How To Travel on a Budget
Debunking the Myth: “I Can’t Afford to Travel!”

My Background on How I Travel on a Budget

I’m a public school teacher married to a public school teacher. We raised three kids in suburban Las Vegas and put all three through college. My husband and I live in Nevada, with family scattered from coast to coast and all three adult kids living in three different states. SO BELIEVE ME! I GET IT! Money didn’t grow on a tree in our backyard either, I can guarantee because I checked repeatedly! Still, I have always had an extensive travel schedule. So the question I field most often was “How do you do it?” Even when the kids were just growing up, we made travel a priority, and I’m going to show you how to travel on a budget.

Make the Decision to Travel, and Stick To It!!

We got married at 24 (1990). We lived in New Jersey, Brian’s family was in California, while mine was scattered down the eastern seaboard. From the very beginning of our marriage, we knew we wanted to travel often and for many reasons. We absolutely wanted to visit family—they are a priority. In addition, we had (and still have!) so many places we wanted to see and explore around the world! As teachers and life-long students, we had an additional list of places we wanted to learn about.

In Short: We had a long list of potential vacations! 

As excited, struggling financially newlyweds, we committed ourselves to prioritizing travel. We both loved to visit new places and revisit old favorites and we didn’t want that to stop. We loved all types of vacations. From hiking to the beach to new cities, we felt feeding the travel bug was more important than the latest and greatest gadgets or clothes.

So if you want to travel, be honest and recognize your desire!

Prioritize Your Time!

The key decision that has made all of this possible is to value our time in terms of earnings.

We decided quite easily to utilize ALL of our available time to travel. As teachers, we have that block of time during the summer months, but until 2006, my husband also worked a summer job, and often a night job, which minimized how much time off we actually had.

So we had to find time (and you should too)! We became masters at weekend travel. Normal two-day weekends and long weekends were our playground for travel!

Living in New Jersey until 1996, there are a tremendous amount of locales that are within a few hours drive. We thought it was important to investigate as many different places as we could, while we could. Once the decision was made to move to Nevada, we knew we had limited time to explore the beautiful northeast.

An Important Tip For You: Don’t discount the weekend trips that are driving distance from where you are now! The United States is a beautiful place from coast to coast and edge to edge—no matter where you are there is something to see that won’t break the bank.

Traveling With Kids? Travel on a Budget with Family & Future in Mind

Every single year from our marriage in 1990, we have also planned longer trips once a year. While some of these trips were focused on visiting family, we mixed it up—visiting different locations each year. One of our strategies (I will cover in a future blog), we visited a different city each year when our kids were in middle and high school. On these trips, we always included a visit to local colleges and universities. We wanted our kids to see the different opportunities available to them across the country and near home! For example, when we visited Colonial Williamsburg, we made sure to tour the beautiful William and Mary University. 

Prioritize Your Spending!

So we are career public school teachers who are not trust fund babies. How did we do it?

It was, frankly, fairly easy: We created a living budget and lived within it.

When we moved to Las Vegas in 1996, we created a budget that fit into our (greatly reduced) income. Those first few years were quite lean, with travel mostly devoted to driving distances—we visited Brian’s sisters in California many times, enjoying their tremendous hospitality while avoiding hotel costs. Those weekenders were free lodging, visiting free beaches, and were among the best trips of our lives! 

So now we are in 2022. Our income has risen dramatically because we continue to take advantage of every opportunity to move up in our pay-scale. Additionally, my Husband worked a second job until 2006.

Ready for the magic bullet? We still use the same budget as when we first moved to Las Vegas! Seriously!! My husband and I still use the same basic budget for lodging costs, we keep our cars at least 10 years, and we rarely eat out. We bought this house in 2001 with the same mortgage as our previous house. Our family buys new cars and run them ragged. We buy quality furnishings and appliances and don’t replace them until we absolutely have to. We live simple. THAT is how to travel on a budget (or have extra money for anything else you want to do).

This is how we finance our traveling lifestyle. Using the same budget from 1996, our disposable income has risen astronomically, and it is broken into two groups: Investments and Travel. Those are the  two biggest line items in our monthly and annual budget. (I’ll hit the investment strategy in another blog, don’t worry)

Still Need Funds in Your Travel Budget? Find the Money!!!

I could give you the correct advice to stop daily coffee runs and visit clothing resale stores, but you probably know all of that already. What I’m telling you is to make travel a higher priority than other items in your budget. Give travel the respect I think it deserves, and focus a percentage of your income to it right from the beginning—not after other things have been paid.

I sit down twice a month to pay bills and balance accounts—because that’s how often we get paid. (If you have to devote more time to managing your basic budget, you need to automate things.) So, I sit down to look at bills and expenses and the very first thing I do is move money to investments and travel accounts.

Money in your budget can be found in likely and unlikely sources. There are an incredible amount of articles and blogs that can help you find money.

Strategy #1: Build a Proper Travel Budget

For us, the first decade or so we used the famous envelope system. We marked an envelope for each budget item (shopping, gas, food, etc.) and put a certain amount into each budget envelope for each month. When the envelope was empty, the spending stopped no matter what.

This wasn’t always easy or pleasant in the beginning—we were frequently out of money before the paycheck came in. When this happened, whatever was left we called “milk and bread money.” This was our code for absolutely no spending except for ABSOLUTE requirements to keep our children healthy. EVEN THEN, the travel envelope got it’s proper respect.

Stragedy #2: Singles and Change

One of my absolute favorite things we have done for decades is the change and singles jars. Saving cash and change in today’s technology-based world is a bit more difficult, but still a worthy pursuit. We accomplished the singles box by only carrying $20 bills. Every time we used cash, any singles we got for change went automatically in the singles box when we got home.

As our financial position improved, the singles box got the occasional 5, and even some 10s and 20s. Each year, the results have gotten better and better. Las year in Hawaii, for example, the singles box paid for all of our food for all 10 days. This year it will cover all of our excursions on our upcoming Alaskan cruise!

Most importantly, this strategy creates a savings that doesn’t “hurt” to build. We found we didn’t miss the stray dollar or two—even when our income was relatively modest.   

The Technology Advantage

There are so many tools available to help you achieve your travel goals, that you should be successful. Here are a few key items that have helped us over the years:

• Automate your savings!
  • Choose a modest amount to move on a monthly/bimonthly basis into your travel budget. Designate an account just for travel, and start feeding it regularly
• Save money where you can!
  • Before I book a hotel room, I make a few stops on the internet to help me get the best price. Minimally, start on a large website (think travelocity.com) to get a baseline price. Then go to the chain website (bestwestern.com) to see if you can beat that price.
  • Costcotravel.com is a wonderful resource, particularly for rental cars. I’ve saved literally hundreds by comparison shopping cars using that site. Way worth the yearly joining fee.
  • As a final stop, go all Alexander Graham Bell on them and call the location directly—often they will beat whatever price you can find.
• Let people know!
  • I’ve been gifted points on Southwest.com and free nights on hotels.com from people who had extra to share. If people know your passion is travel, they can not only share tips, but fill your closet with money- and time-savings travel products!!

Keep Planning

Here is where I talk about the mindset of a travel aficionado…

I am ALWAYS planning. I mean literally on a daily basis I am thinking and planning and scheming and price-checking. It’s a passion project for me—to schedule exciting travel, then work diligently to decrease the cost of my dream. 

This is particularly important during the turbulent time we are all surviving through right now. If I didn’t have my future travel plans to look forward to, my attitude could have taken a header into the dumpster. Even when we went into lockdown, and I had the trip of a lifetime canceled, I was still looking ahead to what I could plan next. All refunds were immediately reinvested in future travel. The plans that were canceled were immediately rescheduled for a future date.

Right now, I’m scheduled through summer of 2024, but there are plenty of empty months in the next two years just waiting for my imagination to catch up to the calendar. And it will. I will make sure of it. How about you?

THANK YOU FOR READING THIS FAR

Hey, since you’re here! You may as well check out some other travel strategies, here, where we talk about planning a Disney trip in 1 week! Or, check out our other topics here! Either way, I appreciate you!

Please leave a COMMENT about any tips you may have!! Or comment what your favorite tip of mine was! Where to YOU plan on traveling next? Let me know.

Feel free to contact me or leave a COMMENT with anything you would like to hear more about! Or reach out with any unrelated questions, comments, concerns, or random outbursts of excitement by clicking here.