Digital creator couple, Hemani Chawda and Sagar Patel, have got rid of rent, groceries and daily utilities ka jhanjhat—they use that money instead to travel the world, no strings attached
Both Chawda and Patel had been traveling separately but when they got married in December 2022, they decided to pursue it full time. They gave up their rental apartment in Ahmedabad in December last year
Everyone has heard the saying that the best way to travel is to read—well, everyone but Hemani Chawda, 30, and Sagar Patel, 31, who have spent the last four months living out of a suitcase.
Chawda is a former-RJ-turned-travel-blogger from Raipur, while Patel hails from Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh, and worked in the geographical information system field—“Basically people who help you make online maps,” he says. Since their wedding in December 2022, they had been planning their transition to full-time travellers. The couple finally bit the bullet, gave up their rental apartment in Ahmedabad in December last year, and dove in head first.
Even before they met, they had been traveling separately, albeit with very different approaches. “Sagar’s travel was more spiritual, in the sense he would go on a lot of yatras. I had been doing a lot of backpacking, so our combined synergy worked out beautifully,” says Chawda.
Since Hemani Chawda and Sagar Patel gave up their rented flat in Ahmedabad, home is wherever the next adventure takes them; The duo have decided to make travel their full-time profession for a year; Four months into living the carefree life, they say they have no regrets
Both were bit pretty bad by the travel bug, and they were barely home for a week in a month. The couple say they were paying around Rs 40,000 in rent and another Rs 10,000 went towards utility bills and domestic staff. “As a result, there was a lot of guilt, so [we’d say] let’s go home. We were shelling out money for rent and other things, which we felt were financial and mental burdens that were limiting us from experiencing life,” says Chawda.
They both wanted to get out of the habit of attachment to materialistic things pretty much from the start, admits Patel. For the first two years of their marriage, they tried “settling down”; renting an apartment together and buying things for it. But all that did was prove to them that life wasn’t for them. “It was not something we wanted. But we had to convince our parents, too. We took them on trips and broke the news to them in phases,” he recalls. This started with the partial truth that the couple was moving in with the Patel’s parents in Madhya Pradesh, and then easing into more frequent trips.
Cost-wise, it works out to pretty much the same as their rented apartment. “We pay around the same amount at a place in Manali where we’re regulars,” says Patel.
The couple have given themselves a year to live out this experiment, but now that they are a few months into it, both chime in and say they hope it goes on beyond 2025.
“It’s been good and we realise that it can be done well even monetarily,” say Chawda and Patel, who record their adventures on their Instagram handle @wanderlust_himani, which has over 3.3 lakh followers (most of whom started following the duo after they headed into travel as a full-time vocation).
How do they do it? They reach out to managers of properties they find interesting and volunteer their services in exchange for a comped stay or remuneration.
“Sometimes I handle a place’s social media, clean it up, and make it sharper. Sometimes, we just mail a bunch of places and tell them that we can come and review the place. Most of them reply and negotiate some kind of a deal, but you have to take the initiative and volunteer some kind of services,” says Patel.
But compressing all of life’s needs into a suitcase is not easy. We ask the couple what’s the one thing in their suitcase they can’t do without. “Nothing,” both say together after a few seconds. “I think except for our lights for shooting, there’s nothing we can’t do without,” says Chawda. “When we were at a recent
seminar for creators, I had just one pair of shoes, but I just styled myself well and tried to look good,” she giggles.
Patel tells us that they are both learning how to shed some baggage—quite literally—by learning how to travel under 15 kg. “That’s our next small goal: How to travel with as little as possible and focus more on the experience, not worrying about stuff,” he says.
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