HOW DO WE AFFORD TO TRAVEL?
One of the most commonly asked questions we get is “how do you afford to travel?!” In this post, we will detail exactly how we saved money before leaving for our world trip, how we use credit cards and points to book lots of travel, and how we save & budget on the road.
First and foremost, travelling is much cheaper than many people realise. Since we left Taiwan on January 18th, 2023, we have averaged a daily spend of $85 total. This includes everything from flights, accomodation, food, activities, travel insurance, and transportation for 2 people! This is MUCH cheaper than most people spend in their normal lives on rent, food, car payment, insurance etc. Many people are shocked to hear this, as there is a misconception that all travel is very luxurious and expensive. While there are definitely luxury world travellers out there, we follow a fairly strict and meticulous budget that allows us to travel using our savings and not need to work while on the road.
SAVING MONEY
For nearly 3 years before we left Taiwan, we both worked teaching English in Taiwan. English teaching is quite a lucrative job in Taiwan, as the demand for good teachers is very high. The average salary for English teachers at a cram school is around $22 USD/hour, and private tutoring is even more lucrative, where you can earn $30+ USD per hour private tutoring.
These are good wages even by Western standards (a $7.25 federal minimum wage in America is an actual insult to society), and the cost of living in Taiwan in MUCH lower than countries like America or Canada. For example, our rent in a 1 bedroom apartment in downtown Kaohsiung came out to around $470 USD per month. Split between the two of us, we were only paying $235 per person for rent! Taiwan also has incredibly affordable public transportation, food, and health insurance.
When we committed in early 2021 to saving for this trip, we sat down, mapped out our exact monthly income, every single necessary expense, and cut out any unnecessary spending. Sarah also had $4500 USD of student loans left to pay, so we worked to cancel out any debt before we dedicated our budget to saving for this trip. Our high wages and low cost of living allowed us to save aggressively, and we budgeted to save around 50% of our paycheck every month. We budgeted and saved for 3 years during the COVID era, and managed to save around $20,000 USD per person for travel, in addition to putting some other savings away for emergencies. We realise that this is a massive privilege that a lot of people are unable to afford.
That said, saving did not come without sacrifice! We ate 95% of meals at home, avoided buying drinks on nights out (we just pregamed at home before going out hehe), and didn’t buy many new clothes during that time. We had bicycles, an electric scooter, and public transportation as our means of transport so we didn’t have expensive car payments, gas, or car insurance. For the last ~6 months before we left, we were also lucky enough to move into my parents’ apartment to further save on costs.
Again, we recognise that the ability to save this much in a relatively short period of time is an enormous privilege. While the rest of the world was halted during COVID and many corporations were laying off employees in the West, Taiwan was thriving with their COVID response and the English teaching demand was higher than ever. This perfect storm of events allowed us to save a tremendous amount for this trip of a lifetime, and we are forever grateful to the Taiwanese people & government for implementing strict COVID control measures and keeping its residents and citizens safe and thriving during a time of such uncertainty in the world.
If teaching English in Taiwan is something that you would potentially be interested in, please don’t hesitate to reach out for more information. Teaching is not for everyone, and it is definitely challenging and at times exhausting, but we both love kids and genuinely enjoyed our time with our babies in the classroom!
HOW WE SAVE MONEY ON THE ROAD
Since being on the road, we’ve tracked every single expense using an app called TripCoin. This is an amazing app that allows us to track exactly how much we are spending so that we can maintain a daily average. The app allows us to track spending in the local currency, and it automatically converts that to USD so we can easily standardise our spending across different currencies. We can also enter expense categories, so we can filter to see exactly how much we spent on different categories such as accomodations, travel, food etc. Obviously some days we spend more and others we spend less, but we use a daily average as a metric to track how we are doing with our budget.
ACCOMODATION
We will often choose not-so-glamorous accommodation options, including rooms without windows, and places that are a bit more run-down to save extra for experiences. We never skimp on safety though. We shop around on different platforms to find the best deals — usually between Booking.com (which has a great discount program the more you book with them), and Airbnb.
In Asia, your dollars stretch much further (we’ve stayed in gorgeous hotel rooms in Vietnam that cost ~$8 per night total, a 4-person dorm room in Thailand for $5 per night, etc!). In Europe, we sometimes opted for hostel beds or places a little out of town to save money. In Canada and the USA we were able to stay with friends and family! Other times, friends will come meet up with us on the road and we have been able to split costs with them.
We have also been super lucky to have been able to Couchsurf several times. It’s an app where you can connect with people living in the city of your choosing, and they let you stay at their house with them for free! Through this site we’ve met some of the coolest people ever, and gotten to experience cities through a local lens, which has been one of the biggest highlights from our travels. This saved us so much money in Europe, as accommodation in a city like Paris is astronomically expensive!
Travelling as a couple also helps us save on costs, as it is often cheaper to get a room for two than two separate hostel beds.
Occasionally, we also choose to travel overnight on buses, trains, or ferries in order to save on a night of accommodation while also getting our travel out of the way while we sleep.
FOOD
We try to eat as the locals do as much as possible, especially in places with great/cheap street food.
I also love to cook, so whenever we can we will try to find accommodations with kitchens so we can make our own meals (this saved us a ton of money in Europe especially).
We do not drink alcohol very often on our travels (usually only when meeting up with friends), so that’s an expense we don’t need to factor in.
TRANSPORTATION
We travel on foot as much as we can. If we have all our luggage with us, we will walk up to 30 minutes to a destination. If we are just exploring a new place, we will happily walk for hours to a destination. It’s a wonderful way to get the feel of a place, while also saving money.
We’ve also learned the hard way that sometimes its worth it just to book a ride, though. Some countries are more expensive than others when it comes to taxis and Ubers, so we try to check our options and see if it’s more worth it to pay $3 for a ride or walk 2 hours in the scorching sun hahah.
We prefer to take buses and trains when we can between places, as flying can be more annoying and strict with our luggage, etc. Our travel days are often long and cramped, but that’s a small price to pay for seeing the world! We would much rather book the most uncomfortable transportation and have an unglamorous travel day, if it means we’ll have more to spend on experiences once we arrive.
EXPERIENCES
This is the one place we are most likely to splurge! We are so lucky to be visiting some of the most incredible places on earth, so we want to make the most of our opportunity. However, we have to be aware of our budget, and where we can we will DIY the experience.
For instance, if a tour we are interested in is out of our price range, we might rent a scooter or bicycle to get to the destination ourselves. We will often pack our own lunches if we do join an all-day tour. We check reddit and blog posts to get an idea of whether an activity costs more to book online or in-person, and do whichever is more cost-effective.
CLOTHES/SOUVENIRS
Since we have to carry everything we buy on our backs, it severely impacts are interest in picking up extra things along the way. We only very rarely buy souvenirs, if it’s something incredibly special (and light)!
TRAVEL HACKING
One of the best investments and biggest money savers that we’ve had since travelling is utilising premium travel credit cards and earning points to pay for travel. In fact, all of our big, expensive international cross continental flights have been fully free using credit card points. We paid for our flights from Taiwan to Australia, Thailand to France, Rome to Canada, and Paraguay to USA flights fully using points. These flights would have been thousands of dollars per person, and we were able to save so much money by learning how to utilise these points to our advantage.
The 3 travel credit cards that I have are the Chase Sapphire Reserve, Capital One Venture Card, and the United Explorer Card. The sign on bonuses for each card were 60,000 points, 75,000 points, and 60,000 points respectively. In addition, because these are travel credit cards, most travel related expenses put onto these cards earn 3x the points. I use my cards to book all of our hotels, buses, Ubers etc. and am able to rack up tons of points to use and redeem for expensive flights.
Additionally, one of our most used benefits of the Chase Sapphire Reserve is the airport lounge access in most airports we go to. Airport food is always incredibly expensive, but with this credit card perk, we are able to get free meals on every airport travel day.
There are tons of resources regarding travel hacking and using points online, but don’t hesitate to reach out on Instagram if you have any questions regarding these 3 cards!
We also utilise the Charles Schwab debit card, that has no ATM fees worldwide! This allows us to take out cash in every country and not worry about insane ATM fees. Those fees can easily rack up to 30 or 40 dollars a month if you’re not careful, and we utilise the Schwab card to avoid paying any extra fees while travelling in a cash based society.
We hope this helps you realise that travelling doesn’t have to break the bank. You can make it as affordable as you want, while still getting the most out of each place. We were super lucky to have been able to save so much before leaving, but we’ve also met a lot of people on the road who work remotely or pick up jobs along the way. There are a lot of opportunities if you are willing to look for them, and aren’t afraid to leave the life you knew behind. We know this kind of travel is not for everyone, but we are so happy and feel so blessed to be on this journey.