This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lloyd Enbom, 40, a content creator who purchased an abandoned home in Hakuba, Japan, a ski town in Nagano Prefecture, with his wife, Mandy Rutherford. Enbom, who is from Australia, plans to continue traveling with his wife and two-year-old daughter while making Japan their home for half the year. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
We’ve been doing YouTube full-time for nearly five years. Our full-time work is travel content.
In 2021, we were locked down in Australia until the 11th of November, which was the exact day we left.
At the time, a lot of people, especially in Australia, thought you couldn’t travel to Bali or Southeast Asia, so we were documenting our experience of doing it, and sharing tips and advice. That’s when it really dawned on us that travel content was a viable business, because people tend to watch other people travel to get advice on where to go, what to do, how to get visas, and how to earn money online so that you can travel full-time.
So we fell into the role of educators for people on how to live this sort of life.
We started in Bali, then traveled around Southeast Asia. We did all of Vietnam in one month, which was really incredible; we went to Thailand, Singapore.
Then we made it over to North America; we spent six months in Mexico, and then we bought an RV and traveled around basically the entire Western United States. We drove our RV through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, and back up. We got married in Las Vegas and had our honeymoon in New York City.
Then we settled in Thailand for two years, where we had our daughter, Lyla.
We had reached what we wanted: get a full-time income and live wherever we want. We decided Thailand would be a really good option for us as digital nomads; it’s cheap, has really good healthcare, and amazing private hospitals that are cheap.
We were renting a place in Thailand, but as foreigners, you can’t own land in Thailand. You have to rent property for 25 or 30 years. If you buy a house in Thailand, you’re basically renting the land that you live on.
It works for some people — a lot of retirees go and do the long-term lease thing, and I think it works out financially to be pretty good. But we were in Thailand, and Mandy started seeing these cheap houses in Japan when she was pregnant.
Apart from that time in Thailand, we were fully nomadic. It’s great to be able to move around, but the biggest challenge is that you live out of a suitcase. At some point, you really start craving a home base, somewhere to go back to, and that’s one of the things that drew us to buying a home in Japan.
We fell in love with a Japanese ski town — and the cheap houses
While we were in Thailand, we went down a YouTube rabbit hole. We learned a lot, and the more we learned, the more we realized that buying a home in Japan was actually really possible.
My first concern was, “How are we going to buy a house if we don’t have residency in Japan?” In most countries — like Thailand — you have to be a resident to buy a house.
The biggest surprise was that you don’t even have to set foot in Japan to buy a house there. If you find the right house and the right real estate agent, you can buy a house from your home.
We read up on it and went back and forth with the idea for two years. In March 2026, we came to Japan on a road trip and decided to check some houses out. We decided then it was pretty much a no-brainer for us.
We ended up finding a house within 15 minutes of an amazing ski town called Hakuba. They co-hosted the Winter Olympics there in 1998. There are a lot of Australian expats who come here to snowboard and they end up staying, so it’s got a bit of a multicultural vibe.
It’s still very Japanese, but it doesn’t feel like you’re such an outsider being in a ski town like this. When we found it, we thought this could answer a lot of our problems.
We got lucky that somebody was selling this property that we were interested in, and the real estate agent had lived in Canada at one point, so she was Japanese, but spoke fluent English.
The property had been listed a month earlier, and we happened to be here on a road trip, so we emailed them and were able to set up a viewing, and everything went pretty smoothly.
The total closing price was 3.6 million yen, which at the time was $22,000. After all of the fees that we had to pay, it totaled 4.1 million Japanese yen.
We signed everything at the end of March 2026, and they gave us a window of about almost five months to actually settle it, which was great because we needed to figure out all the paperwork and the logistics. We moved in July.
I don’t want to sugarcoat it and make it seem like you’re buying a $20,000 completed house that has everything in order. There’s a lot of stuff you have to take on yourself.
When we signed the contract to buy the home, we bought it as-is, which meant if the electricity doesn’t work or if the water pipes are all rusted and everything, that’s on us. We have to fix that.
We didn’t know if we were going to have running water, electricity, or if anything was going to work. Thankfully, the electricity and the water did. But the boiler didn’t work, so the biggest thing for us right now is having a hot shower and renovating the bathroom.
The bathroom is just a cold bath at the moment, which doesn’t really work when you’ve got a two-year-old and two adults living there.
We’re anticipating spending about the same amount on renovations as we spent to actually buy it. We may even go beyond that if we want to make it really, really nice.
We want to keep traveling, but Japan will be our home base
This is only our second time in Japan. We came for a road trip for about a month this spring, and we fell in love with the country.
The culture is extremely friendly and polite. It’s clean, it’s safe, it has four seasons, and it’s surprisingly affordable. You can eat out in Japan for half the price that we pay in the United States or Australia.
We’re not going to live full-time in Japan. There’s a difference between purchasing a property and getting citizenship or residency.
Our visa statuses allow us to be in Japan for up to six months of the year, which has always been the lifestyle we prefer; being able to move between two places — whether that’s Thailand or Bali for six months, then Japan for six months.
We’re here and treating it as a permanent holiday home. We get to come and enjoy the area and have our house that we own, that we’ve renovated ourselves and has our furniture in it. We don’t have to find a new rental every time we want to come back here.
We own forever in Japan for the price of what wouldn’t even cover a house deposit back in Australia. And no one can ever take it off us.
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