Be A Tourist On The Way To Financial Independence

Regular readers know the drill but if you’re new to my blog I’m a geography and mapping nerd who’s always on the hunt for online mapping tools that have relevance to finances and financial independence. 

Today I have a short post to highlight a new tool that’s actually a revival of an old tool I never posted about.

Tourist

I live just outside of Washington D.C.  While I don’t go into the city nearly as much as I used to, I sometimes run along the National Mall.  I really like it. 

Besides being surrounded by the Washington Monument, Capitol Building, the majestic Smithsonian buildings, and the multitude of other monuments, when you’re on the Mall you’re surrounded by tourists. 

Tourists are a funny lot.  The pointing, the phone selfies, and the wobbly legs of folks not accustomed to walking more than 100 yards on any given day make for fun people watching. 

You see folks from everywhere – not just in America but from the world.  I’ll usually hear between 5 and 10 different languages being spoken on a short run. 

And tourists serve a valuable function in that they remind me to take notice of the cool stuff in my backyard that I might otherwise take for granted.  Yeah, that’s the Lincoln Memorial that I run past all the time, let’s stop this time and soak it in again.  It’s pretty darn amazing. 

All this is to say I like living near a place full of tourists, but wouldn’t necessarily want to live in one.  Your opinion on this might be different, and that leads me to today’s mapping tool.  

Locals vs. Tourists

A dude named Logan Williams created a really cool map called “Locals and Tourists on iNaturalist“. 

If you’re not familiar, iNaturalist is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society where people post geotagged photos and observations of plants and animals to contribute to a growing corpus of knowledge about our natural world. 

How can he distinguish between locals and tourists?  On the map orange dots are postings by tourists and purple dots are posting from locals.  Williams defines tourists as a person who has <= 90 days of activity in that specific area.  A local has >= 90 days of posting activity in that area.  It’s a subjective time period and relatively rough measure, but I’d guess it works well enough to be considered mostly accurate. 

Williams let’s you adjust this 90 day cutoff with a sliding scale (under the “tourist threshold” label), and you can choose any value between 0 and 365 to experiment.

For instance, here’s Washington D.C. leaving the tourist cutoff at someone who posted for less than 90 days:  

That long orange rectangle going from east to west is the National Mall, full of postings from tourists.  The orange circle of tourist postings on the upper left of the map is Teddy Roosevelt Island which has a very popular trail around it.  It’s a very popular tourist spot. 

I did some other spot checks with areas I know well and the map seems to show touristy areas pretty well, at least for the D.C. region.

There’s A Reason For Tourism

Tourists go to certain places in greater numbers because those places have unique qualities worth seeing and experiencing, plain and simple.  So stepping back, I think it’s wise to consider that some level of tourism to a place is good or it might not be a place worth being in. 

This is a very subjective thing of course, and surely many folks would be happy having a house on a remote hillside in the middle of nowhere. 

Yours truly might have a remote cabin one day, but even if it’s in the middle of nowhere it’ll surely be very close to majestic mountains or possibly an ocean or lake that will probably be a tourist attraction. 

And the wonderful thing about being financially independent is that I have endless options.

Geoarbitrage

So there you have it financial warriors, a really slick and well-design mapping tool to help you determine the relative amount of tourism in any location, and specifically where it is.  If you are looking to geoarbitrage your way to financial independence and relocate, choosing the right place is hard.  You may want more tourism where you live or you may not, and this map can help.

I do lots of posts like this that show various aspects of money and finance from a location perspective.  So you’re considering Geoarbitrage in the United States be sure to check out my Geoarbitrage Resources Page which has tons of great tools to help you find your perfect location.

I hope you find these resources handy and I will continue to expose valuable tools that can help when deciding on a geoarbitrage strategy.