We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tenaj Faustino. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tenaj below.

Tenaj , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

For us, our story of life changing risk began when we decided to quit our jobs, sell our home and move to Malaysia. You see, we lived in New Orleans for ten years and had excellent paying jobs before we decided to pull the plug on “ The American Dream” because we finally realized it really wasn’t our dream. Yes, we were entrepreneurs, we owned our home, and we threw parties whenever we wanted. We vacationed twice a year with our kids and then one day Tenaj had a stroke at work, which she never saw coming. Luckily for us she was treated immediately but we found out she had an undiagnosed aneurysm in her brain. Needless to say, with so much happening, Tenaj took some time off, well during this time we started watching a popular TV show, House Hunters International, and we were shocked by the low cost of living internationally.

During this time Tenaj was working as a Social Services Director, and that role allowed her to interact closely with the elderly and while working in this field, Tenaj was able to see first hand how precious life is and how important it is to live a good life. Everyday, her patients would tell her stories of how they live with so much regret, regrets that they did travel more, regrets that they spent more time with their families, and it became a recurring topic. Tenaj met so elderly patients that regretted not becoming dancers, doctors and some even regretted not being as happy as they should have been. Here they are at 60, 70, 80 and still regretting what they didn’t do.

After hearing stories of regret and seeing other people move abroad and have wonderful lives living internationally we kept asking ourselves, “Why could that not be us”? “Why do they get to live like that”? We then began our research into the cost of living abroad in different countries and we were just shocked at the low cost of living and from that day on in 2016, we devised a plan. Our plan was to reduce our debt and become minimalist for an entire year in preparation to quitting our jobs, selling our home, pulling our 14 yr old out of school. The first bill we canceled was a $150 monthly payment to Direct TV, a satellite cable provider we had for 20 years, and that extra $150 was used as an extra payment to our next creditor until it was paid off, and then every time we paid off a new debt, we would use that initial $150, plus the minimum payment from the previous debt would be used to pay the next debt, so on and so forth, eventually we were making $700 payments on credit cards and our debt just melted away within a year! We also stopped going out to eat, we stopped throwing parties, we stopped buying luxury items, in other words, we stopped the “Keeping Up With The Joneses” lifestyle! We continued this lifestyle and payment plan for an entire year (Jan 2017) until we became debt free in October 2018, the following month in November, we were living in a 3 bedroom condo on the beach with a balcony and we’ve been traveling the world ever since!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We’re Tenaj & Tino, a married travel couple from New Orleans. In 2018 we quit our jobs and sold everything to travel the world. We lived in Malaysia for a year and traveled extensively through Southeast Asia with then our 13 yr old son, as of today he is a Freshman attending LSU. After leaving Southeast Asia, we decided to become Professional House Sitters, so for 5 years now we have been traveling the world house sitting pets, plants and homes. We’ve had some amazing house sits all over Mexico, Central America and South America!

In 2020, during Covid-19, we decided to purchase and convert a Mercedes Benz 2500 Sprinter Van while living in New Orleans, so that we can travel all over the United States, Canada, Mexico and Central America. We currently have one of the top luxury vans in the country. Our van build has been featured on several Youtube Channels and the extremely popular channel Tiny Home Tours. We currently provide technical advice to other van life enthusiasts.

We are also Content Creators, which involves making content around products provided to us by Brands. We are also Brand Ambassadors.

The way we came into all these roles was by creating content around our daily lives. Just recording and keeping sort of a video diary around our lives and wouldn’t you know, people find us interesting. We honestly just live our lives, and learn by living.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

We built our presence on social media by just posting to be honest, but more than just that. We initially started our social media accounts just to be social before, it became an income generating source that it is now. Sometime in 2017, a year before we moved to Malaysia, we realized that if we wanted to earn income from social media we would have to change our social postings from general family content to targeted travel content in order to attract sponsors or endorsements. Our advice to any starting out would be to be honest with yourself and create content based on what you really do in life. We would say, do not create social media content just because it creates income and your passionate about the topic you’re posting about.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Name a time we had to pivot, wow, there were so many! Our most recent pivot was during Covid-19. We went from traveling the world to not traveling at all! We were going to spend our 20th Wedding Anniversary backpacking through Europe, instead Covid-19 put that to a halt and so were our dreams of traveling the world! Here we are 2 years into our Youtube world traveling life and it was just taken from us, instantly! We were devastated and lost, how were we going to continue this lifestyle when there is no travel! At this point, Tenaj decided to manifest a van and six months later, after a massive amount of research and searching, we finally bought an empty van and built it into a tiny luxury home on wheels. What we thought would take 3 months to build actually took an entire year for us to convert the van into a home we could travel in.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.tenajtino.com
• Instagram: tenaj_tino_
• Facebook: http://bit.ly/TTfbpro
• Youtube: http://bit.ly/TTyutu
• Other: Facebook Page: http://bit.ly/ttfbpg Tik Tok: bit.ly/TTtiktok