How Can You Afford to

Travel Full Time?

Money! The #1 question everyone has!

Most Americans are well aware of the cost of vacations. Even driving to a different state and staying with family on our annual vacation can set us back a pretty penny, and a month-long cruise or a 15-hour plane ride to an exotic location for a couple of weeks could easily run $10,000 or more. So how can we possibly afford to travel ALL of the time? Here are a few tricks we’ll use to make this life affordable.

• Visit inexpensive countries with a good exchange rate. Cheap doesn’t mean bad. Sometimes it’s even better than a similar place; it’s just not as well known so tourist demand hasn’t driven up the price. Geo-arbitrage saves us money. Traveling to a place that a lot of tourists may consider “dangerous” because of an event in one city in that large country, or because a war is in another part of that perceived region, is one example. When a country has a bad economy, U.S. dollars may go further. Balancing longer visits to “cheaper” countries with more expensive travel will stretch our budget and let us see it all.

• Stick to a region. Traveling between home and your destination is often the biggest cost of a vacation. We will spend many months visiting adjacent countries with less expensive bus, train and budget flights in between.

• Longer stays. When renting an AirBnB type of accommodation, there’s usually get a discount for longer stays. In fact staying for four weeks is often cheaper than staying for three weeks due to deep discounts at 28 days. In some areas, staying 30 days eliminates the hefty taxes on short-term rentals as well. And four times the cleaning fees from four one-week stays would add a substantial cost compared to only one cleaning fee for a stay of four weeks.

• When we have shorter stays, we usually utilize hotels where we can stay for free with points (and usually have no tax or resort fees on award stays, and sometimes even a 4th night free or something). For example, in the first two months of travel we stayed 13 nights free in hotels and saved almost $3000. Our flight from New Zealand to Bali, with a 24 hour overnight layover in a really nice hotel at the Singapore airport is completely free, saving $1500.

• We will maximize our budget by staying away from tourist and resort areas. Accommodations and restaurants are often considerably less expensive in a neighboring town. The proximity to the tourism industry means English will likely still be spoken by many to help us get by, and we can visit the tourist hot spots if we want, but we can live in a more peaceful environment that is similar to its neighbor but with a more local vibe.

• Travel Hacking. We strategically apply for and use credit cards to earn points on travel. We get thousands of dollars worth of free hotel nights and flights this way, as well as benefits like free airport lounges, free TSA pre-check, travel credits, etc. We’ll share more on this later, but if you are anxious to get started, I would suggest downloading the free app “Travel Freely”—click on Resources at the bottom of the app home page, then “Beginners Start Here.” Don’t pay to learn travel hacking—there’s lots of free information out there, some of which we listed on our Resources page. By the way, this is only effective if you always pay off your credit cards every month and charge just what you would be buying anyways. No debt! And usually your credit score goes up with more credit!

• Save money by using public transportation instead of renting cars (we usually only rent cars when necessary and using points for free).

• Eat like the locals, not at tourist hotspots. Cook in your Airbnb or use the microwave in your hotel. Buy pre-made food at a grocery store rather than a restaurant. Capitalize on accommodations that include breakfast. Scale down to 2 meals a day.

• Travel with carry-on only. That way you are not tempted to buy souvenirs and things—you literally have nowhere to put it!

• Focus on all the free things to do and see. Knowing we’ll likely be nomads for many years means we don’t have to see (or pay for) all the tourist attractions—we’ll likely be back. And honestly, when it’s our life and not a vacation we are less inclined to want to do “tourist” things, less likely to book cruise excursions, etc, and more inclined to explore and get lost and find the hidden gems in places we visit! This approach is less stressful and exhausting as well as cheaper.

• Tracking our spending keeps us aware that it’s real life, with real budget restraints, not a vacation we can “catch up on” later by working extra hours. We use the TravelSpend app.

• A lot of nomads live for free at times, by utilizing housesitting matching services. Taking care of someone’s pet gives you the free use of their house and sometimes even their car while they vacation. We’re looking forward to eventually doing this, especially in more expensive areas like Europe, at some point in the future.

• We have no bills at home—no mortgage, no utilities, no cell phone bills, no costs associated with work like clothing, food and transportation, no car or insurance, no maintenance, etc. We don’t even have a storage unit. Every single expense we have is related to our travel. (Any expenses associated with our kids, gifts, taxes, donations, etc. are minimal and will not be reflected in the travel budget we share even though we will try to keep within our $48,000 a year total budget inclusive).