How We Saved Up 40K To Travel The World
We have had several people reach out to us wanting to know how we’ve managed to travel for as long as we have and how we saved up to do it while we were full-time university students.
So what is our secret?
Our secret is in fact very simple and somewhat boring, but for those of us who will not become the next YouTube sensation, it is the only other option that we know of to make long term travel a reality.
At the beginning of our sophomore year of college, we were both drowning in college debt and counting down the days to our next break. It dawned on us that in 3 years we were going to walk across the stage as college graduates, we would have to find respectable jobs, and begin the rat race to achieve the “American Dream”. In this mid-college crisis, we found ourselves spending all of our free time on the internet reading about new destinations and dreaming of the world and its endless possibilities. After running into a few blogs of other travelers who successfully traveled around the world for an extended period of time, we were determined to make our dream of traveling a reality after graduation. And so it began, the best and hardest part of making a trip of this magnitude come true: saving!
There are just four simple rules that we followed to save up $40,000 to travel for an entire year. If you are planning to follow in our footsteps, keep in mind that it is most definitely possible to travel for an entire year with less. For our first year of travel, our budget was very comfortable and included a couple flights back home just to take part in some important events with our families. Here are the steps we took to make this trip happen and how you can do it too!
- Set a Target
As with any financial endeavor in your life, your first objective should be to set a target. There are countless blogs and resources online dedicated to travel budgets. Daily budgets, country-specific budgets, ‘round-the-world (RTW) budgets, you name it, Google has it. Begin your planning by setting a savings goal for your RTW journey based on where you want to go, how long you want to travel for and most importantly the type of traveler you are. Next, you have to give yourself a timeline. Set a departure date. If you’re still undecided make it a figurative departure date, but in order to stay on track with your savings goals, it’s important to have a date set. Once you have a target and a departure date you’ll know exactly how much you need to save per week, per month or per year to make this dream a reality.
- Make Yourself a Spending Plan
Logically if you save up money over the course of 2 years like we did, having a spending budget of $0 is virtually impossible. You will inevitably spend some money during the time that you’re saving up for your trip; however, instead of spending blindly, give yourself a monthly or weekly limit, and DON’T go over! As college students apart from gas and our cell phone bills, we gave ourselves $50 per month extra to spend. Which leads us to #3 …
- Make Some Sacrifices
If you have read past step 2, then you are serious enough about your desire to travel to move on to the hardest step, step 3. If your goal is to travel the world for a prolonged period of time, then you will certainly need to make sacrifices! That simply means you won’t be able to go on shopping sprees, you will not own the latest iPhone and you won’t be going clubbing with your friends on the weekend, because it’s expensive and you’ll likely be serving tables at your local restaurant to save up for your travels. We are not saying you have to give up your life, but in order to make your dream a reality, you will have to make some sacrifices.
- Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help
You are planning the trip of a lifetime and your family and friends will be more than happy to help you achieve this dream of yours. While you should save up the majority of the money for your long term travel plans, share your dream with others and you’ll be surprised how much support you will receive. In the early stages of our planning, we set up a simple gofundme page and we sent out an email to our family and friends telling them our plans after graduation and asked for any small contribution that they could give to make our dream come true. Little by little we were able to collect 1300$ in total donations, which helped us out a lot!
Saving up for a big trip like this isn’t for everyone, but if we did it as students working part-time gigs serving tables at a restaurant and delivering pizzas, in our opinion anyone can do it. The formula is very simple, but it will come down to how bad your desire to see the world really is. If you want a piece of advice from us, it is most definitely worth it!
