Once we decided to travel for a year one of the most important parts we had to figure out was can we actually afford to travel for such a long time. Whenever we tell someone new “yeah we quit our jobs and we’re going to travel for the next year” their first remark is always something along the lines of “how in the world are you able to afford that?”. In this post we’re going to go over the main ways that we plan to afford a year of travel as well as things we have done to help us cut costs.
Everything here is more of a general template for what we did to save money and afford to travel long term. We will be putting together future posts that will outline specifically what we spend and if we are hitting our budget outlined below!
There isn’t one recipe to get to travel long term. Everything depends on your lifestyle and therefore how much you’re spending vs. saving. We’ve seen people who have kept their day jobs, taken a leave of absence or those who quit like we did. So for the purpose of this post we’re talking about things we did (besides keeping our day jobs) in order to have enough money to travel long term.
1. Saving Money (for a while)
Probably the most obvious way to afford something like this, but also the hardest, is saving money. In our Why are We Traveling Post we talked about how we’ve been talking about traveling like this for a few years. So we both were very diligent about putting money from every paycheck into our savings. While we never made a separate account for “Traveling for a Year” or anything like that, we continued to save knowing that there were things we wanted to do.
About a year before leaving for our yearlong trip was then we really started to buckle down. At that point we were saving even more by cutting out almost everything. We stopped going out to dinner, getting drinks at new places, buying things we didn’t need and spending money on anything that wasn’t completely necessary. In the city, takeout on a weeknight for two people can easily cost $50+ for a meal. If you cut out two takeout nights per week, you can save over $5,000 in one year in addition to anything else you cut out (shopping, bars, etc.).
- Whatever your vice is, whether it be clothes or food, you really have to jump all in if you’re committing to something like this.
Every week I would keep track of our expenses in a note on my phone called Budget. I updated it with how much we spent on groceries and anything else we bought. We gave ourselves a budget for each week and on Sunday I would total it up. Most weeks we were well under while there were a few that were close to going over.
- There are a bunch of apps out there that can help you keep track of everything if a note doesn’t work for you. However, keeping track of everything held us much more accountable!
Travel Truth: I won’t lie and say it was fun every single week. There definitely were times where we got lazy or annoyed that we were eating leftover fried rice for 5 days straight. We kept reminding ourselves the extra savings meant more days traveling!
Savings Goals
It’s always a little frustrating when posts don’t give specific information so below is an outline for exactly what our monthly targets were.
Our savings goal was a minimum of $1,000 each per month. This was just for the trip specifically as we had separate savings going towards retirement
This is extremely dependent on your living/working situation, as well as what your trip budget is and how long you want to travel. The money we put aside each month plus the money we saved from reducing our meal/drinks expenses, got us to $30,000 for the last year. We also had additional savings from years past which helped us hit our goal before leaving for the trip.
Travel Truth: The biggest piece of advice we can give is START EARLY. If long term travel is something you are interested in, or think you may potentially do, then start saving as soon as possible. It will only make things easier in the long run.
2. Selling Everything
In order to travel for a year we decided to give up our apartment and sell all of our stuff. Not everyone that travels long term decides to go this route but for our circumstances this was the best plan for us.
We decided to sell all of our stuff from our apartment for a couple reasons:
- Our apartment lease was ending shortly before we would be leaving anyways. There was no way we were going to be able to afford to pay rent for our apartment and all of the trip expenses. It also felt unnecessary to keep an apartment that we would be gone from for an entire year.
- The money we got from selling everything completely paid for our Sony A7III camera, a wide angle lens for the camera, and all of our other gear for the trip. If you know anything about cameras and lenses then you know those things are not cheap!
- We didn’t want to simply take everything from our apartment, put it in storage and then have to deal with everything in the storage unit once we’re back. For us we wanted to keep and store only the things that we loved and wanted to have again.
- Not to be too Marie Kondo-ish but we felt like this was an opportunity to get rid of things that we no longer needed or didn’t actually love. Now we only have the things that we want to live with when we are done traveling.
We sold our TV, TV stand, end tables, nightstands, bookshelf, couch, dressers and bed frame. Which means that the only furniture item that we still own is our mattress. We also sold a significant amount of clothes, kitchen items and other miscellaneous things that we no longer felt we needed.
Read More: Selling Everything to Travel
3. Travel Credit Cards
Another way that we hope to cut down costs is by taking advantage of travel credit cards and the travel perks that come with them. When you sign up for specific credit cards you often times get a sign on bonus as well as programs that the card offers. The Points Guy and Kara and Nate both have a lot of knowledge about travel hacking and how to use it to your advantage if you’re looking for where to start.
The first card we signed up for is the American Airlines Citi / AAdvantage Platinum Select Card. We did this to have at least one airline card in order to redeem points to pay for airfare at some point. Because American Airlines is part of the One World Alliance it also gives us flexibility to use them with other airlines within the alliance.
The other card we signed up for is the Chase Sapphire Reserve Card. While the annual fee is very expensive the main reason we signed up for this card is to get the Priority Pass. Priority Pass is an access card to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. Which means instead of sitting on those uncomfortable airport gate seats for 7 hours we (in most cases) will have access to nicer lounges with free food, free wifi and other amenities.
- Not only will it make long layovers more comfortable and productive but we also hope it will cut down on costs on travel days. Theoretically if there is a lounge in the airport that we have access to we shouldn’t have to spend any money that day on things like food and water.
- Both of the cards have other perks such as rental car coverage, loss of items, etc. so make sure to read the fine print when signing up so you know exactly what you have!
4. No-Fees Debit Card
Saving money and selling stuff saved us money before we left. But we’re hoping the travel credit cards (along with the Priority Pass) as well as our no-fees debit card will help us keep our costs down while traveling.
Because we will be traveling to so many different places we will constantly have to be taking out money in different currencies. Depending on your bank and their fee structure, it can cost an additional $2-15 in fees when you take out money at a foreign ATM. Sometimes you get hit with a foreign ATM fee (not your bank) as well as an international fee for being outside of your home country.
- Once or twice it’s annoying but doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. But if we’re taking out money at an ATM at least once in every country that can very quickly add up!
- For example, a $5 fee (lets be conservative) in 25 countries would be $125 and thats only taking money out once in each place. Odds are you will find yourself taking out money way more often than once per country.
So we signed up for the Charles Schwab Visa Platinum Debit Card. This debit card allows us to withdraw money at ATMs internationally with no fees and if the ATM or bank has a fee, Charles Schwab will refund your account the fee amount. If you travel internationally a lot this is a great card to have (thats not a credit card) to make your life easier!
3. Giving Ourselves a Daily Budget
While preparing for this trip we found giving ourselves a budget for a specific amount of time worked really well for us. Being for a shorter amount of time (daily budget) helped us understand better where our money was actually going.
So for our travels we are giving ourselves a daily budget. We also have a budget for the entire trip that includes our transportation costs as well as a few big bucket list items we want to do. However, it is almost impossible to set a monthly budget unless we planned to stay in certain countries for a long period of time.
We have set our budget to an average of $75 a day.
This does NOT include our major transportation costs (flights, trains, buses) so this budget is for our nightly accommodations, meals, and anything we want to do that day.
(Using our takeout example above, we were able to add 2 months onto our trip solely by cutting out the amount of money we spent on takeout dinners.) We would really like to be under $75 in places where we know we can spend less like South America and Asia. Hopefully that will off-set some of the more expensive places in Europe where we will most likely go over.
- In order to set this daily budget we thought about our overall budget for the trip and then what our priorities are in terms of spending money. We would like to spend no more than 50% of our daily budget on accommodations a night in order to leave enough money for meals as well as other things we want to do.
- Maybe this will work and maybe it won’t but it gives us a starting point and then we can adjust from there!
6. Off-Season Travel
This is a hit or miss strategy. Off-season travel or shoulder-season travel is traveling to a place in a time of the year that is not the peak season. For many places the peak season are the dry, warm months but that also means it’s usually the most expensive time to go.
We will most likely be in Italy in August which is absolutely the busiest (and therefore most expensive) time to visit, however, it’s hard to plan to visit everywhere in the off-season. So it’s something to consider if you notice flight or hotel prices are significantly more expensive then you want to pay. But it might not always work for your schedule or other destinations.
- We will be traveling to some places in the off-season which should reduce how expensive it is. But it isn’t our overall goal to always be traveling in the off-season. While we would appreciate dealing with no crowds, it simply won’t line up for our entire trip.
7. Flexibility
Google Flights Date Grid 
Google Flights Price Graph
Flexibility, if you have the luxury of having it, can save you a lot of money while traveling! We’ve taken advantage of this while booking a lot of our flights lately. Google flights has a feature called Date Grid where it gives you the price for the flight you are looking at for a variety of dates. It also has a Price Graph where it gives you insight into if the price you’re seeing is typical, more expensive than usual or less expensive than usual.
- Booking our flight from the US to Lima we relied on these tools heavily when deciding which day to actually fly out.
We will also be putting together regular budget posts as well as cost guides for the different places around the world we are going to! Keep an eye out for those in the coming months.
Do you have any other tips for managing travel costs?
Safe travels. Enjoy this experience of a lifetime❤️