9 ways that you can travel more often
I spent years trying as hard as I could to travel more often.
For me, it was never enough to just fit in the occasional trip around full-time work. I eventually decided to do something about that constant desire to explore somewhere new, and so I created a flexible career that went hand in hand with exploring the world.
Travelling when you don’t have much money, or when you have a full-time job, or when you’re studying, can be tough. There are always life events that will that get in the way, but there are also changes that you can make to your current lifestyle to fit in more trips and stretch your travel funds a little further.
Here are 9 ways that you can travel more often by finding more time or more money for your future trips!
1. Live a minimalist lifestyle
Minimalism is a lifestyle that I’ve been preaching for years. This method of simplifying your life is beneficial in many ways, including saving money. Here’s a few ways that it’s helped me and Rob save some moolah that we later spent on travelling the world:
- By only purchasing the material possessions that we really need and cutting out the excess, we spend less money on buying new things.
- By living in a small apartment and being smart with cutting our electricity usage and phone bills, we spend less money on living costs.
- By taking buses and trains instead of owning a car, we save thousands of dollars (yep, thousands!) every year on transport costs.
The key to simplifying your life is to question whether each item you own and each purchase you make will make you truly happy. If you really want something and you think it will make a positive impact on your life, then go for it. But is that new pair of shoes really going to make you happy or improve your life? Probably not. Put that money towards your next trip instead.
2. Take shorter weekend trips
One of the ways that I manage to regularly fit over 2 months of travel into each year is by taking advantage of weekends or long weekends. There have been many times that I’ve travelled somewhere new over a Saturday/Sunday and not had to take any time off work.
The trick for these weekend trips is not to venture too far from home. While Rob and I were living in NYC, we managed to visit Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, Chicago, Montreal, and various destinations in upstate New York on weekends. For all of these trips, we only had to take a handful of leave days!
3. Try travel hacking
Travel hacking is a term used for building up miles/points by signing up and spending money through credit cards. It’s a complicated concept to get your head around, but it can also be a great way to travel for cheap or free.
Unfortunately for my fellow Aussies, credit cards in Australia just don’t get the same deals as the North American ones, so when Rob and I moved to New York City, we decided to finally try out travel hacking. Our experiment was a success! You can read all about how we got a trip to Colombia for only $350 via travel hacking.
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