How to Travel on a Budget

Travel has wilt really expensive. Post-COVID, the unshortened world seems to be traveling then and prices just alimony rising. I am astonished at how upper they have gotten. But it’s a product of rising financing and out of tenancy demand. Everyone just wants to travel. We’re all looking for an escape.

Fortunately, it’s not all bad. Airfare has started to go lanugo again, there are more deal-finding websites online, self-ruling walking tours in increasingly cities, and increasingly opportunities to shirk the traditional travel infrastructure and connect directly into the local way of life via the sharing economy.

As we navigate the post-COVID world of upper prices, I want to share some tips and tricks on how to travel on a upkeep this year!

1. Change Your Mindset

Changing your mindset might not be a traditional upkeep tip, but it’s important nonetheless. Constantly remind yourself that travel is possible while taking touchable steps to make it a reality. Whoopee begets whoopee — plane if it’s just victual steps.

Start with a “yes, I can” mindset. Don’t think “I can’t travel” — think “What’s one thing I can do today to make my trip closer to reality?”

Life is a mental game. Do one thing every day that gets you closer to your trip and you’ll find yourself towers unstoppable momentum.

2. Come Up with a Savings Plans

Unless you’re Bill Gates, we all need to save increasingly money. But how do you do that? While life is expensive, I do believe there are unchangingly ways to save a little more. There’s unchangingly something you can cut. A little bit of savings adds up a lot over time.

First, start by tracking your spending. Write lanugo everything you spend money on for a month. Groceries, rent, eating out, Netflix — everything. You can’t icon out where to save if you don’t know where your money is going.

Next, start a savings worth specifically for travel. That way, you’ll have a defended space for your travel fund and you can watch it grow. That progress will alimony you motivated. Plane if it’s just a few dollars a week, every penny counts. The increasingly you save, the increasingly you want to save.

Finally, start cutting. Maybe it’s going to Starbucks, maybe it’s saving on gas by carpooling to work or wearing when on eating out. We all have things we can cut. Find yours.

Here are some posts on how to save money:

• 23 Ways to Cut Your Expenses and Have Money for Travel
• The Ultimate Guide to Traveling Cheap
• How I Find the Money to Travel

3. Score a Flight Deal

One of the things that people unchangingly tell me holds them when from traveling increasingly is the forfeit of flights. But, let me tell you, there’s a lot of deals right now.

All the airlines are trying to fill planes and are offering a lot of deals for summer and fall travel right now. After all, they need to make up for a lost year and are drastic to get people on planes.

The key to finding a unseemly flight is to be flexible with your dates and your destination. If you have your heart set on “Paris in June” you’ll be forced to pay whatever the flight costs. But, if you unshut that up to “France in the summer” — or plane “Europe in the summer” you’ll be worldly-wise to find much cheaper flights since you’ll have a lot increasingly wiggle room to test dates and destinations.

I like to use Google Flights and Skyscanner to scan my options. I type in my home municipality and then pick “everywhere” as my destination. I then wiring my plans virtually where I can fly to for the least value of money.

Both websites moreover let you sign up for price alerts so you’ll get an email if the price for your platonic trip happens to drop.

And if you really want to find wondrous flight deals, consider joining a flight deal site like Going. It’s the weightier website for finding flight deals from the US and has saved me a fortune over the years. It’s not free, but new users can get 20% off a Premium membership with the lawmaking NOMADICMATT20.

Other helpful flight deal sites are:

• The Flight Deal – Incredible deals for flights all virtually the world.
• Secret Flying – Another site with wondrous flight deals from virtually the globe (they find a lot of Asia/Africa/South America deals not found elsewhere).

4. Get Points

Travel hacking, the art of collecting points and miles, is a unconfined way to travel on a budget. By getting point-yielding credit cards and using a few simple techniques, you can get hundreds of thousands of miles — without any spare spending (you can plane earn points just by paying your rent!). These points can then be cashed in for self-ruling flights, self-ruling hotel stays, and other travel rewards.

I’ve earned myriad self-ruling flights, upgrades, and hotel stays from travel hacking. By optimizing my spending and paying sustentation to which cards earn the most points where, I’ve saved thousands of dollars — and you can too!

Here are some resources to help you begin:

• Travel Hacking 101: A Beginner’s Guide
• How I Earn 1 Million Frequent Flier Miles Every Year
• How to Pick the Weightier Travel Credit Card
• The Ultimate Guide to Travel Hacking

Even if you aren’t American, you still have options, as points and miles have gone global:

• Points Hack (Australia/New Zealand)
• Head for Points (UK)
• Prince of Travel (Canada)

Once you have points, use platforms like point.me (for flights) and Awayz (for hotels) to manage them. These platforms help you maximize your points and miles so you earn increasingly self-ruling flights and hotel stays.

5. Use the Sharing Economy

The sharing economy has led to a plethora of new money-saving and community-building platforms that have made travel plane increasingly affordable, personal, and accessible. It’s never been easier to get off the tourist trail, connect with locals, and wits their pace of life. I live by these websites when I travel! You should too.

Here are some of the weightier sharing economy sites to help you get started:

• Trusted Housesitters – The most comprehensive website to find house-sitting gigs. You watch a place on vacation while the homeowner is on vacation.
• EatWith – Allows you to eat home-cooked meals with locals (it’s the Airbnb of food). It unchangingly leads to interesting encounters, so it’s one of my favorite things to do.
• BlaBlaCar – A ridesharing app that pairs riders with verified locals who have a spare seat in their car.
• RVShare – Allows you to rent RVs and camper vans directly from locals.

6. Find the Free

The world is topfull with wondrous self-ruling travel resources (like this website) that can help you travel on a budget. No matter where you are going, there’s probably a blog post on what to do and see there for self-ruling or cheaply. Someone has been there and they’ve written well-nigh it! Make the weightier use of all of them to help you plan your trip.

My favorite search term is “free things to do in X.” You’ll unchangingly get a result!

Additionally, don’t be wrung to walk into a hostel — plane if you aren’t staying there — and ask them what to do for cheap. Their clientele is upkeep sensitive, so they unchangingly know what to do and where to go for little money.

Local tourism boards will moreover have tons of info on self-ruling things to do as well (more on that below).

7. Stick to Public Transportation

If you’re on a budget, skip the taxis and rideshares like Lyft or Uber. Unless you can lower your forfeit by sharing a ride with other passengers, public transportation is going to be the most cost-effective way to get around. Not only will it save you money but you’ll get to see how the locals travel too.

Google Maps usually can requite you a vital overview of the public transportation options and prices available. You can find information well-nigh day passes and/or multi-day passes from your local hostel/hotel staff (as well as from local tourism offices). For unseemly intercity travel information, trammels out Rome2Rio.

8. Use Local Tourism Offices

Local tourist offices are a wealth of knowledge. They exist solely to provide you with information on what to see and do. They often have tons of discounts not found anywhere else and can moreover alimony you updated on local events, self-ruling tours, and the weightier spots to eat. They can help you find public transportation discounts and/or multiday passes too.

Don’t skip the local tourist office! They are a severely underutilized resource.

9. Get Unseemly Accommodation

Accommodation is one of the biggest stock-still financing travelers have, so reducing that forfeit can lead to big savings on the road. I’m sure many backpackers would sleep in a warehouse if it were the cheapest walk-up they could find! Heck, I’ve slept in hammocks in national parks to save a buck!

Since you have to stay somewhere every night, reducing this expense can save you a lot of money off the total forfeit of your trip. Stay in hostels, use Couchsurfing, stay in empty university dorms, camp, or try an Airbnb.

Since there’s a lot of ways to cut your walk-up costs, here are my posts on how to get walk-up deals:

• How to Find the Perfect Apartment Rental
• How to Find Unseemly and Self-ruling Accommodation
• How to Crush it on Couchsurfing

And here are the websites I use to typesetting unseemly places to stay:

• Booking.com – For finding upkeep hotels and guesthouses.
• Hostelworld – The weightier site for finding hostels.
• Agoda – Another unconfined hotel website, specifically for Asia.
• Hotel Tonight – Offers discounted last-minute hotel stays.

10. Eat Cheap

Other than accommodation, supplies is one of the biggest travel costs. After all, everyone needs to eat. But there are lots of ways to eat on the cheap:

• Go grocery shopping and prepare your own meals
• Shop at local markets
• Use apps to find deals (Yelp, Seamless, LaForchette, TasteCard, RiceBowl)

Also, use the five-block rule. There seems to be this magical wall that surrounds tourist areas. Most people don’t go past it. It’s been my wits that if you walk five blocks in any direction from a major tourist area, you end up losing the crowds and finding the local restaurants.

In my experience, tourist restaurants don’t superintendency well-nigh quality since those tourists aren’t coming back. Residents do superintendency so places catering to them need to be largest — and increasingly affordable – or they go out of business. Those are the places you want to eat at. Use the whilom resources to find where the locals eat and stave crappy food!

11. Travel Like You Live

The majority of people in your destinations don’t spend lots of money per day like tourists do. Neither do you in your day-to-day life. So take that mentality with you. Walk, take public transportation, grocery shop, spend a day in a park, and squint for deals. Do the things you do at home every day to alimony your financing down.

Too many people get into this mindset that when they go on the road, they just have to spend, spend, spend, spend. That’s not true at all. There’s no law that says you have to spend more. Be smart with your upkeep — just like you are at home. That will help you save money and prevent you from going home early (and broke).

12. Work & Volunteer to Lower Your Expenses

If you’re a long-term traveler, consider volunteering or doing a work mart to lower your costs. There are tons of options out there such as sublet stays, working in hostels, teaching in schools, and more.

You’ll usually need to commit for a week or more, however, these opportunities enable you to get a much deeper and increasingly nuanced travel experience. Here are some websites to help you find suitable opportunities:

• Worldpackers – Worldpackers offers travelers a endangerment to find volunteer experiences overseas. In wing to hostels, they can help you find experiences with NGOs, homestays, and eco-projects all over the world!
• WWOOF – WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) is a program that connects you with farms all virtually the world where you can work in mart for room and board.
• Helpx – Like Worldpackers, Helpx offers exchanges such as farmstays, homestays, B&Bs, hostels, and sail boats.
• Workaway – Workaway is a lot like HelpX except it has increasingly paid job opportunities (though it has volunteer opportunities too).

While prices may be higher than they were pre-pandemic, there are still plenty of ways to plan a upkeep trip without breaking the bank. By stuff flexible, getting creative, and embracing the right mindset, you’ll be worldly-wise to get out the door in no time. And it won’t forfeit you a fortune either.

All you have to do is take that first step. Remember, whoopee begets action. Once you start moving, everything else gets easier. So don’t wait!