A reader sent me an email the other day to ask for some saving tips for world travel.
They are a couple who dream of traveling around the world together, but are unsure how they can make it happen with their finances. (They also should read my couples travel post.)
I am sure this is a problem many of us have. A lack of finances is what prevents people from beginning their travels in the first place.
A dollar saved is a dollar earned
Many people have often mistake us for being very rich to have travelled the way we have. I wish! Not true at all.
We just made smart decision and stuck to some sensible saving tips for our world travel.
Here are a few of our strategies that you might be able to put into practice when planning and budgeting for your world travel.
Ask Yourself the Right Financial Questions
First thing you need to do is ask yourself the right questions.
- How can I create more money in my life?
- How can I cut back in order to save more money? (Remember a dollar saved is a dollar earned.)
How can I create more money in order to travel?
New Skills and Extra jobs
Start thinking about what skills you have and what extra jobs you can take on to earn and save more money for travel.
No, it is not easy. The last thing you want to do after a long, hard day at work is go to work again.
But, how big is your dream? How much do you want it?
If you want it bad enough, you will do it.
I used to come home from a day of teaching, and instead of collapsing on the couch I would put my uniform on and head down to the local restaurant or bar and start my second shift, or I would gather my tutoring materials together to spend a couple of hours teaching privately.
Craig also gave up his weekends to work extra shifts. Do what you have to do.
Before we moved to the States, we had just come from 5 months in Africa. Our bank balance was extremely low. We only had a few months to save several thousand dollars and it wasn’t looking good.
Our airfares were already covered – Craig’s with his round the world ticket, and my free flight was paid for by my company. But we needed moving and living expenses.
Time to find a job that would pay us extremely well and allow us to save.
The Pearler
Enter Stiltsy! My brother convinced us to go to Kuri Bay to pearl farm with him. We knew nothing about pearling and decided it was time to learn a new skill and go for it.
All our accommodation and food was paid for. We lived on camp, miles from civilization for up to 5 weeks at a time, for four months.
We did nothing but work. It was tough, but after a five week swing we walked into our week off with $10,000 in our bank account. We did 3 five week swings. Pretty easy money after all.
Boarders/ Rent
Before we left for our five year honeymoon, we had our own 4 bedroom two storey house. Instead of just the two of us trying to fill in the space, we invited two people to come join us.
Not only did we get extra cash coming in to our savings account, but we had lots of fun times together.
Who can you bring in as a boarder? Or can you move out and rent your place out? Maybe you might have to move back in with your parents for awhile. OMG.
Do what you have to do.
Sell
Ebay and Craig’s list are ready to be your new best friend. Go through all your crap and sell what you don’t need or use. Even if you only make a couple of hundred bucks, that is money that will give you a few days in Asia or Africa. It is all worth it.
Trade your materialistic things for memories.
Working Holiday
This is our favourite savings tip for World Travel. If you plan to make your travel around the world a long one then the best way to do this is work as you go.
This means you don’t have to save as much to begin with and once you are there you can spend the local currency.
My students in Bangkok, Thailand
You also get to experience another culture deeply by being immersed in the day to day living. You can hop from country to country on different working holiday visas, and if you are lucky enough you might land a work opportunity that provides you with free flights and accommodation.
This happened to us in Australia, Thailand, and the USA.
Tax returns/bonuses
This has given us huge lumps of money at times to travel with. Tax returns and bonuses are unexpected win falls.
Do not ever use this money for anything other than paying off debts or saving for your dreams. Take that cash and put it straight into your savings account.
In 2005, we were getting ready to road trip south to Florida for the summer months and did not have anywhere near the amount of money we needed. From out of the blue, a friend I worked with in Dublin contacted me to let me know I had back pay due to me from when I taught in Dublin for 6 months.
After arranging how she could deposit in my bank account for me, I had $2,500 to go play with on our road trip. Beautiful!
How do I save money for World Travel?
Get clear on what it is you want from life. If you find you have a wardrobe full of clothes never worn, or a shed full of unused toys then you are not clear on what you want from life or your purpose.
The stuff is filling that void for you.
Why are you here? What do you want your life to be represented by- stuff or memories?
When tempted to buy things you don’t really need you need, stop and ask yourself some serious questions.
Is buying ______________ worth giving up travel (or any dream you want)?
Could this ____________ be worth more to me than watching the sunrise over the world’s highest sand dunes in Soussesvlei, or to have rice wine shots with the locals in a small restaurant in the mountains of Vietnam?
Do I want this to be the representation of my life’s experiences?
How will it enrich my life and bring me closer to my goals?
Luxury verse needs
Get back to basics. You don’t really need a lot to survive, nor to have a great life really. You can get by with the bare essentials. Your life will feel less cluttered, which will free up even more energy in order to attract more money to you.
Ditch the labels, the expensive price tags, the brand new cars and other goods, the fancy restaurants, and top shelf drinks. Start living on a needs basis not a want.
Public transport
Take the bus
One thing we loved about living in big cities like London, Bangkok and Dublin was that we did not need a car. Cars are expensive.
Not only do you have to buy it, you have to insure it, maintain it, and fill it with expensive fuel.
Save your money, help the environment, and lose the car for public transport or better yet, your feet. This will help you get in shape for your travels physically as well as financially.
Eat at Home
This is probably the one we have most difficulty with and I blame travel for this. We are too used to going out to eat, especially in cheap countries like Asia and Africa.
Cook at home
The first place to cut is buying your work lunches. Take your own lunch to work, including drinks and yes… coffee...bye bye Starbucks (weep).
Reduce dinners out as much as you can and substitute them for picnics at the park or barbecues at home with your mates. Make eating at home fun by trying new recipes and drinking cheap, supermarket wine while you cook.
Live off one wage
This was one of our biggest strategies for saving a lot of money fast. If you don’t put this into practice before you know it you will have spent both your wages on stuff you don’t need.
Decide whose wage you can live off (after you have followed these saving tips for world travel) and then bank one whole complete wage into a savings account and live off only the other.
If you don’t have the money for something, then you can’t do it.
Saving Accounts
Have a savings account for your travels. Ensure a certain amount goes in there each week, or month, depending on how often you get paid.
Research to find out which savings account is going to give you the best interest. Let’s face it, banks aren’t going to give you much, but even if it is $10 more, it is better off in my pocket than theirs.
Work out a Travel Plan
Take some time to plan your travel style.
How do you plan on getting around when you travel? What sort of places are you willing to stay, where will you eat?
In other words how low budget do you plan to go?
The lower your travel style, the lower your costs and the greater chance you have to get on the road earlier and for longer.
Camping is always in our travel plan
Choose the countries you travel to first wisely. My first trip abroad was 3 months in Indoensia, which was incredibly cheap.
I then moved straight to London where I lost two thirds of my money when I flew into Heathrow. Ouch!! Lucky I was moving there to work.
I was only there for about a two weeks before I was working behind the bar in Liverpool St for the summer waiting for school to start again.
Now that English pounds were flowing into my pocket I could breathe again. Of course earning the pound meant that my money went extremely far when I travelled Europe for the summer in a campervan.
Working out a strategic travel plan will really assist you in saving money for your world travel. It will show you just how possible it is ,and how little money you really need.
I hope these saving tips for world travel have helped you see the light.
Keep believing in your dreams. If you want it bad enough, you will find a way.
Gonna do a bit of shameless self promotion here and plug our Frugal February project which was dedicated to saving money for travel.
http://www.donteverlookback.com/category/frugal-february/
Really really useful tips, thank you!
I feel really inspired now, I guess that if you have a dream, there is always a way to try and save for it!
When traveling in Asia, where most of foreigners take cabs, i try to take public transport too, not only you save money, but also get to learn a lot: language, about the geography, the local people, the area. Another thing is restaurants, i try to go eat following some local. I may get some stomach ache the first day if I am not used to it, but, its cheaper and plus, you get to learn what do they really eat. Thats the whole point of traveling after all no? it does not make sense to go to another country and try to live on starbucks like if you were home. thanks!
Hey Adriana,
If your dream is BIG enough you will find a way to sacrifice and get it done. But you have to have a big enough reason WHY? And yes, traveling like the locals is always best financially and for interaction.
I am a single mom planning an around the world trip with my daughter in two years time. It might seem like a long time away but it coincides with the paying off of a HUGE loan and a number of months to use that freed up money to bump up my savings. I have a boarder that has been with us for a couple of years. I recently renovated my basement so I could get a second boarder in and fast track our savings (paid for the reno with my tax return). I am also planning to rent my house while we’re away so I can cover my mortgage, property tax, insurance and condo fees.
Hi Stephanie,
Your trip sounds great. Good idea to pay off that bad debt first and then work on the savings. That’s what we did and we also rented our place whilst abroad. Two years will come quick – get excited
I apologize for my bad English, but your travel experiences are so interesting. You always read these tips on how to save money, are very useful. Thanks and looking to the next post. Tiziana
Hey Tiziana,
No need to apologize. Thanks for dropping by
I love the line, “trade your materialistic things for memories.” It is all about priorities.
G’day Travel Chica,
Our tag line is….”it’s all about the memories”…cherish them.
These are all such great tips! I follow a lot of them myself already, but will make note of some new ones! Tax refunds are the best…. too bad I already spent this year’s though.
Great tips! Sharing the specific ways you’ve made money to travel is especially helpful!
Fantastic tips! You have to be intentional about saving and sacrifice in order to get what you want.
I live in a one income household with two kids in the most expensive state in the US – California. Yet I have no debt. I made it a focus of mine to pay off debt that I have and I refuse to live in debt. In 2009, I had a car accident that forced me to buy a new car for my family. In Sept 09, I bought a 2005 car. In April 2011, that car was paid off.
Living on a budget is essential whether you are traveling or not. There are lots of little tips but you must know the difference between needs and wants and sacrifice you wants to get something you want even more. One of the biggest things I would encourage people to do is pay off their debt as this will be something that can really free you up once it is paid off.
Fantastic tips! So much more I could add to this but I will stop there!
Hi – good post. My only question is working holiday visas for US citizens are only in a handful of countries. How were you able to work in London?
We are Australian, so for us it was easy. Aussie get two year working holiday visas. We offer the same back. Not sure how American’s go about working there though.
Useful tips, particularly the ‘get rid of your crap’ one. I also often barter, trading in one item I don’t need for another I do. One more thing: create a nest egg wghich you will – absolutely not – touch. I do this by buying gold, mostly in the form of coins and stash them in the bank..then forget abiut them. If ever there is an emergency, they can easily be converted into cash.
Money management isn’t my thing so I won’t contributer here, just read and learn…
My wife and I are in the process of simplifying our lives to free ourselves up for new opportunities in life, but we also hope to do a lot of traveling. This certainly gets me thinking in the right direction.
We followed a lot of these same principles when we saved for our trip. Our biggest accomplishment wasn’t saving for the trip, it was paying off our student loans before the trip- leaving us with no debt hanging over our heads. That made travel A LOT easier and coming home even better! The key is to find out where you spend your money and then decide where you can cut back!!
Good tips for sure. I’ve already cut back as much as possible so it’s time to work on bringing in more cash!
Any recommendations on a working holiday job site? I’m trying to gather up my resources now so I can follow your last step better.
Start with here http://www.ytravelblog.com/working-abroad-2/ There should be a whole lot of resources that you can use.
Holy crapballs! $10,000 for 5 weeks work?! We are so going to do that!
You don’t want to know what my brother walks away with in the bank after a year of working here!
Great tips. Actually pearl farming sounds pretty exotic to me, stuck in England. What do you have to do?
You have to spend all day on the boat, pulling the cages out of the water that house the pearl shell. There are baby ones, and full grown ones. You then have to put them through a cleaning machine, chip all the barnacles and growth off them and throw them back into the ocean. Very laborious and monotonous work. EVerything else surrounding it is exotic though
These are awesome tips! We are always hunting down fun ways to travel on a budget and figuring out ways to make more…to travel more.
Awesome tips here – enough to silence any naysayer who says they can’t afford to travel!
It is all about priorities…, right?
this post such a motivation to me, I always said to people who asked me a lot ‘how you get much money for traveling’ GET SAVING DUDE!!!
Exactly. Just start!
What a wonderful article this is, I need to earn a lot of courage to follow your lead. Sacrificing all the things that you are used to save money for world travel is actually needed. The most useful tip I got is to have a working holiday visa. I’m a teacher myself so I guess I can dot it. Wish me luck!
Wonderful entry guys. Just the kind of tips I need to be living by if I want to get out of here sooner rather than later
You can do it Chris!