How I Afford It. The Honest Answer.
The most frequently asked question, in various forms, is always the same: how do you actually do this? How do you find the time? How do you find the money?
Here is the answer. It is not complicated, but it is also not comfortable, and I suspect that is why people keep asking rather than simply doing.
The Balance Sheet
No wife. No known children. No pets waiting at home with emotional leverage over my departure dates.
No big house. No expensive car — in fact, no car at all for the better part of a decade. No mortgage sitting on my chest every time I look at a map.
No phone contract — I use a prepaid SIM and an old phone that could generously be described as vintage. No weekend shopping trips. No fancy clothes. The wardrobe consists largely of Vespa-related shirts, which serves the dual purpose of dressing me and advertising my priorities.
No Starbucks. I want to be specific about this one: the average daily Starbucks habit in Germany runs to somewhere between €4 and €6. Over a year that is roughly €1,500 to €2,000. That is a significant portion of a Vespa world tour, consumed in paper cups with your name misspelled on them.
On the road, I eat cheap and frequently unhealthy. I sleep in places that a hotel comparison website would struggle to categorise. I reduce costs wherever reduction is possible, and I have become quite creative about what counts as possible.
I often struggle to make ends meet. That is not a boast. It is a fact, and it is worth saying plainly because the alternative — pretending this is effortless — would be dishonest.
What It Actually Costs
Between trips, I work. Hard. Long hours, unglamorous work, money going directly into the next departure rather than into things that make the apartment look nicer or the wardrobe more impressive. I do not buy nice things for myself during these periods. Nice things are not the priority.
Adventure is the priority. It is the only priority, structurally speaking, that gets funded before anything else. Everything else — comfort, stability, the kind of life that photographs well on social media — comes after, if it comes at all.
After every tour I come home broke. Burned out. Body aching in ways that require several weeks to stop mentioning. The 2018 world tour ended with me essentially homeless, living in a van, single, and without a job. This was the direct result of the choices I made to go. I made them anyway. I would make them again.
I now have a girlfriend who is, by any objective measure, extraordinarily patient. She accepts that I constantly think about the next challenge, about funding the next trip, about which Vespa to buy and how to build it for a tour. This is not easy to live with. I am aware of this. She is aware that I am aware of this. We proceed.
The Jobs Nobody Romanticises
People imagine the funding side of adventure travel involves something elegant — a book deal, perhaps, or a tasteful sponsorship arrangement with a luggage brand. The reality has involved delivering newspapers from a truck six nights a week, programming websites for agricultural machinery, and most recently working on a Google Ads project that I will describe as character-building and leave it there.
No permanent sponsors. Over the years I have received some sleeping bags, a few tyres, some oil — less than 10% of total trip costs across all adventures. The rest came from the jobs above, saved carefully and spent on departure dates.
I also have no special boss. I have had to give up my job for tours. Several times. The most recent was for the Iberian Peninsula trip in 2025, because no employer has yet been found who considers "I need three months to ride a Vespa around Spain and Portugal" a reasonable leave request. I have stopped being surprised by this.
The Thing Nobody Wants to Hear
Everybody with the right attitude and the right priorities can do what I do.
That sentence will annoy some people, and I understand why. It sounds like I am dismissing genuine obstacles — financial pressure, family responsibilities, health, geography. I am not. Real obstacles exist and they are real.
But the question I am answering is not "can everyone do exactly what I do in exactly the same way." The question is: why does this seem impossible to so many people for whom it is not, in fact, impossible?
The answer, most of the time, is priorities. Not income. Not luck. Priorities.
The adventure-shaped hole in most people's lives is filled with things that cost money and feel like necessities but are not: the car upgrade, the subscription services, the clothes that signal a version of success that has nothing to do with being alive at full volume.
I am not judging any of those choices. I am simply pointing out that they are choices, not inevitabilities.
What It Requires
It requires the willingness to accept discomfort as a feature rather than a bug. Cold mornings in a tent, cheap food, the occasional mechanical crisis on a road that does not appear on any map — these are not unfortunate side effects of the adventure. They are the adventure.
It requires a genuine tolerance for risk. I am often under pressure on these trips. I have been in situations where the outcome was not certain. I have risked my life, more than once, in ways I did not fully anticipate. This is not something I say to sound impressive. It is something I say because anyone considering this path should know what the path actually involves.
And it requires the willingness to give things up. Not temporarily, as a sacrifice you will be compensated for later. Permanently, as a reallocation of resources toward the thing that actually matters to you.
I gave up relationships. Jobs. Flats. A version of stability that other people find comforting. In exchange, I rode around the planet on a 40-year-old scooter. I have slept under the stars in Siberia and on petrol station forecourts in Kazakhstan. I have been genuinely, completely, terrifyingly alive in a way that no amount of comfort has ever matched.
The maths works out. For me. It might work out for you too.
But only if you decide it does.
Stay happy. Enjoy life. And to the people who will read this and still find reasons why it would never work for them — I genuinely hope you prove me wrong.
My haters will still hate. That is fine. They are very consistent and I respect the commitment.
One More Thing
Since we are being honest: I pay taxes. I pay social security. I pay health insurance. I work. And I have done more charity work in the last fifteen years than I have spent on my own travel — somewhere in the region of €113,000 raised for causes that had nothing to do with me personally.
I am not a millionaire. Not a hippie. Not a gypsy living off the goodwill of strangers. I am 48 years old, not married, no kids, and I own very little apart from a few scooters. I simply try to squeeze as many miles as possible out of a modest amount of money, and I accept the personal risk and sacrifice that comes with that choice.
What I do believe — and this is the part that some people find uncomfortable — is that we live in a system that has convinced most people freedom is impossible. That the only valid life looks like: work, eat, sleep, repeat, until you are too old or too tired to want anything different. I have spent a significant portion of my adult life pushing back against that idea, not by lecturing anyone, but by getting on a scooter and demonstrating that the walls are not as solid as they appear.
I am not asking anyone to become like me. I am not asking anyone to give up their house or their car or their Starbucks. I am simply saying: the door is not locked. You are allowed to try the handle.
To the keyboard warriors, the haters, and the people who have decided that the most productive use of their time is leaving hostile comments on the page of a man who can barely afford his own fuel — I would politely suggest redirecting that energy toward Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, who are measurably more exploitative of the infrastructure we all share and considerably better funded to absorb the criticism.
You have a question? Ask. I am happy to answer. You want to help? Every form of assistance is appreciated and none of it goes unnoticed.
Everything else gets blocked. I am getting too old and too tired for arguments that go nowhere, and the road is calling.
To everyone who supports this, reads this, shares this, sends a fuel donation, or simply shows up — thank you. Next trip is coming. Sooner than you think.
Previously: I Am Not Special. The Things I Do Are.
P.S. — Sometimes I turn myself into something best described as an Adventure OnlyFans girl: live updates, real-time chaos, the occasional mechanical breakdown at 2am, all delivered directly to your WhatsApp against a small fuel donation. We all know how expensive fuel got in 2026. I did exactly this on the Penistour Europe 2023 and on the Vespaseo Ibérico — Iberian Peninsula 2025. If you want in next time — you know where to find me.