, it was our first date! We weren’t exactly planning a future together at that moment, but fast forward a year later - I had quit my job and started looking into travel contracts, while Tom planned to finish out the last few months of his 2-year commitment at his job and then do the same. I took my first travel contract (SLP) in September 2017 and Tom started his (PT) in January 2018, living 45 minutes apart in Massachusetts. Since then, we’ve been full-time travelers, got married, bought a gross old 5th wheel camper to renovate and live in, and are currently expecting our first baby!
One of the things that we are most proud of though, is how we used travel therapy to pay off over $180,000 of debt during our first two years of marriage.
I wish I had a checklist, an exciting 5-step program for exactly what everyone needs to do to become debt free, or some secret you-heard-it-here-first trick, but the reality is that paying off a monstrous amount of student loan debt has more to do with knowing and disciplining yourself than anything else. And ya gotta have a budget. I know, boring. While we were both committed to the idea of paying off debt no matter the circumstances, travel therapy played a big part in our ability to pay the loan down more quickly than we would have been able to in permanent jobs.
Here are a few of the ways that we made travel therapy work for us and our goals:
one:
We didn’t go for the glamorous locations. Contracts in places like Hawaii tend to have lower pay because, you know, it’s Hawaii. Everyone wants to go there, so they don’t necessarily have to offer astounding rates. California has all of those awesome $2k/wk contracts, but the cost of living in California can be significantly higher than other parts of the country (plus...we might also be too lazy to go through the process of getting licensed there). That’s not to say we haven’t taken contracts in nice areas, but they aren’t the states that are usually considered the glamorous ones (i.e. the ones you see on the front page of travel company websites, promising that travel healthcare is basically a paid vacation). We have largely stuck to the East Coast and Midwest. But taking contracts in Massachusetts allowed us to visit most of the New England states as well as Boston, New York City, etc. Taking a contract in southern Mississippi allowed us to spend weekends in New Orleans and hang out on the beaches in Biloxi and Pensacola. There are great things to see and do no matter where you go, and there is a lot of benefit in searching out lower cost-of-living areas.
two:
We bought a camper to live in. It is 25 years old and pretty ugly on the outside. Its name is Wilson. The jury is a little out on actual monetary gain in camper living, as you have to consider several factors: cost of buying the RV itself (plus possibly a hauling vehicle), the cost of campgrounds (we have usually paid around $450-$650 per month), increased cost of gas for traveling with an RV, and renovation costs if that’s your thing. All of these costs averaged out may mean that living in a camper doesn’t save significant amounts of money over renting apartments. However, I consider this one of the things that helped us toward our financial goals because it made travel life more sustainable for us. The search for short-term, furnished (or even un-furnished) apartment leases was at times exhausting and discouraging, in addition to the anxiety of not always knowing exactly what kind of a living situation it would be, having to pack everything up into a small vehicle every few months, etc. RV living has alleviated some of that stress and allowed us to live in our own space, sleep in our own bed, and generally feel at home no matter where we go. Mentally, it has been a huge help to keep us traveling and enjoying it.
three:
This might sound counterintuitive or go against advice you’ve heard from other travel therapists, but we didn’t really play money games with recruiters, try to pit multiple recruiters against each other, or hold out for weeks between contracts trying to play hard ball and score higher-paying gigs or get a few extra dollars a week. We took contracts that enabled us to work without major gaps in employment, even if the weekly pay package was at times average or low average. Did we let ourselves get taken advantage of and just accept any job offered? Of course not. But we made decisions that seemed to be offering the best chance of consistent income. Sometimes it panned out great, sometimes contracts got canceled and we had to re-think our plans, but that’s just the reality of travel therapy life. We have only worked with two companies total, and currently just with one because we have a recruiter that we like and trust because she has known us for years now.
Some of this may sound like we have just trudged through the travel therapy life, stocking away money while all of the other, cooler travel therapists you follow on Instagram are at the beach, climbing mountains, and eating at local foodie spots every night. You’ll be glad to know that the two lifestyles aren’t mutually exclusive and we did allow ourselves to enjoy the perks of travel therapy. Even while paying off student loans, we took frequent weekend trips, ate at local restaurants, and generally tried to dig into the life and culture of different areas of the country—just within the budget parameters we had set for ourselves. Don’t fall into the mindset that doing travel therapy is either/or—either you can do it for fun and freedom and excitement, OR you can do it for pragmatic financial reasons. It can absolutely be both.
Written by Rebekah Ebertowski + Edited by Megan O’RearAbout the authors:
Rebekah is a speech-language pathologist who graduated from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2014, then moved to North Dakota for her clinical fellowship, where she met Tom, a physical therapist who graduated from University of North Dakota in 2015. They have been married since 2018, traveling therapists for 3.5 years, and continue to say they’ll settle down sometime, but it hasn’t happened yet. They are expecting their first baby at the end of May. Rebekah and Tom can be found on Instagram as @bekahebertowski and @runningman32.
