Whenever we tell people about our recent travels, the number one question we get (basically every single time) is how do you afford to travel? And it is a valid question. Traveling is expensive. I am a stay-at-home-mom with no income and Ben works at a library; so we aren’t making the big bucks. But we have been able to travel internationally 3 out of the last 4 years, go on an average of at least one trip every month for the last 4 years and we’ve been able to do it all while not going into any debt.
We are going to be sharing over the next few months here and on our podcast how we have been able to afford to travel to so many places and what we do behind the scenes to make that possible.
5 Ways We Can Afford Travel:
There are lots of things that we do to afford to travel, but I’ve broken them down into 5 categories.
- No debt
- Budget
- Save
- Prioritize
- Dream
I’ll go into a little detail now about each of these things, but keep an eye out over the next few months as we go deeper into each of these ways.
No Debt:
This is huge for us. Ben and I have been married for 7 years and have never had any debt. We have worked our entire marriage, never had credit cards and have always said that debt isn’t an option (except for a mortgage when we’re ready to buy a house, and even then we have very specific guidelines that we will follow).
Ben and I got married when we were both still in college, getting our undergraduate degrees. We were fortunate enough to have financial support from our parents with our tuition but we also worked hard to earn scholarships and grants to pay for our tuition as much as we could. And we worked to pay for all of our living expenses.
In addition to both receiving our undergraduate degrees, we paid for Ben to get a Master’s degree out of our own pockets without any loans or debt. We are also currently paying for him to receive a second Master’s degree and I will begin my own graduate work in the next few weeks. We have worked hard and taken opportunities to get this education, all while not sacrificing our travels or by going into debt.
Budget:
Another way we can afford to travel is by budgeting! Lots of people don’t like that word, and I can’t say that I love having budget meetings, but it has totally allowed us to do the things we want to do while staying within our means.
By making every dollar have a purpose, we aren’t surprised that we can’t afford something. We list what we have to pay for each month and things we would like to be able to do. After taking care of the necessities, we use what money we have left to meet our other goals whether that is traveling, saving up for something or doing something fun.
Save:
Saving is a HUGE way that we can travel. We have learned to delay gratification and to save for what we want. For example, this year we knew that we would need to be replacing quite a few electronics so we decided to take fewer trips and to have them be closer to home and less expensive so that we could put more money towards things we need to replace.
Saving has made it possible for us to go on lots of trips and to travel nicely. While some trips we do try to do as cheaply as possible, our larger trips we save up the money for and know how much we have to spend on food and activities so we aren’t stressed about if we can afford to do something or not.
Prioritize:
Like I mentioned before, we have to prioritize what we do with our money. And for us, traveling is a big thing we want to do, so we do it! Lots of people say they want to travel, but when it comes down to it, they don’t spend their money there; they spend it other places.
Also like I mentioned above, traveling is important to us, but there are other expenses we knew we would have this year. So we figured out a way to still travel and pay for our other expenses simply by prioritizing and making it work in our budget.
Dream:
One of the best ways we can afford to travel is to dream. That sounds counterintuitive right? But it isn’t! By dreaming of places we want to go and by setting goals we want to achieve, we have a direction to go and purposes to accomplish.
We have a list of all the places we want to travel: near and far, small and big. That way when we see a good deal to travel to one of our dream destinations, we can take up the offer and pay for it out of our travel money we have saved. This way we are getting the best deal and letting the money we saved go towards other travels or other things we need or want.
Sum Up:
Basically anyone can travel who wants to. We don’t make a lot of money but we are able to make traveling a part of our lives because we don’t have debt, we budget our monthly income, we save for big expense, prioritize traveling and we dream big! Make sure to stick around and keep an eye out for our blog posts and podcast episodes that will be coming out the next few months that dive deeper into each one of these ways we can afford to travel.
