our start to travel nursing

People start travel nursing for all different reasons and in all kinds of situations. For us, we were just coming out of an incredibly overwhelming and destabilizing failed immigration experience when we decided to start travel nursing. You can read a bit more about that here. We had talked about travel nursing for years, and I had always been intrigued by the idea, but Dan not so much. In general, he’s a bit more of a homebody and slightly less travel-obsessed (although that’s definitely been changing). That said, after he moved to Montreal following our wedding and had his immigration process fall through, I think we both had the thought of “how much more crazy can travel nursing really be after all that?” So we decided to just jump and see how it would go.

Obviously a lot more thought and prayer went into it than that, but it really was a bit of a leap of faith into the unknown. Dan was more open to the idea of temporarily living somewhere other than New Hampshire (where we’re both from) after moving to Canada, and I was excited to see new places and take some time to recover from a bad work experience. Neither of us had expected to settle back down in New Hampshire for a while as we had been planning to live in Montreal for at least a couple more years. So began our travel nursing adventure!

If you’ve been following along for a bit, you’re probably getting the general sense of our mindset with travel nursing by now. Our main priorities or goals balance between adventure and saving money for the future, while looking for ways to be generous. While we don’t know when or even where at this point, we hope to be able to buy a house in the next few years. Between our wedding, paying off loans, immigration fees, and the whole immigration situation in general, we had been a bit stalled in our savings for a while. Travel nursing has been an incredible opportunity to get back to building that up. In general, it’s been such a growing experience for both of us, and has shown us that there are many places around the country that we love where we could potentially imagine settling down.

our priorities

savings

You don’t often get the opportunity to both have amazing adventures and save a lot of money. Travel nursing is really unique in that way. That said, it would be totally possible to come out of it with no, or at least not much, savings. If you’re unwilling to sacrifice some of the regular comforts you want and expect, or if you choose to really emphasize adventuring over savings, you may not save much. It’s totally up to you what you set as your goals while travel nursing, I’m just sharing a bit about what we’ve decided for us.

In general, we aren’t doing travel nursing to be super comfortable. It’s chaos a lot of the time and like I’ve said before, destabilizing. Though we’ve largely been blessed with great housing opportunities, our mindset with finding apartments is really a “take what we can get & find the best deal” kind of attitude, rather than our personal preferences. Our place in Myrtle Beach was incredible, but it was also literally our only option and waaaaay more money than we ever wanted or imagined we’d spend. It’s really hard to maintain every aspect your lifestyle and preferences while travel nursing; you have to be willing to be super flexible and sacrifice some things that you want, but don’t really need.

Out of that flows some of how we take trips, how we manage cooking while travel nursing, and how we spend our time. We’re not that good at sticking to it and we certainly make exceptions, but in general we try to make do with what we have in each apartment and what we bring with us (which isn’t much). I’m sure there are people out there who do a much better job at it than we do, but we’ve been really trying to limit ourselves and focus on those main things we want to get out of travel nursing. Check out the list some of our essentials that we bring with us here.

adventure

Adventure is something that’s not difficult to achieve when travel nursing. We could easily stay in the state, or even just the city, where we’re based each contract and have incredible adventures. It doesn’t take eating out all the time or taking big trips to get adventure when you find yourself all the way across the country from where you’re from, or even just in a new state close by. We both love getting outside, though in slightly different ways… Dan is definitely more of a hiker and I’m a bit more inclined to go for walks and go to the beach.

While we were in Myrtle Beach, we pretty much exclusively did things like eating out or activities that cost money when friends and family visited. There was so much to do that didn’t cost money, and I was having a great time cooking in that big, beautiful kitchen. During that contract, we did take a few trips that we saved up for, but since then we’ve realized we want to limit ourselves to one big trip per contract. When I say big trip I just mean not a day trip. If we can make something a day trip, we do, and if we can’t we aim for spending as little as we can on a hotel or Airbnb. For us, adventure while travel nursing mainly looks like getting to know our new area by taking walks, drives, and lots of day trips.

generosity

Travel nursing has also been a great opportunity to use what we’ve been given to be more generous. As Christians, that’s incredibly important to us and we’ve been excited to have this opportunity not just to give more, but to be able to host people and find ways to be consistently in the mindset of what do we have that we can give and who have we been given the opportunity to be generous to. In general, that felt easier when we had our own home and weren’t on the road all the time, but there are always ways you can be generous to those around you if you’re willing to be on the lookout for those opportunities.

What are your goals/priorities when travel nursing?