📩 In Today’s Email

• TL; DR - When you trade square-feet for square freedom, your money starts working for your time, not your things.

• The Deep Dive:  Minimalism, Money & the Freedom Loop - A Tokyo night, a vending machine, and a reminder that owning less is the fastest way to buy back your time.

• The Read: The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel - Housel reframes wealth as the freedom to control your hours, not the display of your possessions.

🤿 The Deep Dive - Minimalism, Money, & the Freedom Loop

I landed in Tokyo at dawn, carrying my camera bag, my Moleskine (this was before I switched to the ATN-endorsed Leuchtturm1917), my laptop, and a few changes of clothing.

One of the first things we did was seek out the famous Japanese vending machines known to sell basically everything under the rising sun.

You might have heard of some of the legendary items, but we just wanted to try one, get a drink from one of these robot-monster technologies.

After finishing the soft drink in the neon alleys of Shibuya, I looked everywhere for a trash can.

Not one to be found.

And not a single scrap of trash on the streets of this metropolis. I ended up holding that can for the next 45 minutes; I wasn’t about to be a litterbug and spoil these pristine, almost freshly-painted streets. I hunted for a bin like it was a relic.

It struck me: in places built for motion, there was everything yet nothing, no room for dead weight. This was also true of the hotel rooms.

Obviously, Tokyo is spatially challenged and needs maximum efficiency, but what fascinated me was that this city contains two things in equal, somehow congruous abundance: maximalism and minimalism.

The efficiency of Japan has always stuck with me, even now when recalling this memory makes me think about my LEGO collection. The Ninjago theme is very popular in Japan (think dragons, big robots, ninjas).

In an interview with the creators of The Minimalists documentary, someone at a Q&A asked about keeping collections when trying to be minimal. The “minimalists” said collections were fine, one even had one himself, and that they considered a collection to be one thing.

Phew. I was still a minimalist with somewhat north of 50 LEGO sets, though I know a couple of people who will still argue that point with me.

But it does pay to remind yourself of these things occasionally. Remind yourself that, for most things, purchasing is only fun for a brief time after the purchase.

It’s all neurochemistry.

The thrill of buying something fades into the monotony of maintenance: dusting, organizing, storing, mentally tracking, more dusting…

Minimalism is More Allocation, Rather Than Aesthetic

Minimalism isn’t about a blank room or Zen cream colored walls, though that Japanese influence is undeniably beautiful. It’s about choosing what you keep so you can dedicate what you save (in money, time, mental bandwidth) to:

• One bathroom you truly love instead of multiple underused ones

• One camera you truly shoot with instead of three that collect cards and dust

• One story you truly write instead of three half-finished drafts and three ideas you “might revisit someday”

Here’s a statistic worth noting: 1 in 3 American households rent a self-storage facility. That’s roughly 40 million households paying to store things they’ve essentially forgotten exist.

Millions are paying thousands of dollars annually into this growing industry, and mostly it’s “lock it up and throw away the key.” Now, that’s great for the self-storage business (and sure, go ahead and entrepreneurize the you-know-what out of that fact), but if you’re renting space for stuff that doesn’t fit in the home, someone still has to pay for it, maintain it, and remember it.

The “Boomer clutter” concept is real: the generation that built bigger homes, more rooms, more garages, owns more stuff. And often that stuff accumulates in self-storage facilities or forgotten spaces. In other words, the home becomes a burden.

The stuff you bought to signal success to your neighbors becomes a drain on your agency.

Time as the Only Finite Currency

If you funnel more money into extra rooms, more stuff, and then rent a unit or buy a storage shed, you’ve bought lost time, not time gained. Housel stresses that well-spent money is that spent on more time. Time is the only finite thing. You have bought time spent cleaning, organizing, relocating, worrying. Filling out guarantee cards.

Throwing away mailers and junk email from the store you gave your email to when you bought your stuff.

You, my friend, are owned by your things. All that time is the opposite of what you invested for: freedom.

The same dollars reinvested into a smaller footprint, a home you love, and a few possessions you can truly use, that spark joy, can compound your time capital, instead of your dust capital.

Morgan Housel points out the Vanderbilt family (minus Anderson) squandered their fortune on boozing, gambling, playboy-ing, and one descendant built America's largest private home (the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC), a house so grand it eventually bankrupted the dream of keeping it in the family.

When I went to the University near there (UNC Chapel Hill shout out!), I toured the Biltmore (I highly recommend the special rooftop tour). It’s stunning, but it sure is a dust museum for tourists.

And it made that Vanderbilt, who built it, broke.

But hey, if you’re a Vanderbilt, why not?

If you’re just me or you, I’d personally rather optimize for quality of life.

Actionable Insights for Your Nomad Mindset

• Audit your footprint: What possessions do you own that require storage, maintenance, insurance, dusting? Estimate the hours per year.

• Decide on “enough”: How many bathrooms, bedrooms, suitcases, gear kits do you need to live the version of your story you’re writing? Not the version you think others expect.

• Redirect the excess cost (financial or time-cost) into your priorities: writing sprints at 5:30 am, a new camera story, a MONTH in Tokyo filming local life.

• Watch the compounding of freedom: As Housel says, time is the highest dividend. The less you’re tethered to managing things, the more you’re tethered to creating meaning.

The new wave of minimalism isn’t a design fad; it’s a lifestyle structural choice.

When you remove the extra rooms, the unused equipment, that second storage unit, you free space (mental, physical, temporal) to make something you’ll actually care about.

And when you free your money from servicing your things, you serve your vision instead.

🌎 Visa Watch

🇵🇹 Portugal: Revised D7-Flex announced: drop required savings to €22,000 for first-year approval.

🇹🇭 Thailand - Extended its digital-nomad visa to allow stays up to 180 days per entry (renewable for five years), part of a broader push to attract remote workers, students, and long-stay creatives seeking tropical bases.

🇲🇽 Mexico: New remote-worker permit (Residente Temporal por Trabajo Remoto) extended to family dependents, applies from Jan 2026.

🤓 The Read - Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel

Wisdom from Morgan Housel

• Francis Crick, who discovered DNA, was once asked what it took to win the Nobel Prize. His response: "It's simple. You just have to know what to ignore." A lot of brilliant minds work like this. Einstein said his main scientific talent was his ability to pour through thousands of scientific papers and reject any that did not further his goal.

• Wealth without independence is a unique form of poverty.

• A pretty nice life is independence + purpose: the independence to do what you want and the wisdom to do meaningful things.

• A lack of envy brings another gift: freedom.

• You can never truly win the status game. It's a moving target. A constant struggle of viewing other people as having something you want, and then around and around you go. Unless you take precautions to prevent it, this desire is going to become one of the chief motives of your life.

• Consider how much influence expectations have on your well-being. People struggle through grueling hours of work they often don't enjoy for a chance at buying stuff they assume will make them happy. There is often more psychological help in managing your expectations down rather than pushing them upward.

• You are on this journey alone. Maybe your spouse and your kids are part of the equation, but you have to find your own way—fearless of how others think of it. Be careful judging how other people spend their money.

For this issue, I'm recommending The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life by Morgan Housel. It’s the second of his books ATN has explored and along with Galloway, I consider him the best financial writer going right now.

Housel argues that wealth is not measured by what you show, but by the freedom you buy with what you don't spend. One especially powerful line:

The book pivots the conversation from his last book The Art of Making Money with "How do I get rich?" to "How do I live rich?" It shows how envy and social comparison drive consumption, and how time—our most limited resource—can be bought if we learn to want less.

This matters now for borderless professionals and high-agency creatives like you: When your lifestyle is defined not by address but by autonomy, the question isn't "How big is my house?" but "How free is my day?"

Who this is for: Anyone designing a meaningful life rather than a status life; anyone choosing time over things; anyone building a platform like A Texas Nomad that trades scale for essence.

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection. One story, one share at a time.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.