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Laura Cody How Can I Afford to Travel?
"How Can You Afford to Travel?"
This post marks the first in a series about how we can afford to travel, which will hopefully be useful for you if you want to travel longterm too!
I (Caz) first started travelling in 97 and have ever since. Craig joined me in 02 after we married and we've been travelling ever since. We have always followed the working holiday strategy and still do, only this time we have our own online business and so earn money through that while we continue to travel.
If you work as you travel, you never have to worry about saving too much to begin with and you can slow travel for as long as you like. You've always got income coming in. I was a primary school teacher and Craig a carpenter so we easily found work in other countries. We both also did other jobs like hospitality. We'd work for 1- 2 years, exploring the region we lived in during this period. We'd then take a few months in between jobs to travel through cheaper countries. In 97, I lived in London for two years teaching and travelled around Europe in a campervan with some girlfriends. I then moved to work in Dublin for the summer before moving back home via two months travel in Vietnam and Thailand.
After we married, we lived in Bangkok for 6 months teaching English. We then travelled South East Asia for a few months before moving to Dublin where we lived and travelled for nearly a year. After that we backpacked Africa for five months and then moved to Western Australia to work on a pearl farm for five months. We earned awesome money here, which topped up the bank for our big move to the States.
We lived in Raleigh, North Carolina for two years, finishing with a road trip across the country and then a few months travel through China, Laos and Thailand. We then had our daughter back in Australia and when she was nine months moved back to Raleigh for another two years. We then moved back home, built up our travel blog and 16 months ago set off for a road trip around Australia.
Before I had my blog I was working, saving money, traveling and then I would repeat the whole process.
Nowadays I'm fortunate enough that I can completely live off my blog and keep traveling. My travel style changed a lot though, I travel much slower than years ago as I need to work almost every day on my blog. Having a travel blog is not only fun and travel, it's a damn fulltime job but it's the best job I've ever had. I love the freedom to wake up whenever I please and working from any place in the world.
The $20/day budget covers everything and is meant as an average over the entire journey. In some countries I'm above while in other countries I'm below. My current overall average is above but so far I have covered most of the expensive countries. I see it coming down and believe that the budget will stick (more or less). It's sponsored by Ross Offshore.
We taught English in Vietnam; volunteered in India; started the Two Monkeys Travel blog while in India and UK; started our Yoga and Massage business in Arequipa Peru.
I have savings from when I used to be a travel cardiac nurse. I work as a Thai masseuse, candle-maker, and with my blog. I've traveled to 25 countries over 5 years.
I do what I can, when I can. Sometimes I pick up casual jobs such as teaching or labouring when the opportunity arises, and more recently, I have been making a small income online.
The secret is that I reduce my expenditure, spending next to nothing when I am on the road. By doing this, I don't need to make a whole lot of money.
I used to throw caution to the wind and give up work after saving like crazy then travel for months or move overseas but now I hold down a steady full-time job (which includes travel occasionally) and I have learnt to be really smart with annual leave and holiday periods.
We have several main sources of income. They include, but are not limited to freelance jobs (project management and web-design) and grants, scholarships, and occasional journalist orders. Therfore, we are not physically attached to any office and are absolutely free to move around the world whenever and wherever we want to.
We afford to travel purely from the savings we made before travel. Many people tend to think that we make thousands from our travel blog and get freebies everywhere we go, but the truth is that it doesn’t always work that way. Instead we manage our savings well and push them as far as they will go.
Well firstly we work, so we save up, but to make our pennies go further, we often opt for travelling in South East Asia, Africa or South America where we can live like kings for comparatively little due to the strength of the pound. Yes the flights aren't cheap, but once we're there we can roam around for a month for the price of just 7 days in Europe!
We started in February last year with a trip to South America. We'd saved up enough money for that journey, and planned to return home to "real life" as soon as it was all over. But, then we got back to the UK and found we didn't want to stop.
To avoid working, we started housesitting - which gave us free accommodation throughout the UK, and spent a few months doing that and working on my blog (Sam took over as a sort of 'marketing manager') which by that time was making enough money to support us both!
We saved up, and took another trip - this time just 6 weeks in Vietnam - before Christmas, then started the new year with another stint of housesitting - in Rotterdam. I can afford to travel full time thanks to housesitting, which means living rent free whilst in the UK, freelance work as a writer, and my blog, which is bringing in a modest income through advertising.
Travel is affordable for me as I live a very frugal and minimalistic lifestyle to save as much money as I can. I also made it possible to work and travel at the same time by creating an online business.
We managed to save enough money to not have to worry about working throughout the year as we traveled through South America (3 months), the United Kingdom and Ireland (3 months), India, S.E Asia and China (6 months).
What we do is prioritise, we cut back on other “luxuries” and live on a budget to afford to travel, we also have been heading to places such as Eastern Europe more recently, staying in hostels and travelling in the off season to make the most of our money. This sounds as though we sit at home with the heating off surviving off beans on toast, but really you can easily budget yourself and live comfortably, it’s more about organisation and deciding what is more important; a take away or travel!
When we first started travelling, Luke and I got a job as English teachers in Taiwan for a year. Living in Taiwan, we were able to save half our salary (around £6000 each) while living a comfortable life.
After our year, we blew some of that money on a whirlwind backpacking trip to Vietnam before we got back to the UK. It was then that we decided to make travel a long-term thing and spend our money wisely.
We became house sitters, freelance writers and slow travellers. We secured our first house sit in the mountains of Costa Rica, and managed to find some reliable freelance writing work. We work for 4 hours everyday and that money, although not a lot, is enough to cover our travel expenses.
I work hard and prioritise saving money for travel. I don't buy things I don't need and I always try and put away some money at the end of the month - however small that amount may be! Even when I was earning minimum wage I still managed to save money (no, I didn't live with my parents!) by being strict with spending and reminding myself that I would much rather buy a flight than a pair of shoes.
In my country the prices are low but so are the salaries. Everyone here struggles to save enough for travelling and most of the time people don’t even think about spending money on vacation abroad.
In 2014 I worked full time and afforded to travel to Paris, London, Istanbul, Athens and many places in Bulgaria just because I put travel on first place and I was saving money all the time.
I saved 200 Bulgarian levs per month (roughly 100 Euros). I mostly stay at each city for 4-5 days because it’s hard to get enough vacation days from work and I have to use them wisely.
My advice for those in my position – low salary, developing country and huge desire to see the world: cut the unnecessary expenses, save money every month and travel somewhere new every time. It doesn’t have to be far away. Sometimes the best things to see are just around the corner.
We make travel affordable by firstly eliminating all accommodation costs through House Sitting.
As this is often also very luxurious accommodation we feel we can deal with extremely budget travel between the places - we pick the route by how cheap it is, normally sacrificing (a lot of) comfort and (a lot of) time.
Finally, we work online in a number of different ways so we can make money anywhere in the world!
Thank you for reading this post about how we can all afford to travel! We picked these travel bloggers because of their inspirational websites - so please take a look at those!
And keep an eye out for more posts over the next few weeks which will reveal more secrets on how to afford a life of travel, including how to make money online and how to find the cheapest route to your destination!
P.S. If you don't want to miss any post and/or would like a 10% discount for trustedhousesitters.com click that link!