It is a common urge belonging to the human kind, some inner feeling and compulsion to see these landscapes that one has seen in pictures, to tread upon cities which are bestowed with historical choruses and to experience the cultures which are different to our vision of this earth. But to so many it is a dream forever, a hazy somewhere, sometime, something. The difference between desiring something and having the desire fulfilled is not by means of a lotto win or receiving a windfall inheritance but by will itself. It all starts with a paradigm shift; the mind is envisioned to be moved up a notch, with the intangible notion of travel being concretized into a very vivid, non-negotiable financial objective. This is not the process of deprivation, it is the first, most real process of this journey. It is an exercise of exchanging the ephemeral, daily pleasures with the vast and enduring experience that can only be available through travel. This procedure can start as soon as you make up your mind and establish a certain savings account to dedicate to travels, a special savings pot that cannot be touched under any circumstances barring that you uphold it to fulfill your travel desires and make them a livable reality.
You cannot develop a map to your destination when you are not certain of where you are starting out. This demands a hard and straight-forward observation of the current financial picture that you are in. Track it-your rent or mortgage payment and your last penny spent on a piece of candy-every cost you incur in the course of one month. Make use of a budgeting application, an excel sheet, or a humble pocket notebook, however, be precise. This practice does not aim to trigger guilt, but give you power with statistics. It can also be a mind opening experience, one that opens your eyes to the habits of unconscious spending and financial seepage that is running your money dry. You may be appalled on finding out how how many numbers of those daily coffees, spontaneous takeout, un-reviewed subscription plans are costing you. When this clear picture is obtained, it is then possible to shift to the specific out of the abstract. The desire, I want to travel, is a weak desire because it is unlikely to be acted upon, but the idea, I will save four thousand dollars to go back packing in the Andes in a year in twelve months, is a strong idea because it means that it is going to be taken action upon. It is through this lucidity that you have a North Star. When the big picture is divided into a small manageable goal which in this case will be a monthly goal of around 333 dollars, this now insurmountable mountain will be reduced to a row of hills. In a bid to help your motivation to stay hot, consume yourself in what you want. Make the wallpaper of your telephone or computer the image of Machu Picchu or the streets of Buenos Aires. In order to build a physical map, make one with maps and photos. Read travel blogs, watch documentaries and allow the thrill of the reward (the future) to motivate your discipline (via attending the present).
Now that there is a clear goal the step is to do financial triage the big wins should be tackled first. These are the big, frequent ones that, being minimized, can relieve a lot of cash way better than missing one hundred lattes. Housing is the biggest expense to the majority of people. Although transferring or selling a house is a quite important choice in life, changes in small steps can create a huge difference. Is it possible to get a roommate to share the rent or mortgage? Is the possibility to relocate to a cheaper neighbourhood when your present lease expires a possibility? When you consider having a modest cut of several hundred dollars a month in the housing payment, that alone will be all you need to achieve that monthly savings goal. The second broad one is transportation. Our dependence on individual cars is a huge drain of finances. The prices of cars, insurance, gas, parking and maintenance added together can be very conveniently thousands of dollars annually. Just put yourself the question, are you able to live without a car, or maybe, reduce your two cars into one household? Not only it is a money-saving strategy, but it is also a healthy alternative to car-driven transportation, which can lower environmental impact. A non-negotiable car can be downsized into more fuel-efficient or aged reliable car in order to avoid incurring a car payment and reduce running expenses.
Food is the third column of huge expenditures. The ease of the meals at restaurants, take away, and food delivery apps is at an unbelievable cost. There is one habit that can do much to help save money and that is to cook at home. That does not imply that you have to turn into a gourmet chef within a night. First, make the promise to pack your lunches to go to work. Learn a couple of cheap, easy and tasty dishes. Set up the habit of meal prepping one Sunday afternoon and cook your lunches and even some dinners of the following week. This saves not only money, but time and mental energy as well on a busy week. Make a list, purchase generic brands and go looking into the possibilities of savings on buying staple foods such as rice, pasta and beans in large quantities. Eating out ought to be turned into the special occasion that it is, a practice to be enjoyed as an intentional indulgence, as opposed to the natural choice that comes of convenience. The economic benefit of transitioning your food culture of being a diner to a home cook can be nothing less than startling, especially in making as much as a couple hundred dollars available at the beginning of every month to directly deposit into your travel bank account.
Although it is acceptable in reducing your basic operating costs that form the basis of your savings, there is a thousand little holes that may sink a boat. After taking care of the big wins it is time to take a close look at your discretionary spending. Make an audit of subscription. Go over your credit card statement and your bank accounts to see the recurring expenses. Be ruthless. Do you really use the gym membership so often that the value of your money paid getting it is worth it, or could you do it at home or outside of the gym? Do you subscribe to five streaming services in which you only daily watch two? Cancel useless things you do not use on a regular basis. Then go on to discuss the day to day habits. That 5 dollars a day coffee investment adds up to more than 1800 dollars at the end of the year-money that can be spent to fly back through Europe on a round trip ticket and still have more to spare. Making coffee at home and bringing it to work is an easy decision, with a huge financial leverage. This argument can equally be used in purchasing bottled waters, snacks and all small conveniences. You also have great savings prospect in your entertainment budget. Make it a challenge to have fun at no cost or at cheap cost. Re-discover local library as a source of books and movies. Potluck and game night, you can do it with your friends, instead of going to costly bars. Visit local parks, hikes and free local events. When one cannot restrict themselves to things that they need, use the 30 day rule: whenever you feel like you would like to purchase something unnecessary, write it down and keep it at 30 days. Most of the time, you will not be feeling the urge any more, and you will have avoided an impulse purchase.
Defensive measures are effective when you cut costs, but what you need to do to really boost your progress towards realizing your travel objective is to go in the attack mode, that is, earn more. In the modern economy, there are more chances than ever to make extra money quitting the nine to five time job. Find your side hustle and explore the new world of them! Ridesharing or delivery, providing freelance opportunities to make extra amounts of money, is a possible thing to consider when you have a free ride and some time to spare. Just in case you have a marketable skill e.g., writing, graphic designing, web development, social media management, etc., sites like Upwork and Fiverr have a freelance pool of people who may be ready to outsource you globally. How about making money out of your hobbies? In case you are a working photographer, you might also conduct portrait sessions during the weekends. In case you are a knitter, you can sell your work on Etsy. Check out what your local community has on offer, whether it is tutoring, pet- or house sitting. The other effective practice is to have a significant decluttering of your residence. Raid your closets, storage facilities, and garage, and single out all those things that you do not use or need anymore. By selling clothes, electronics, furniture, and even books on Facebook Marketplace, eBay, or Poshmark, you can expect a one-time robust amount of cash that can add its significant contribution to the travel funds and grant tremendous growth to it.
The guideline to this is automation as it is the only thing that ensures that all this hard work saves real money. The problem is that discipline is not infinite, and the use of willpower as a manual transfer of money should not be viewed as an effective strategy. You should ensure that saving becomes automatic and without effort. The one best thing that you can do is to pay yourself first. Arrange an automatic transfer of your main chequing account to an separate, dedicated, high-yield, savings account. Timetable this move to the day when you get your paycheque. In that manner, the money gets transferred into your travel fund and you don not even have time to miss it or feel tempted to spend it. It is simply an extra bill that you cannot negotiate such as rent or electricity but this is a bill that you had paid in exchange of thinking about how you were going to be a free person. “Round-up” is also available in many banking applications, where all your purchases are rounded to the nearest dollar and the remaining change gets deposited to your savings. It may not sound like much however when spread over a long period of time it quickly accumulates. Lastly, design a plan on how to spend the windfall. Make it a rule that whenever a windfall comes along, a work bonus, tax refund, or birthday cash present, at least some large percentage (50 percent or more) of it should be put straight into your travel bank. With a pre-thought strategy, you make sure this extra money does not go into your habitual expenditure.
Watching your travel fund increase is great and you should be aware of the fact that the whole process can be seen as a training. Your ability to commit to a budget, your creativity in an attempt to find free things to do, and your resourcefulness in opening a side business are also the skills that will transform you into a smart and skilled traveler. You are being taught how to be more purposeful with your life, how to know the difference between what you need and what you only want, and how to place more emphasis on the experience rather than objects. The path of saving is not a time of sacrifice without delight. It is the regime of empowerment, concentration and thrilling anticipation. Once you save it, the dollar is a vote to your future self, which is a direct part of the adventure you are starting. It all begins not at the airport security line, but in the little pin drop when you open a savings account, naming it My Trip to Japan and put the first dollar in it. It is at that time when the dream is crystallized into a plan and the real expedition starts.
And yet, just as any experienced traveler will tell you, the start of a trip is also accompanied by the enthusiasm burst, which is sometimes quite hard to maintain during the long and curving route ahead. The startup rush of establishing a travel fund may wear off with passing months, and the 9 to 5 routine of self-discipline may become more of a power trip, rather than a pleasurable habit. This is the most important point in which most would-be travelers abdicate thus giving way to what some may call the fatigue of savings. The trick to get through this stage is to learn the psychology of making sacrifices so as to get something in the end, and it is by setting up systems so as to stay motivated. You have to train yourself not to think about the will as of infinite source of force, but rather think about it as about the muscle which should be exercised and also should have a rest. There is no 100-meter race to your dream trip and it is a must to prepare endurance strategies.
The most useful example of combating the fatigue of savings is to plan regular minor rewards into your budget. The straight-out savings plan is fragile and it is bound to break. A sustainability plan is flexible. Provide yourself with a little, guilt-free expenditure on a small treat once a month, say a meal out at a restaurant of your choice, a new book or a film. By planning these little rewards, you can avoid the accumulation of anger towards your budget, which can cause the wish to spend on some impulsive way, destroying all your goals. In addition, celebrate your milestones. Once you have signed up the first 1,000 dollars, or made a quarter of your overall target, reward it. The reward however should not be lavish but significant and preferably your final destination. This might be a good quality travel backpack that you will use during your trip, a language learning (or improvement) application so that you can practice the local language ahead of time, or a beautifully illustrated travel guidebook (you can now start planning your future adventures). These micro-wins reaffirm the circle of positive feedback and turning the process of saving into the chain of rewarding achievements and not a lengthy and effortful wait.
One of the most surprising ways to go about the social life of living frugally is to navigate the approach through socialization. The need to stay on course with peers who might not be financially orientated to what you are might be overwhelming. The invitation to a costly concert or a weekend trip provokes the sense of anxiety and FOMO (fear of missing out). It is simply to tell the truth, to yourself and to your friends, and to present your options as preferential and not as an excuse. You do not have to break down and include the details of your bank account, but something like this, The ticket price is out of this world, but I am saving up so hard at going on a large trip to Italy next year so my budget is really tight at the moment can do the trick. In most occasions good friends will be more tolerant and even supportive of what you want. Take the initiative and propose other cost-effective things to do. Rather than spending money to get out and have an expensive drink, have a board game night. Do not have brunch, propose a picnic in a nearby park. You can even motivate some friends to re-think their own expenditure and begin to set a goal of theirs to save up.
As an added measure to strengthen your promise, you may gamify the way you save. A strong trick of psychology is to transform a chore to a game and therefore make discipline fun. Accept the more popular savings schemes such as the 52-week scheme in which you save $1 in the first week which increases to $2 and so on with the end of the year leaving you with a hefty amount with having to go through excruciating pain. You can develop your own game, e.g. put a given amount of money in your travel budget every time you manage to resist an impulse shop or cook a meal at home instead of ordering in. Design a visual aid, e.g. a large thermometer or a map of the world where you can colour in a certain territory when you get to your destination point, and hang this material somewhere you constantly pass, e.g. on your fridge or next to your desk. You have this physical embodiment of the progress you make which acts as a visual reminder of how much you have already gone and how much you need to go further to reach your objective. Especially towards the end of a long paper, the feeling of finishing off another section of your chart can be a remarkably strong contributor.
After having mastered your defensive strategy of budgeting, and setting your offensive strategy of earning more in motion, the time would be ripe to consider even more advanced tactics that would be the league of their own. It is the world of travel hacking where one can use credit card reward and loyalty systems to slash the price of travel significantly. It should be said with fair amount of bias that this plan is only appropriate to those people who have a steely financial discipline who have the aptitude to pay the full balance of the credit card bill on a monthly basis without exception. When you have a balance, the high interest rates will eliminate all rewards that you will be earning instantly and throw you in debt, the further you are getting to your goal and destiny. It is a game changer, though, to the disciplined saver. All that is required is to find a trip that you wish to book and what happens is, applying strategically to various credit cards that give big bonuses in terms of miles or hotel points, on a sign-up. Then, you run your routine, scheduled expenses (grocery, bills, fuel) on this new card until you are able to reach the minimum spending amount to get the bonus. This will mean that you get a reward e.g. sufficient points to cover a round-trip to a foreign country, with using money that you would have spent anyway. It is a challenging type of hobby that relies on research and organization but the reward can net you a travel contribution that is in the thousands of dollars.
Other ways of deepening your strategy include considering not only your financial status and time auditing. In the same way you have been able to control your expenditure by monitoring your money to leak, monitor your time the whole week and see where that most valuable and irreplaceable resource of yours called time, is leaking. What is the amount of time that is being spent there staring at social media or the TV? This does not involve passing judgment on whether or not you relax, but it is a matter of handing the other times which you can re-allocate and use to generate income. Seven hours a week amounting to an hour of scrolling every evening is just enough to start a small freelance writing company, manage a social media page of a local business or acquire a new and monetizable skill online through some online courses. Consider what you can layer on your current competencies to make a special offer. In case, you are proficient in another language and know how to write, you can provide translation assistance. Assuming you are a good baker and a photographer, you can start a food blog or an Instagram account that could be monetized in a long run. The point behind this deliberate use of time is to stop being a passive consumer and become active and productive and this above all is not just a way to increase your income but to go back to a feeling that you are really good at something and your life has a purpose.
All this, including the fact that I saved my first dollar to even receiving a final boarding call, is life-altering. The man or woman who carefully analyses his/her spending habits, who learns how to prepare novel meals on a shoestring budget, who braves the possibility of asking to relocate to a more desirable salary or aims to start a side job, and who trains his/her self into following through with a long-term project, is no longer the one who merely wanted to go on a trip. You will have developed an educated appreciation of financial literacy, the sense of resourcefulness that you will help you in other aspects of your life. You will have more of an understanding of the importance of your own labour in addition to the conscious decisions that you make with the money. The virtual trip in itself when it is finally reached will be all the sweeter. All that amazing sunrises you see on the top of a mountain, all that tasty food you get after visiting a crowded market in a foreign country, all that talking to random people who belong to a different culture will be tinted with the pride of knowing that they deserve it. It will not be just a vacation, a holiday, and an idle receipt. It will be the successful realization of your own concentrated effort, a lesson herein written, that you can reach the consummation of a remote aspiration, and give it living reality. The parts that you have developed and the confidence that has been developed will be the best souvenir that you will bring back home and it will last longer than the tan and will remind you always that you can achieve anything when your mind makes a decision to achieve it.
