You don’t have to be rich to travel well.

Eugene Fodor

When we first started telling people about this idea of traveling the world, there were two questions I got asked repeatedly. The first was ‘Did you win the lottery or something?’ and the second was ‘How can you afford that?’ I tried to answer the questions the best way I could, but at the time, I didn’t really know if my answers had much truth to them or not. We’d read about people traveling the world on the cheap, but we had no idea how to make that happen. I imagined them sleeping in their cars, not showering for weeks on end, and living off of ramen noodles for every meal. If that’s what traveling cheap meant, I didn’t want any part of it.

About two years ago, we made the decision that we wanted to travel long term. At the time, we didn’t really know how we could make that work, but we knew we had to change our lives in order to make it happen. So we did what we knew to do at the time. We tightened our budget – we stopped spending money on things we didn’t really want or need and started whole-heartedly saving what we could. This helped a little, but at the rate we were going, it was still going to take forever to save up enough to travel for a year. We both had good paying jobs, but we spent enough money each month to not have much left over at the end for our savings.

We started reading blogs and watching videos on how to manage our money differently. For years, we had one checking account, one savings account, and one credit card. We put our monthly expenses on a credit card and paid it off at the end of the month, which allowed us to use the credit to live on while our money was in the bank earning interest. This strategy had worked well for us for a very long time. Several ‘travel hackers’ that we learned about advised playing the system to take advantage of extra points or bonuses that you could earn to help pay for travel. There were lots of different checking/savings accounts and credit cards out there that offered significant sign up bonuses and rewards on specific items. We took their advice and opened several strategic accounts so we could earn more on our normal every-day purchases. We weren’t spending any more money than we had been, but we became very strategic about where we put the expenses.

Dining expenses were charged to one card because we earned 3% back on those. Groceries went to another card because we earned 5% at grocery stores on that card. Gas was charged on a third card because we got 2% back on fuel charges. We also took advantage of our grocery store benefits when we could. If we had a big expense coming up at Lowe’s Home Improvement, we’d buy a gift card for Lowe’s at our grocery store and then use it to purchase our items at Lowe’s. This allowed us to earn extra fuel points through the grocery store and 5% back on the expense through the credit card (grocery stores earned 5% whereas home improvement stores only earned the standard 1%). We’d also fill up both vehicles with gas at the same time so we could max out our earned fuel discounts. To be completely honest, I thought Brian had lost his mind when he told me about his plan, and I wasn’t crazy about it. I knew he’d done the research, but it just seemed like a complicated mess to me. I’m still not loving the idea of it, really, but now those points are coming in very handy, and I’m glad we tried it. For example, our Southwest flights to Cozumel would have cost us almost $600 if we paid for them outright. Because of the travel hacking, we only ended up paying $105 for all three of us to get to Mexico. We had to use up some of our banked points, but the flights cost us only a few of the points we earned just for signing up for the cards and saved us quite a lot of money.

By the way, there is a lot of information on travel hacking available on the web. If you are interested in learning more from us, please leave us a note in the comments and we can add a more in-depth post later.

So we saved our money, and we earned a lot of bonus points in the process, but traveling is still expensive, isn’t it? Well, it is and it isn’t. Vacationing is expensive, or at least it is for us. When we would go on vacation, we would want to go everywhere and see everything while we could. We’d splurge a little every day because, well, we’re on vacation. The travel that we are doing now isn’t really a vacation, though. Neither our budgets nor our waists could afford for us to vacation for a year, no matter how much we wanted to. So we are living here more like we might live at home. For us, that means eating moderate meals and splurging only occasionally, staying in decent lodgings that may not be overly luxurious, and visiting free/inexpensive sights where we can. We are living well, but because we are in this for the long haul and not just a week’s vacation, we have to maintain on a modest budget.

We had read that you could travel the world on $50 per day, and while we initially thought the guy who touted that had to be crazy, we hoped he wasn’t. Fortunately, over the past 11 days, we have managed to easily keep our expenses in the same range. With travel insurance, lodging, transportation (including our flights to Mexico), food, and all our supplies, we’ve averaged $146/day. When you consider that is for 3 people, the $50/day number feels pretty real. Today, for example, we spent $35 on our hotel, $45 on our food, and $8 to have our laundry done. We have been resting by the pool and catching up on Henry’s schoolwork, so it’s been a bit of a lazy day for us. Our travel days are more expensive, but bus fare for all of us from town to town has been about $35 so even that isn’t too bad. The rest of the world won’t be like it is here in Mexico. Some areas will be much more expensive, but some will be significantly cheaper as well. We’ve found it pretty easy to live at this range here, so long as we stay out of the touristy areas mostly. We are eating very well, we’ve had nice private hotel/hostel rooms everywhere we’ve been, and we’ve gone and done quite a lot.

Money is important for traveling, but it can be an excuse that keeps you from enjoying it also. We could have worked longer and saved more, but how much is ever really enough? One day we may return to our jobs and work a while longer, but for now, this is what we need. We aren’t living in the lap of luxury, but we are well fed and happy, and we are together. I’m glad we had the courage to try something new and to invest in us. We might not be rich financially, but we have each other, and for today, that’s enough.