Drawing on their savings, investments, and a fledgling travel blog, they lived out of short-term rentals as they traveled through 13 countries across Europe, Asia and South America. 

“We wanted to strip away all of these burdens that the American Dream piles on top of you, one by one until we craft a life that we’re happy with,” Colby, formerly a mechanical engineer, told Fortune. 

Meredith, who spent over a decade as an accountant before leaving, said she worked 70-hour weeks in the U.S. that didn’t feel like living meaningfully and left her burnt out. 

“It doesn’t feel like the math is mathing,” she told Fortune. “Even if you can make enough money, you don’t have time to enjoy it because you’re working all the time.” 

The Thomases are part of a growing cohort of around 18.5 million American digital nomads, up from 7.3 million in 2019, according to the latest estimate from MBO Partners, a workforce consulting firm that has tracked the trend since 2018. 

Gen Z and Millennials make up 75% of digital nomads, according to MBO’s report, the same generations that report feeling squeezed out of the traditional American Dream. This disenchantment shows up in housing data. 

Americans now expect to be 40 years old when they buy their first home, up from 28 in the early 1990s. More than half of American non-homeowners say buying a house feels unattainable. And even renters under 40 earning at least six figures a year report feeling less confident that they’ll own a home than they did five years ago, according to a BMO Financial Group survey of 2,500 adults this year. Faced with a market like that, 83% of Gen Zers and 87% of Millennials said they would relocate to a cheaper location if their jobs let them work remotely. 

So many young workers are opting to take their paychecks somewhere else, and their employers are allowing it. Digital nomads who work for a company have grown faster than self-employed ones since 2019, as the pandemic normalized remote work, per MBO. 

“We’re seeing a structural shift in how Gen Z and Millennials view living standards,” Miki Esteban, chief marketing officer of international eSIM company Holafly, told Fortune. “For this generation, digital nomadism isn’t just a lifestyle choice, it’s a smart economic strategy.”

The Thomases felt that difference directly. The mortgage, taxes and insurance on their house in the U.S. added up to nearly $4,000 a month, a sum that now covers all their living expenses abroad in some months. For housing in Bolivia and Vietnam, they rented two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartments within walking distance of the beach for less than $700 a month.

“You just can live so much more life,” Meredith said. “You don’t have to be counting every penny, and you can go out and have a drink or get dinner and not really worry about it, which is a big weight off the shoulders.” 

Esteban said this kind of geo-arbitrage, a financial strategy of earning an income in a higher-cost area and then moving to spend it in a lower-cost area, is attractive to young workers from the U.S. and Europe. 

For example, a young professional paying around $2,500 a month for a studio apartment in New York or London can drop their overall living expenses to under $1,200 in nomad hubs like Lisbon, Mexico City, or Buenos Aires, he estimated. 

“It turns what would be a tight budget at home into a 50% savings rate abroad,” Esteban said.

The unglamorous parts of leaving 

Traveling around untethered to a job or a city as a digital nomad can be glamorized on social media. Posts of young creators diving into turquoise waters and befriending expats and locals are ubiquitous on TikTok, where the digital nomad hashtag has racked up over 4.2 billion views.

But Meredith said the perks of the lifestyle—affordable housing, more work-life balance, seeing the world—also came with loneliness that she and Colby didn’t anticipate fully. While the Thomases found a community for a short time in Vietnam, other places billed as digital nomad hubs didn’t match what’s portrayed online, since language barriers left them unable to make more local friends.

Digital nomads who’ve done the lifestyle longer end up limiting themselves by falling into a “circuit” of the same group of people rotating between the same handful of cities—Tallinn, Estonia in the summer and Chiang Mai, Thailand in the winter—to feel less alone. 

There’s also taxes that can be harder to figure out when you’re an American living abroad, as well as having visa restrictions to deal with. The Thomases rely on tourist visas, which means they have the stress of tracking how long they can stay in each country and bracing for questions at customs. 

The hardships of digital nomadism are partly why only 11% have kept up the lifestyle for more than five years, according to the MBO report.

But Meredith and Colby have no plans to return to the U.S. permanently, and still live off their savings, investments and blog. While they’re planning to visit family in the U.S. for a short time, they said their way of living now is more fulfilling, with Colby calling digital nomadism “an inspiring journey” for the couple. 

“We have a much greater appreciation for different ways of life and different ways of thinking,” he said. “It’s worth any kind of investment.”