Samuel Jeffery

I'm Samuel. I grew up in Gold River, Vancouver Island, British Columbia — the kind of small town where the mill closing overnight taught you more about diversification than any MBA ever could. From those roots, I've somehow ended up traveling to 75+ countries with my wife, Audrey Bergner, building a life around storytelling, curiosity, and the firm belief that small places deserve proper guides.

The story starts in Penang. Before travel blogging was a profession, I was backpacking across Southeast Asia and South America on a shoestring, popping into internet cafés once a week to email my family: "Still alive. Funds runnin' low." Nomadic Samuel launched from a sweltering, windowless attic guesthouse in Georgetown, Penang — no A/C, a death fan doing its best, and me breaking the site repeatedly. That was 2010. I had no idea what I was doing. I kept going anyway.

Then I met Audrey. We both taught English in South Korea and connected through a link exchange between our two blogs. It escalated — as these things do — into a relationship, a marriage, and a shared life built almost entirely around travel, food, and cameras. We've been doing this together ever since. 2X World Travel Award winners, 250 million+ views and nearly a million combined subscribers across our English and Spanish channels, and featured everywhere from National Geographic to the White House.

Right now: Project 23. We're living between South Alberta (May–October) and the Sierras de Córdoba, Argentina (November–April), where we're renovating Audrey's family hotel property and slowly working through Project 23 — a mission to document every single one of Argentina's 23 provinces. We're not passing through. We live here, pour concrete here, and know what the empanadas actually taste like in every region. That's the whole point. And if you want to know where we'd go if you took the project away and just said "go anywhere" — it's Patagonia. Every time. We keep going back and it keeps having more to give.

Traveling with Aurelia. We added a third member to the crew — our daughter Aurelia, who has already racked up flights, cruises, and overnight buses across Canada, the US, Argentina, and Peru. Traveling with a kid changed us. Slower pace. More playgrounds. Snacks as a full logistics category. We wouldn't have it any other way.

The numbers side. Somewhere along the way, it became clear this was always going to happen. I was a hockey card kid — obsessively tracking stats, memorizing numbers, building mental databases of player comparisons before I knew what a database was. That turned into fantasy sports, which turned into a genuine obsession with data, patterns, and what the numbers are actually telling you. Nerd overdrive. It was only a matter of time before that energy found its way into portfolio construction. I run Picture Perfect Portfolios, where I coined the term "Expanded Canvas Portfolios" to describe strategies that use leverage to unlock diversification beyond the confines of a traditional 100% allocation. I especially love to write about return stacking, managed futures, and capital-efficient portfolio design for DIY investors. Growing up in a town whose economy collapsed overnight — and now living in Argentina, where inflation is a lifestyle — gave me a very practical reason to care. The research has been cited by Mt. Lucas, Nasdaq, and Moontower. It's a genuine side obsession. But it comes after the travel, the renovation, the food, and the family.