How To Save Money For Travel

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Making Travel Possible

It’s been nearly 30 years since the launch of the internet, and the effects have reverberated through our entire society. Travel is a sphere which was not left untouched, and every year there is another new innovation, or service being launched which makes travel easier, safer, and cheaper.

We often get asked by family and friends how we were able to travel around the world for a year. The assumption is that we must have saved a couple hundred thousand dollars, hired an agent to book everything for us, and were just lounging around the world. The reality is much different.

People want all sorts of things in life, from a new car, a new house, or the perfect two week vacation. We wanted to travel so that’s what we strove for.

Below we will outline some mindset changes we had to make, practical tips to save, and to end off we’ll outline how we managed our income to save as much as possibles. This post is going to be a bit long, but I hope you will find it worthwhile. Our goal with this post is to actually be helpful as apposed to being a clickbait list.

Mindset Change

1. Focus On The Next Goal

When we got married we had a lot of dreams for what we wanted to do in the future. We still do. Having all these dreams and plans was a bit overwhelming, and we weren’t sure what exactly to focus on next. In the end we decided to focus on the next thing we wanted to do. Instead of all the things we eventually one day in the future wanted. As a result we could focus on our goal exclusively.

We knew we wanted to travel the world. This meant that we didn’t focus on having a great car, updating our wardrobe, or buying furniture. These are all things we want to do one day, but they took away from our primary goal so instead we put them on the back burner.

Our table was a used piece of furniture our parents loaned us, our couch used to sit in Katie’s bedroom, and we hardly ever shopped for clothes.

2. Don’t Buy Stuff You Can’t Take With You

The last paragraph is a great segue into our next mindset shift. We are consistently bombarded with messages of how we need to buy this or that item of clothing, own various kitchen gadgets, or go on fancy vacations. Every single time we were tempted to buy something we always had a secondary question, “Can we take this with us?”

For the most part we discovered that we didn’t need much. Also, we would not even be able to find the space, or even need for it, while we were traveling. With that in mind we opted to put it in the category of “We’ll think about it once we return”.

3. You Choose Your Story

Social media really ups the pressure on a lot of people. You look around and  your friends are having babies, buying houses, driving nice cars, or going on fancy vacations. It is really tempting to do what others are doing simply because that’s what they are doing.

The thing is, if you allow other people to determine what your story is, then you will never get to live out your dream.

We often went on social media fasts in order to combat the constant media bombardment. It was so helpful to unplug, and refocus on what we wanted to do, instead of looking at what other people are doing. 

Practical Tips For Saving Money

1. Know How Much You Need

One of the biggest demotivating things about saving for something is not knowing how much your end goal is. I think this is one of the biggest reasons people don’t save for a home, their retirement, or even a new car.

Without a set end goal, you start to think that if you just spend some of the money now, it won’t matter all that much in the long run.

We had two ways of figuring out how much we needed. The first was talking to other travelers, and factoring in some extra wiggle room in our budget. The other way was to go online and research how much we should expect to spend in each country. Although we ended up with basically the same number, this allowed us to see which countries were just way out of our budget.

2. Save Every Week

The way most people will mention this one is to have a minimum amount that you put away each week in order to reach your goal. You can set up an automatic transaction with your bank and take x amount out of your primary account and into a separate savings account. This worked great for us in paying off some bills.

In terms of saving for our trip we actually went a different route. We figured out how much money we needed in our account in order to pay all of our bills, purchase groceries, and have a little bit of discretionary spendings such as gifts or ice cream. Basically what are our paycheck to paycheck needs. Everything over that went into savings. This meant that some weeks we saved more than others. 

The benefit we found to this approach was that it gave us a consistent artificial barrier to how much we could spend. Instead of seeing thousands of dollars in our account instead we saw that we needed to keep spending to a minimum if we were to make it to the end of the week.

3. Treat Your Credit Card Like A Debit Card

Now Dave Ramsey will have you believe that the smartest option is to cut that baby up and live off your debit card. The problem with that approach is that you’ll end up leaving a lot of money on the table. If you have a problem with credit cards, however, listen to Dave Ramsey not me. If on the other hand, your credit card bill is practically down to nothing its a simple matter to begin treating it like a debit card.

By paying it off every single week you will see your bank account affected the same way as if it was a debit card. The upshot to a credit card, however, is that you can save some major money for your travels. Over the course of our savings we were able to get approximately $3,000 back in credit card points and sign up bonuses.

Our Savings Journey

Its 2015, we had just gotten married, and were in debt. On top of that only one of us was working. Two years later we had a one way ticket and enough money to travel the world for a whole year. So how did we get to that point?

To start off with we focused on making sure we paid all of our bills without incurring any more debt. This is a great starting point for anyone no matter what their income is. Once we were both working we focused on paying off all of our debt. Every penny that wasn’t spent on necessities was spent on making sure we had no more debt.

Once all of our debt was paid off we then looked at how much we could afford to save each month. By cutting out everything but the most necessary expenses we managed to save around 45% of our income each month. We had figured out already that we would need approximately the same amount for travel as we used currently. This meant that it would take us a little over a year to save up for our world trip.

Each month we focused on putting as much as we could in our savings account. Of course real life happens, and at one point we were beginning to think we would not be able to save up enough money in time. However, not long before our trip we were able to pick up a little bit of extra work that allowed us to make our financial goal exactly on time!

Here are some posts we wrote while we were saving up for our trip,

7 UNCONVENTIONAL WAYS TO SAVE MONEY

TRIP PLANNING: CREATING A ROUTE

TAKING A YEAR TO TRAVEL AROUND THE WORLD

ONE-WAY TICKET

HOW MUCH MONEY WE SPENT IN

HUNGARY
UKRAINE
POLAND AND SLOVAKIA
KYRGYZSTAN
PHILIPPINES
CAMBODIA
INDIA
CHILE 
PERU
ECUADOR

Lets Wrap It All Up

If you want to go travel the world for a year, it’s going to take a shift in your mindset, putting into practice a few strategies, and staying focused on your goal. Not everyone wants to travel the world for a year though, and we get it. The thing is that a lot of these things apply to pretty much any monetary goal you might have.

At the end of the day if you want to live a radically different life from everyone else, you’ll have to do some radically different things.

Saying no today so you can say yes tomorrow is not popular in our culture, but it’s what’s going to get you what you want in the end. What’s your goal?

Getting Started

Are you interested in creating the lifesyle of your dreams but aren’t sure where to start? Perhaps you find yourself with less time, focus, or inspiration than you would like. Or maybe you’d like to ditch it all and go travel for a year, but would like to talk to someone who has done it already? Send us an email at

thatoneadventurecouple@gmail.com 

We’d love to set up a consultation with you, and get you started on your goals!