RPF0646-How_to_Travel_the_World_On_The_Cheap
00:00:00.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:04.040 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while
00:00:08.700 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:11.800 | My name is Joshua, and today I want to help you to live a rich life now while not damaging
00:00:17.120 | your plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less with a discussion of how to travel
00:00:21.880 | the world on the cheap.
00:00:24.120 | I've been out traveling the last couple of weeks, and I'm now back at home, back in front
00:00:28.400 | of my microphone, and ready to get back to work.
00:00:31.000 | Of course, when you're on the road, it's a useful time to think about the subject of
00:00:34.920 | travel.
00:00:35.920 | It has been my personal experience that the vast majority of people have, at least they
00:00:41.360 | say they have, a major life goal of traveling.
00:00:45.400 | The reason I modify the statement is when you ask them, they say they want to travel,
00:00:49.640 | but when you look at many people's lives, it seems to me that most people don't actually
00:00:53.800 | want to travel because most people don't.
00:00:56.200 | But for years I worked as a financial advisor, and as part of that process I would ask people
00:00:59.560 | about their life goals and their financial goals, and especially I would talk to them
00:01:04.000 | about retirement.
00:01:05.320 | And I would estimate about 80% of the time when I would ask somebody what they wanted
00:01:09.320 | to do when they were retired, they would say something like, "I'd like to travel more."
00:01:13.080 | And then I would try to open them up and say, "Well, what do you mean?
00:01:16.560 | Where would you like to travel?
00:01:17.800 | How would you like to travel?
00:01:18.800 | What does that mean?"
00:01:20.060 | And I learned that everyone says they want to travel, and yet very few people are clear
00:01:25.440 | on exactly what it is they want to do or how they want to do it.
00:01:30.280 | Few thoughts on why this is.
00:01:32.160 | First, many people don't like traveling, and I think that's perfectly fine.
00:01:36.680 | Frankly, after traveling I'm always happy just to get home.
00:01:40.320 | One of the best things about traveling is that it makes you appreciate your house.
00:01:42.840 | It makes you appreciate home.
00:01:44.880 | So that can be useful.
00:01:46.960 | In fact, I'm at a place where at the moment I don't particularly want to travel much right
00:01:51.680 | now.
00:01:52.680 | I have been very fortunate and blessed to be able to travel quite a bit in the past.
00:01:57.120 | I'm sure that I will travel more in the future, but right now I don't want to do any more
00:02:01.000 | traveling.
00:02:02.000 | And there are lots of people who just recognize that they're unproductive when they travel,
00:02:05.280 | they're uncomfortable, they don't see the point.
00:02:07.560 | They'd rather sit at home and be in their comfortable surroundings and watch travel
00:02:12.240 | videos on their TV, which is fine.
00:02:15.080 | It's a free world, right?
00:02:16.080 | Nobody has to force anybody to do anything they don't want to do.
00:02:18.520 | But I know that a lot of people have this desire to travel, and I want to help you if
00:02:22.840 | you have that desire.
00:02:24.040 | I want to help you do it soon.
00:02:26.440 | I want to show you how you can travel now, how you can do it soon.
00:02:30.600 | I do believe there is great value in traveling, because traveling, being in unusual situations,
00:02:39.000 | unusual places, it exposes you to things that can have a formative impact on your life.
00:02:44.160 | It can shape your life.
00:02:45.320 | It can help you to see the world differently.
00:02:47.740 | It can help you to appreciate other people.
00:02:49.320 | It can help you to consider your own ideas and consider are they really true, or are
00:02:54.720 | you just think they're true because you haven't been exposed to alternative ways of seeing
00:02:58.800 | the world.
00:02:59.800 | And so I want to help you.
00:03:00.800 | If you say that you'd like to travel, I want to help you do that.
00:03:04.320 | I want to help you do it quickly.
00:03:07.960 | I was also inspired by stumbling across a video on YouTube from a channel called Canrush,
00:03:14.040 | wherein a couple, a Canadian husband and his Russian wife who live in Russia, profiled
00:03:21.160 | and talked about the way that they traveled the world.
00:03:24.280 | And so they traveled the world for a total of 752 days.
00:03:29.160 | So that's about two and a half years, or just over two years.
00:03:33.600 | They traveled nonstop from Moscow, Russia.
00:03:36.920 | On this round-the-world trip, they traveled from Moscow across to China, across India,
00:03:42.880 | then to Egypt, then they hitchhiked all around about eight countries in Africa.
00:03:47.880 | They flew from Angola to Brazil, did the whole tour down and up through South America, up
00:03:53.360 | through Central America, and then all across the United States and Canada.
00:03:56.160 | I don't remember the exact number of countries, but probably 35-ish countries, 30 to 40 countries
00:04:01.040 | in that time.
00:04:02.280 | But they traveled for, again, 752 days.
00:04:06.840 | And in that time, how much do you want to think that they spent as a couple traveling
00:04:13.320 | for just over two years?
00:04:17.560 | The total that they spent, and they were very diligent about tracking their expenses, the
00:04:20.640 | total they spent to travel for two years was $13,431.
00:04:29.040 | And when they left Russia, they just had money in a bank account, I think something like
00:04:32.280 | $15,000, $10,000 or $15,000, and they just went out planning to travel until their money
00:04:37.600 | ran out.
00:04:38.800 | And because of that, they were extremely frugal and used it, and were able to stretch their
00:04:48.440 | travel time out to a total of two years.
00:04:51.000 | I'll go over some of their expenses in a minute, and I'll make sure to link you to the video.
00:04:54.880 | Maybe I'll pull the audio from it and share it with you so that you can listen to him
00:05:00.120 | talk about their actual expenses.
00:05:02.160 | But I found that super inspirational.
00:05:04.120 | A couple, two people traveling for over two years with a total money of $13,431.
00:05:10.660 | Their daily cost, of total daily cost, was $17.86 per day, including all of the expenses.
00:05:20.520 | Now that is expenses included buying and selling several cars, renting cars, et cetera, in
00:05:25.440 | the United States.
00:05:26.940 | And so they could have traveled cheaper if they'd had some better fortune with the cars
00:05:30.280 | that they bought, but total it was $17.86 per day.
00:05:33.720 | If they pulled out the cars and such, it came out to about $12 per day.
00:05:38.200 | So I found that inspirational.
00:05:39.920 | So let's talk about some strategies that you can use.
00:05:42.440 | If you want to travel, but you feel constrained by money, here are some useful strategies
00:05:47.520 | to help you accomplish your traveling goals sooner, to help you do it on the cheap so
00:05:51.800 | that you continue to save money, or to help you to do it when you don't yet have a lot
00:05:56.080 | of money.
00:05:58.260 | The first thing is to recognize traveling can be done by any person in the world who
00:06:06.520 | wants to do it without regard whatsoever to your financial condition.
00:06:15.120 | You can travel if you want to do it without regard whatsoever to your financial condition.
00:06:23.320 | It's very simple.
00:06:25.760 | If you want to travel, you walk out your front door, toss the keys to somebody, walk out
00:06:31.680 | your front door, turn right or turn left, and go.
00:06:39.520 | And voila, you are now traveling.
00:06:44.740 | Any person in the world can walk out their front door, leave the keys in the lock, and
00:06:49.720 | turn right or left or maybe straight ahead and start walking.
00:06:56.120 | And you are now by definition traveling.
00:07:01.240 | Now maybe you walk, maybe you stick your thumb out and wait for a ride, maybe you go down
00:07:05.960 | and buy a bus ticket, maybe you get on a bicycle, buy a bicycle and start pedaling, but that
00:07:11.600 | is by definition traveling.
00:07:13.760 | And walking is by definition traveling.
00:07:16.920 | And you can walk your way across the world.
00:07:20.120 | Over the years I've always had an interest in extensive travel stories.
00:07:24.160 | I've read, I don't think I've read books, but I've read essays and websites and articles
00:07:29.240 | about people who have walked across the world for years and years.
00:07:33.760 | I've read essays about people who've bicycled across the world.
00:07:37.400 | I've read essays about people who ride motorcycles and drive.
00:07:42.280 | There's a great website that was curated by an Australian couple called Lost Horizons
00:07:48.320 | who over the course of about a decade, maybe a decade and a half, rode one Harley Davidson
00:07:53.560 | motorcycle to every country in the world.
00:07:57.000 | Remarkable and they chronicled it all on their website.
00:07:59.920 | It's just a remarkable website.
00:08:02.120 | So you can do it in all different forms, but you can do it just simply by walking.
00:08:06.800 | And you can walk without a dime to your name.
00:08:11.160 | And along the way you can figure out how to provide for your sustenance.
00:08:14.840 | Now that's probably not what you were thinking of when you talked about traveling and wanting
00:08:19.220 | to travel.
00:08:20.480 | That's certainly not necessarily what I'm thinking of.
00:08:22.760 | If I really wanted to travel and I had never traveled, I would consider walking out my
00:08:27.320 | front door, turning left or right, but that's never been my particular thing.
00:08:32.520 | Maybe someday it will be.
00:08:33.520 | Maybe I'll walk across the United States or walk across Europe.
00:08:35.840 | But thus far that's never really appealed to me.
00:08:39.060 | So you do need to think about what you are trying to accomplish in your travels and clarify
00:08:44.200 | that.
00:08:45.200 | But don't assume that because somebody else travels in a luxury personal automobile or
00:08:51.480 | a giant RV or first class airfare all around the world in five star hotels, don't assume
00:08:57.280 | that that's exactly what you want to do and what you need to do.
00:09:01.640 | I think most of us, if given the choice between flying around the world using first class
00:09:08.080 | tickets on premier airlines, staying in five star hotels and eating at fine dining restaurants
00:09:14.360 | without regard to the cost, if we were given the opportunity to travel in that way versus
00:09:19.720 | the opportunity to walk across the world, sleep on the ground under the stars and eat
00:09:23.920 | what people gave us to eat, most of us I think would prefer the five star hotel route.
00:09:31.360 | But if your choice was between traveling on a budget, even a severely restricted budget,
00:09:37.680 | and not traveling at all, I think a lot of us would choose the traveling on a budget
00:09:44.680 | as being better than not traveling at all.
00:09:46.880 | Not everybody would.
00:09:48.400 | If you're comfortable in your home, again, realize, "Hey, I don't want to travel that
00:09:51.480 | way."
00:09:52.480 | Good, don't.
00:09:53.480 | But there are a lot of us who would rather travel on a budget because it provides that
00:09:58.480 | grist for the middle of our life experience.
00:10:02.480 | Consider if that's you.
00:10:03.480 | Now, there's a very decent chance that you have more resources than simply a pair of
00:10:09.120 | shoes that you're going to walk around the world in.
00:10:11.880 | You probably have stuff already that works for you to travel.
00:10:15.720 | You probably already have a car, for example.
00:10:18.240 | Well, that's probably your best place to start.
00:10:20.920 | If you have a car and you want to travel, consider just simply traveling in your car
00:10:25.920 | and using that to be your means of transportation.
00:10:29.760 | In some places, that can be a very inexpensive way to travel.
00:10:33.800 | Probably the best here would be the United States and Canada.
00:10:37.360 | Traveling around the United States and Canada in car is probably going to give your best
00:10:42.000 | solution and be really your most frugal strategy.
00:10:46.280 | Busing around is hard.
00:10:47.520 | The hostile network is not like it is in other places.
00:10:50.920 | Having your own car can be a very low price and effective strategy.
00:10:55.880 | This can be very freeing for you.
00:10:57.900 | When I was younger, newly graduated from college, one of the things that I did that was really
00:11:02.560 | for me quite helpful and empowering was I took a trip around the United States in an
00:11:07.920 | old car that I had, the first car that I ever had.
00:11:10.160 | I paid $2,000 for it.
00:11:12.160 | When I graduated from college, it was an old Honda Accord.
00:11:14.560 | It had almost 200,000 miles on it.
00:11:16.480 | I wanted to travel, but as memory serves, I think I had a couple thousand dollars in
00:11:20.200 | my savings that I could use for travel.
00:11:23.440 | I just thought, "Well, how can I do it?"
00:11:25.040 | I was scared to go off in my car and drive this car with 200,000 miles all around the
00:11:29.400 | country, but I thought, "You know what?
00:11:31.400 | Worst case scenario, the car breaks down.
00:11:33.280 | I leave it on the side of the road and I buy a bus ticket or a plane ticket home and I
00:11:37.520 | go home.
00:11:38.520 | I'll make sure that I have enough money to buy a bus ticket or a plane ticket home and
00:11:42.320 | I'll take the car."
00:11:43.760 | I took the car and drove it all around the United States, all around Canada.
00:11:46.920 | I exclusively stayed with friends.
00:11:48.600 | I mapped my trip out by where I knew people and so I could stay on people's houses.
00:11:54.920 | That also helped with food because I could eat with them.
00:11:57.760 | I spent a good bit of money on gas, but almost nothing on lodging and traveled for several
00:12:01.440 | months for a very low budget.
00:12:02.840 | I don't remember the exact numbers.
00:12:05.040 | If you have a car, consider using that.
00:12:07.300 | If you don't have a car, then look and say, "What else am I trying to do?"
00:12:12.680 | From here on out, I'm going to talk about international travel because I would guess
00:12:16.940 | that for most of us, international travel is probably somewhere that we have a bit of
00:12:22.280 | a bent, a lean.
00:12:24.280 | Yet, you can walk out your front door and you can go 10 miles down the roads and set
00:12:29.000 | up a tent in the woods near your house and you are, by definition, traveling.
00:12:33.400 | But you're probably already doing that, so you don't need much input from me.
00:12:37.060 | You can go to the next state over, but again, you probably don't need much from me to do
00:12:42.120 | that.
00:12:43.120 | But if you're thinking about going on to the other side of the world, perhaps that might
00:12:45.160 | be a little bit more challenging for you.
00:12:47.480 | So let's talk about how do you save money and travel the world on the cheap.
00:12:55.000 | In traveling, there are a few different categories of costs.
00:12:59.240 | Your number one cost in traveling is going to be the cost of your life at home.
00:13:06.680 | This is a very important concept for you to grasp.
00:13:10.000 | Your biggest cost will be your life at home.
00:13:15.180 | If you rent a house or have a mortgage payment and you continue to maintain that rental house
00:13:21.280 | and that mortgage or that mortgaged house while you are traveling, you will have your
00:13:27.360 | home expenses and your travel expenses to pay for.
00:13:33.600 | That's a big, big cost.
00:13:35.160 | Now, it's possible that you may not have those expenses if you live in some way where you
00:13:39.880 | don't pay a monthly rent payment or you own your house outright so you don't owe a monthly
00:13:44.640 | mortgage payment.
00:13:45.640 | That can help quite a bit.
00:13:47.320 | But your biggest cost of travel is going to be if travel is added on to your normal expenses.
00:13:55.240 | So you have to think about this and ask yourself, "Is there a way that I can eliminate these
00:13:59.320 | normal expenses?"
00:14:01.440 | In 2018, my family and I traveled around the United States in a travel trailer, in an RV.
00:14:08.840 | But one of the things that we did in that time was we made sure that we abandoned all
00:14:14.600 | of our previous housing.
00:14:17.080 | So we stopped renting the apartment that we were renting previously.
00:14:20.680 | We made sure that we canceled all of our expenses so we had no expenses from home.
00:14:26.320 | And that makes a massive difference.
00:14:29.040 | In traveling the country full-time, we spent more or less the same amount of money traveling
00:14:35.680 | as we spent living in South Florida.
00:14:39.120 | It's just the numbers were changed a little bit.
00:14:41.440 | Now it wasn't perfectly more or less because of the purchase price of vehicles and such.
00:14:47.520 | So it wound up being a little bit more based upon the cost of the transportation.
00:14:54.400 | But in terms of being on the road, once you buy the vehicles, which that can be budgeted
00:14:58.160 | for if you buy an RV or need a car or whatever it is you need, once you're on the road, then
00:15:03.240 | the basic costs are just what you have on the road.
00:15:06.600 | And so if you eat at home, you have the cost of eating at home and you have the cost of
00:15:10.520 | eating on the road.
00:15:11.520 | That's the easiest one to adjust.
00:15:13.480 | But if you are used to paying $1,500 a month on rent, you can either pay $1,500 a month
00:15:18.680 | on rent in Boston, Massachusetts, or if you have an RV, you can pay $1,500 a month in
00:15:23.120 | RV parks all around the country.
00:15:25.840 | But it's your costs that are additive that make it tough.
00:15:29.640 | This is where the vacation model becomes really challenging.
00:15:33.160 | If we go with the basic concept of a two-week vacation where you say, "Okay, we have our
00:15:38.360 | normal life, but around the holidays or in the summer, we're going to take a two-week
00:15:41.800 | vacation or a four-week vacation," all of your travel expenses generally are going to
00:15:46.400 | be added on to your normal cost of living.
00:15:49.360 | Thus, your vacation is going to be very high.
00:15:52.600 | If you can figure out a way to eliminate or defray your expenses at home, then your travel
00:15:59.720 | costs are fairly straightforward.
00:16:01.320 | How do you do it?
00:16:02.320 | Well, first, you can eliminate them.
00:16:03.680 | You can do the drastic step of giving up an apartment, not renting an apartment anymore,
00:16:09.280 | of selling your house, putting your things in storage, or getting rid of all your things.
00:16:13.840 | It's a very big step.
00:16:15.200 | It's a lot of work, but it can be done and it can give you that ability to go where you
00:16:20.000 | want without being tied down.
00:16:24.160 | It's really unique.
00:16:25.840 | It's something that I think very few of us ever do.
00:16:28.640 | I like to do things myself before I talk about them, but I've gone through the various stages
00:16:35.480 | of size of your possessions.
00:16:39.080 | When I was younger, of course, I had few possessions.
00:16:41.580 | My wife and I lived in a tiny studio apartment when we first married.
00:16:44.920 | Then we bought a big house.
00:16:45.920 | I adjusted our possessions to fit the big house, had tools and stuff everywhere.
00:16:50.280 | Then we downsized into an apartment, downsized into an RV, and then ultimately downsized
00:16:54.080 | into about seven or eight suitcases and traveled with all our children across the world with
00:16:58.640 | seven or eight suitcases.
00:17:00.320 | It was remarkable how we could be perfectly comfortable living out of seven or eight suitcases.
00:17:05.880 | There were some things in the seven or eight suitcases that we really missed.
00:17:10.680 | That was more due to the challenge of being parents of young children.
00:17:15.080 | For example, you have a small number of toys fit in the suitcases, which was great.
00:17:20.000 | A small number of books fit in the suitcases, which was great.
00:17:23.240 | But we got really tired of reading the same 15 or 20 books again and again and again and
00:17:27.880 | again.
00:17:28.880 | So there are some downsides to that.
00:17:32.440 | But in terms of the flexibility of recognizing that, wow, with eight suitcases, even though
00:17:37.360 | in my case I have a large family, I can move my entire family in a minivan or a sedan.
00:17:43.840 | It's remarkable how much freedom that can bring to you.
00:17:46.880 | So it's really freeing to be free of possessions.
00:17:50.080 | I'm not a proponent of the philosophy of minimalism as being good in and of itself.
00:17:56.960 | I think that's silly.
00:17:57.960 | I think it's short-sighted to say that there's somehow a prize for whoever has the least
00:18:02.800 | number of physical possessions.
00:18:04.880 | To me, it seems that the number of physical possessions that you have should fit the lifestyle
00:18:09.680 | that you're living.
00:18:10.680 | So if you want to live on the road, pack light.
00:18:12.880 | Just have a few things.
00:18:14.200 | If you're going to be a farmer, you're going to need more possessions because trying to
00:18:17.600 | be a farmer and live out of a suitcase can be very, very frustrating.
00:18:20.680 | The hoe doesn't fit in the suitcase or the tractor.
00:18:25.960 | You insert whatever you want to.
00:18:28.340 | So consider the cost of your life at home.
00:18:30.340 | Another way to cover those costs is to defray your expenses.
00:18:34.960 | Now you can do this formally or you can do this when you see an opportunity.
00:18:39.160 | For example, you can do a vacation house swap.
00:18:43.080 | Let's say you have a house and you live in Boston, Massachusetts.
00:18:45.760 | You'd like to go to Dublin, Ireland.
00:18:48.360 | Well get online, go to one of the house swap websites and see if you can do a house swap
00:18:52.480 | with somebody.
00:18:53.600 | And you can live in their house in Dublin, Ireland and they can live in your house in
00:18:57.200 | Boston, Massachusetts.
00:18:58.880 | You can also do this when you see an opportunity for perhaps a low-maintenance tenant to rent
00:19:03.880 | your house.
00:19:04.960 | Maybe you have a family member who's going through transition time and they're looking
00:19:07.500 | for a house to rent but just on a short-term thing.
00:19:10.160 | Well put them in your house for a couple of months.
00:19:11.880 | Let them use your stuff.
00:19:13.120 | Have them pay you rent.
00:19:14.220 | That covers your cost of home and go travel for a couple of months.
00:19:17.080 | It allows you to not have to move out of your place but it simply allows you to go on the
00:19:22.200 | road and you can do that of course with a more arm's-length rental transaction as well.
00:19:26.720 | Rent your house out for a year, go travel for a year, come on back, open up the lock
00:19:31.040 | shed in the back where you put your personal items, put them back in your house and you're
00:19:34.240 | ready to set up your life again.
00:19:36.160 | But think about how you can eliminate the costs of your life at home.
00:19:42.180 | This is why being free of debt is so important so that you don't have a big debt load because
00:19:47.460 | if you don't have debt, it's very easy to cut off your home expenses.
00:19:50.440 | This is why keeping your life relatively contract-free, not having contracts on your cell phone and
00:19:57.620 | not having contracts on your internet and all that stuff.
00:19:59.600 | So then anytime you want, you can just turn the stuff off, say that's it, this is the
00:20:02.400 | last month.
00:20:03.580 | You can easily cut your expenses at home, go on the road and then come back and pick
00:20:06.920 | them up.
00:20:07.920 | But recognize your biggest cost is most likely going to be the cost of maintaining your life
00:20:11.420 | at home while you're traveling.
00:20:13.860 | Now with regard to actual travel expenses, your first category is transportation.
00:20:19.800 | Transportation for you from one place to another.
00:20:23.020 | And so one of your major strategies needs to be to minimize the costs of your transportation.
00:20:29.440 | So you should choose an appropriate travel methodology for your goals and think about
00:20:36.060 | low price.
00:20:37.840 | In my example of turning out the door and walking, that could be a great strategy for
00:20:43.060 | an active, healthy young person who just has a little bit of money and isn't too concerned
00:20:50.220 | about going to the other side of the world necessarily.
00:20:52.800 | That would be harder for somebody like me with young children and babies who don't
00:20:57.380 | really walk very well.
00:20:59.060 | They don't have quite the hiking stamina that you would like.
00:21:02.580 | And so when I would think about traveling, I think about how am I going to minimize the
00:21:06.820 | cost of the transportation in an appropriate way.
00:21:10.420 | So think about your region of travel.
00:21:12.180 | What's available?
00:21:13.180 | Are buses available and inexpensive?
00:21:14.900 | Are trains?
00:21:16.340 | Should you consider buying a car?
00:21:17.840 | Should you hitchhike?
00:21:19.280 | There are lots of things that you can do that will allow you to move yourself around the
00:21:25.700 | world without much money.
00:21:29.480 | The very inspiring story that I shared with you about the Kenrush channel where the couple
00:21:35.280 | spent the $13,500 to travel for two years, they exclusively hitchhiked in every place
00:21:42.960 | except the United States and Canada where they bought a car and with the exception of
00:21:47.020 | a few international flights to get them from one continent to another.
00:21:50.960 | But in order to conserve their money, they exclusively hitchhiked in every country.
00:21:56.700 | And they saved massive amounts of money and had incredible adventures by hitchhiking.
00:22:01.500 | So you could do that too.
00:22:03.300 | That'd be something worth considering.
00:22:05.440 | Another big strategy is to do this, to stretch out your time between transportation so that
00:22:10.960 | your daily cost of transportation is much lower.
00:22:13.560 | I'll give you a simple example.
00:22:15.320 | Say you're an American and you live living in the United States and you want to go on
00:22:18.780 | a European vacation.
00:22:20.680 | Well if you plan a 10-day tour of Europe and you buy plane tickets for a 10-day tour of
00:22:25.880 | Europe, let's assume your ticket costs $1,000 to get from the United States to Europe.
00:22:32.700 | With a $1,000 ticket on a 10-day tour, you have a daily cost of $100 of airfare.
00:22:41.160 | Every day of your trip, you're going to be spending $100 on airfare as we amortize the
00:22:46.200 | $1,000 expense over 10 days.
00:22:49.680 | Now if you will increase the time in Europe from 10 days to 30 days, you'll have the same
00:22:56.760 | $1,000 but now your daily cost is lower.
00:22:59.560 | You'll have $30 per day on airfare instead of $100 per day.
00:23:05.400 | Or if you extend it out even further to a 200-day tour of Europe, now your airfare costs
00:23:10.100 | are only $5 per day instead of $100 per day.
00:23:14.620 | Question is, is that a good thing for you to do?
00:23:16.160 | Well it depends.
00:23:17.160 | If you were paying a bunch of at-home expenses for your house in the United States, then
00:23:22.120 | maybe that 10-day tour is all you could afford because you had to get back and stop the travel
00:23:26.680 | expenses.
00:23:28.040 | If you're staying in very expensive hotels and you additionally have a $200 a day hotel
00:23:32.920 | bill, then certainly it's going to be more expensive for you to be on a 30-day tour at
00:23:37.960 | $200 a day than a 10-day tour at $200 per day.
00:23:40.980 | But if you can adjust those accommodation expenses in Europe and you can adjust those
00:23:44.180 | home expenses by simply lengthening out your trip, you'll lower the overall impact of the
00:23:51.740 | cost of airfare.
00:23:53.960 | In the example that I gave you with the Canrush couple, the total that they spent on flights
00:24:01.980 | was $2,300.
00:24:04.140 | They flew from India to Egypt, then they flew from Angola to Brazil, and then they ultimately
00:24:14.420 | flew from Canada back to Moscow.
00:24:17.180 | And so they chose the flights based upon inexpensiveness, but they traveled around the world for a total
00:24:21.620 | airfare of $2,300.
00:24:24.380 | Whereas if they had gone from their home in Moscow to all these other places, it would
00:24:29.100 | have been tens of thousands of dollars of airfare.
00:24:31.460 | Well, how'd they get there?
00:24:32.940 | Because they had more time and thus could make more efficient choices.
00:24:35.980 | Now, the other thing is if you'll stretch out your time between transportation, you
00:24:39.580 | can very quickly have much cheaper options on even the airfare itself.
00:24:45.700 | For example, if you want to go to France and yet the tickets to France are very expensive,
00:24:52.220 | if you only have 10 days, you can't fly into the other side of Europe where you could fly
00:24:55.820 | in for $500 and then make your way on the train system to France.
00:24:59.900 | You just got to get to France, do your France things and get home.
00:25:02.980 | But if you have more time, then you can take advantage of a discount ticket or something
00:25:07.620 | that's just massive discounts to fly into the other side of Europe and then make your
00:25:11.940 | way slowly to France, which would be much cheaper on the local system than the international
00:25:16.660 | airplanes.
00:25:17.740 | So consider stretching out your time and calculate your daily cost of air transportation.
00:25:23.660 | Here are a couple of other things that I would suggest that you do with regard to air transportation.
00:25:28.420 | First, if you don't care much where you go, first figure out where it's cheap to go and
00:25:36.340 | then figure out what to do there.
00:25:38.880 | When you're trying to travel, the time that you will pay the most money in air transportation
00:25:44.380 | is when you need to be in a specific city on a certain set of dates.
00:25:49.220 | Then you have almost no flexibility.
00:25:51.380 | I have to be in London from the first through the eighth because I have these events scheduled.
00:25:58.900 | Well, you're pretty much stuck with whatever the airlines are charging for you to be in
00:26:06.020 | London from the first through the eighth.
00:26:09.140 | So even when you go out and try to get a good deal on a ticket, you're going to have a very
00:26:12.460 | difficult time.
00:26:13.620 | But if you'll shop the tickets based upon what's cheap to get to and you say all of
00:26:17.700 | a sudden find a cheap ticket to Germany and you say, "Well, that'd be interesting.
00:26:23.780 | I bet I could find interesting things to see in Germany."
00:26:26.880 | Then you can take the cheaper ticket, go and then look up and figure out what interesting
00:26:30.300 | things are there to do in Germany.
00:26:32.500 | So think about where you can get – find the ticket first that's cheap and then think
00:26:37.220 | about what there is worth doing there.
00:26:39.180 | A couple of tools that I use there without doing a full lesson on it first.
00:26:43.300 | The Kayak Explore function is fantastic.
00:26:46.340 | If you go to a website called kayak.com/explore, you can put in your home airport and then
00:26:52.860 | you can see where in the world you can go on a certain budget.
00:26:56.660 | Again that's kayak.com/explore.
00:27:00.300 | And that's a really, really useful function.
00:27:05.140 | So if you live in Miami, you can see where can I fly from Miami, from Fort Lauderdale,
00:27:11.860 | from West Palm Beach, from Orlando, from Tampa.
00:27:15.180 | And then you can see the tickets that are available.
00:27:17.860 | And this can be a really useful tool.
00:27:19.660 | You can check it every day, every couple of days and you can find some really great deals
00:27:23.300 | on airfare.
00:27:24.940 | There are a number of deal websites and subscription services that also will help you find discount
00:27:30.140 | airfare.
00:27:31.200 | So if you're not going to go and travel for a year, you just want to travel from time
00:27:34.560 | to time but you're open to it, search those companies, find those people who are compiling
00:27:38.720 | them and do that.
00:27:41.100 | Another tool that I think is so useful is the Matrix software.
00:27:45.700 | The website for Matrix is matrix.itasoftware.com.
00:27:50.300 | I'm not going to go deep into this tool but basically it's in many ways a travel agent
00:27:55.380 | tool which you can use to find interesting flight itineraries.
00:27:59.820 | It's owned now by Google and it's the software that powers Google Flights.
00:28:03.620 | Many people use Google Flights.
00:28:04.620 | It's a little bit more user friendly.
00:28:06.660 | But if you're looking for a way to figure out how to put together massively discounted
00:28:10.620 | airfares from interesting places to interesting places, it's hard to see how you're not going
00:28:16.000 | to be using matrix.itasoftware.com.
00:28:20.340 | Search the internet for the world of travel blogs and airline mile lessons and things
00:28:25.720 | for how to use the software.
00:28:27.380 | But it's extremely useful.
00:28:29.180 | And one of the things I like to do is just to use it to segment out flights in a way
00:28:33.020 | so that you can stay.
00:28:34.660 | For example, one of the things you can do with matrix is you can force long stays in
00:28:39.260 | a certain city.
00:28:40.260 | So if you want to have a long layover, say you want to have a 22-hour layover in a city
00:28:44.340 | so you can get a good night's sleep in a local hotel or do some sightseeing without paying
00:28:48.380 | extra for an extra stopover, the matrix software allows you to do that.
00:28:52.700 | I find that to be really useful.
00:28:55.100 | And then think carefully how you maximize your transport for the number of people that
00:28:58.880 | you have.
00:28:59.880 | If you're a single person traveling alone, hitchhiking is going to be very, very simple
00:29:03.920 | for you because you can easily fit into a car.
00:29:07.060 | It is one person.
00:29:09.260 | My family, it's hard to see how anybody is going to have enough room to pick us up.
00:29:13.140 | So we can't all stand by the side of the road with our thumbs out unless we're expecting
00:29:16.620 | somebody to ride in the back of a pickup truck or ride in the back of a truck.
00:29:20.940 | Common in many parts of the world, less common in other parts of the world.
00:29:24.480 | So we're more likely to choose the efficiency of a driving option of some kind, of owning
00:29:29.220 | a car or having our own car because it's really efficient for the number of people that we
00:29:34.780 | have to move.
00:29:36.260 | But you may be able to do that too.
00:29:37.700 | Let's say that you are in the United States but you want to take a road trip in Central
00:29:43.900 | America.
00:29:44.900 | Well, instead of you just going, get a couple of your friends together.
00:29:48.300 | If you get four dudes in a car, the weight is going to lower the gas mileage a little
00:29:51.700 | bit as compared to one, but it's going to be pretty close to cutting your costs on transportation
00:29:56.420 | by 75%.
00:29:58.300 | Every single border crossing in your car is going to be cheaper because the fees for the
00:30:03.180 | permiso for your car is going to be cut by 75%.
00:30:06.700 | Your fuel costs are cut by 75%.
00:30:08.460 | Your insurance costs are cut by 75%.
00:30:11.220 | You'll even save money on the lodging by being with some other dudes.
00:30:15.460 | So plan it out and think about, is there a way that we can maximize the number of people?
00:30:20.320 | That's enough for transportation.
00:30:21.460 | Your major strategy is, of course, choose a low-cost transportation option that's appropriate
00:30:25.500 | to you.
00:30:26.660 | Don't forget walking and riding bicycles.
00:30:30.000 | You can travel the world or your state or your country walking and riding bicycles.
00:30:36.420 | Very efficient, very flexible, very low cost, and you can have some wonderful experiences.
00:30:41.420 | Just obviously, if you're walking, you're going to meet a lot more people if you're
00:30:44.460 | walking or riding a bicycle because you're in the people.
00:30:47.600 | You're in the crowd.
00:30:48.600 | You're going to try to hide the way that you can if you're hiding in your car, surrounded
00:30:52.260 | by walls.
00:30:53.260 | You're not really talking to people so much.
00:30:54.920 | So think about what's an appropriate transportation strategy for you.
00:30:58.720 | Next would be lodging.
00:31:00.180 | So how are you going to sleep?
00:31:02.880 | Where are you going to sleep at night?
00:31:04.080 | Where are you going to stay?
00:31:05.080 | Where are you going to be?
00:31:07.200 | Here your major strategy is simple.
00:31:08.840 | Minimize your needs and then consider what would appropriately fit those needs given
00:31:12.280 | the constraints that you have.
00:31:14.640 | Another solution is you can just simply sleep wherever you find yourself.
00:31:18.800 | The vast majority of our ancestors, when it came time to sleep, simply lay down on the
00:31:24.840 | ground and slept.
00:31:27.640 | That was what they did.
00:31:29.160 | And it wasn't that long ago that they did that.
00:31:31.680 | They lay down on the ground and they slept.
00:31:34.240 | If you were a cowboy riding your horse across the range on a cattle drive, when it came
00:31:39.920 | time for you to go to sleep, you would lay out your bedroll, which was a blanket, basically
00:31:44.960 | a sleeping bag.
00:31:46.880 | You lay it out on the ground.
00:31:47.880 | You didn't have a pad.
00:31:48.880 | You didn't have a lot of cushion, etc.
00:31:51.200 | And you lay down and you slept, which yes, means that you're hot when it's hot, you're
00:31:55.120 | cold when it's cold, you get rained on when it rains.
00:31:58.020 | It's uncomfortable generally, but that was what the majority of people have done throughout
00:32:03.080 | history and even today, what many people in the world do.
00:32:07.400 | It's really tough to be a rich Westerner and say to people, I don't do this to my family.
00:32:13.240 | I don't tell my wife, we're going to sleep on the floor.
00:32:15.880 | We spend the money and I buy the hotel room and get the comfortable bed and such because
00:32:19.240 | we're soft, we're spoiled.
00:32:21.120 | But it's not that way throughout the rest of the world.
00:32:23.760 | Just two quick stories.
00:32:25.520 | Years ago, I was in Asia and I was traveling in a very poor part of Asia, traveling with
00:32:31.200 | some very poor people.
00:32:33.640 | And we traveled from one village to another.
00:32:36.640 | We were staying and stayed for dinner.
00:32:39.920 | And at the end of dinner, I look around and I realized that all the noise from all the
00:32:42.760 | children had disappeared.
00:32:43.760 | And I look over in the corner and there's just a heap of kids just lying on the floor
00:32:46.760 | in the corner of the little house that we were in.
00:32:49.560 | And it really, in one way, impressed me because it was normal for those children that they
00:32:56.400 | were a bunch of people going from one place to another, but there weren't any fancy accommodations.
00:32:59.920 | There wasn't a nice guest room.
00:33:01.840 | And so the children had just basically collapsed after they were done playing and lay down
00:33:05.640 | in the corner of the floor.
00:33:07.320 | I slept on the wood plank floor on a bamboo mat.
00:33:12.160 | And you don't sleep all that well, but you do sleep.
00:33:15.640 | So those options are there.
00:33:18.600 | Years ago, when my father was growing up, my grandparents would drive back and forth
00:33:24.640 | from Colorado to California.
00:33:26.640 | And at night, they would be out in the middle of the desert.
00:33:28.880 | They didn't have money for a hotel.
00:33:30.920 | They would pull over on the side of the road.
00:33:32.400 | My grandmother would sleep in the car.
00:33:34.480 | And my grandfather and my dad, they would go out in the bushes and sleep on the ground.
00:33:39.400 | That was the normal.
00:33:40.400 | They'd pull off the highway a ways.
00:33:41.440 | That was how things happened.
00:33:44.280 | And even today, if you travel around, you'll see people doing this.
00:33:47.360 | I go to rest stops, and you see people just sleeping in their car at the rest stop without
00:33:52.120 | any particular accommodation.
00:33:54.160 | Now I don't like to travel that way.
00:33:58.200 | That's not...
00:33:59.200 | I like to be a little bit more comfortable because I'm kind of soft and weak.
00:34:03.400 | But the point is you can do it.
00:34:06.440 | So you could just travel and sleep wherever you find yourself.
00:34:09.480 | Now with that as the baseline, now you can move up some levels of luxury as your budget
00:34:13.640 | allows.
00:34:15.120 | First obvious example would be a tent.
00:34:17.080 | Throughout history, many people have lived their entire lives in a tent.
00:34:21.480 | Many people today continue to live in tents.
00:34:24.240 | And you can do this the old-fashioned way.
00:34:26.360 | Build yourself a teepee and live out in the woods.
00:34:29.840 | When I was traveling around the U.S., I spent a bunch of time talking to a guy who did that.
00:34:33.360 | He still lived in a teepee in the woods and had for decades.
00:34:36.240 | Or you can purchase a more modern tent, carry it in your car, strap it on the back of your
00:34:41.200 | motorcycle, carry it in the back of your bike, and use that.
00:34:45.400 | The ability to set up a tent, roll out a modern sleeping bag, modern sleeping roll, pad, you
00:34:50.280 | can be very comfortable and yet not have to pay every night for accommodation.
00:34:55.160 | And in most of the world, you can find a place to put up a tent.
00:34:59.160 | Even if you're in the city, in most cities of the world, if you are a traveler and if
00:35:03.560 | you're traveling in some way that's obvious that you are a traveler such as walking, carrying
00:35:09.320 | a backpack, riding a bicycle, if you go into a residential neighborhood that has backyards
00:35:15.480 | and you knock on a door and you explain, "Hi, I'm traveling.
00:35:19.080 | I'd like to just have a safe place to put up my tent for the night.
00:35:21.360 | Could I stay in your backyard?"
00:35:24.280 | Probably 80% of the time, you'll get a yes answer.
00:35:26.720 | You'll probably be invited for dinner, beers afterwards, you'll meet a local person, you'll
00:35:30.160 | probably make a friend, they'll show you everywhere around the world.
00:35:32.380 | You can do it in a tent.
00:35:33.720 | You don't have to spend a lot of money on hotels.
00:35:36.520 | You can, of course, live in a vehicle.
00:35:38.240 | If you're traveling in a vehicle, I've done several shows on living in your car and loving
00:35:41.120 | it.
00:35:42.120 | It's a great option, can be extremely comfortable, is well worth considering.
00:35:46.300 | Very great example would be couch surfing.
00:35:48.360 | The website and other associated websites that you can use to stay with people who want
00:35:54.820 | to open up their couch to you.
00:35:56.800 | You can do this through one of the websites all around the world, that Canrush couple.
00:36:01.000 | One of the things they did is on their over two years of traveling, they said they paid
00:36:05.000 | for lodging only 11 times.
00:36:07.180 | The rest of the time, they were couch surfing, using the website, staying with hosts all
00:36:12.000 | around the world.
00:36:13.040 | Couch surfing is a tremendous option.
00:36:15.000 | Again, for one or two people, can work out really well.
00:36:17.800 | If you are five or six people, it's going to be a little bit more challenging, but couch
00:36:22.340 | surfing can be a great solution.
00:36:24.760 | You can consider some kind of work stay arrangement.
00:36:28.120 | There are variations on this.
00:36:30.120 | In the United States and Canada, there's work camping.
00:36:32.640 | If you have an RV where you go and you're given a place to park your RV in exchange
00:36:36.720 | for some work.
00:36:38.280 | There is the woofing community, worldwide opportunities on organic farms, to volunteer
00:36:43.960 | on organic farms.
00:36:45.280 | You can go and be a woofer and you stay with a farmer and you, in exchange for room and
00:36:49.240 | board, you volunteer some hours of your day as labor.
00:36:52.900 | If you are open to volunteerism, you can do volunteerism and go and stay with many places.
00:36:59.020 | If you will work, generally a part-time opportunity, you'll go and work with them.
00:37:04.600 | Then you can have room and board provided for you because of your volunteer activities.
00:37:10.700 | Volunteerism is a tremendous way for you to travel the world because it provides some
00:37:15.580 | of the needs of the traveling that many people don't think about.
00:37:18.600 | First of all, working is good for you.
00:37:20.780 | It gives you an opportunity to do something useful.
00:37:22.960 | You feel productive.
00:37:23.960 | You feel like you're having an impact on something probably that's important to you.
00:37:28.360 | But working in some of these arrangements is usually done on a very reasonable schedule,
00:37:33.400 | half a day, three quarters of a day, leaving time free for other things.
00:37:37.720 | I always enjoy doing fun touristy things more if I've done a good day's work before.
00:37:42.440 | If you work in the morning and then go to the jump and swim in the waterfall in the
00:37:45.720 | afternoon, I enjoy that usually a little bit more because it feels like a reward for work
00:37:49.920 | done than if you just spend the whole day swimming in the waterfall.
00:37:53.400 | Your mileage may vary, but that's a little bit of my opinion.
00:37:56.680 | Also, when you're volunteering, you're usually going to have a built-in community.
00:38:02.080 | One of the biggest challenges of hotels in places where there isn't a hostile culture,
00:38:07.480 | etc., is in hotels, everybody does their own thing.
00:38:10.360 | It's hard to make friends.
00:38:11.520 | It's hard to find people to do things with.
00:38:14.320 | But volunteering usually provides that.
00:38:16.460 | You have friends, people that you meet.
00:38:18.440 | You have people in the community that you're interacting with.
00:38:20.440 | It opens up relationships and can result in a much more meaningful travel opportunity
00:38:26.640 | than just simply going through and staying at the hotel and buying the package sightseeing
00:38:31.960 | deal.
00:38:32.960 | I would be remiss if I didn't point out hostels here.
00:38:35.540 | That's my favorite thing about hostels.
00:38:37.200 | Hostels do certainly allow you to save money, sleep less expensively, $10 to $30 a night
00:38:42.200 | depending on the city versus much more for hotels generally.
00:38:46.300 | My favorite thing about hostels is the community.
00:38:48.400 | In a hostel, generally there's a place for people to hang out.
00:38:51.160 | There's hammocks.
00:38:52.160 | There's a yard where people are hanging out.
00:38:54.000 | It's very easy to meet people and a little easier than meeting people in a hotel.
00:38:59.200 | There are cooking facilities also which allows us to defray costs on food which is our next
00:39:05.640 | category.
00:39:06.880 | Consider your lodging strategy.
00:39:08.520 | You can go from free to very inexpensive to as expensive as you want.
00:39:14.640 | Probably your best solution would be to put together some of these things as strategies
00:39:18.600 | and have options.
00:39:19.920 | If you travel with a small tent, then you know, "Hey, if I can't find any place to
00:39:23.280 | stay, at least I have a tent."
00:39:24.960 | That can be useful.
00:39:27.200 | If you are additionally couch surfing or volunteering but you have the tent as a backup plan and
00:39:31.400 | you also have money to go to a hostel if you need to, that's a really good strategy to
00:39:35.720 | have a diversity of options so that as you go into different places, you can try different
00:39:41.360 | things.
00:39:43.160 | Let's move to food.
00:39:45.120 | Food will for many people be after transportation and lodging will be the next biggest category
00:39:52.080 | of expenses.
00:39:54.360 | Here think about what resources you have and what kind of food experiences you want to
00:40:00.120 | have.
00:40:01.440 | There are many people for whom gastronomy is the most important thing of a trip.
00:40:08.120 | They plan their trip around their eating experiences.
00:40:13.240 | Some people food is less important and there are other aspects of travel that are more
00:40:17.980 | important.
00:40:19.920 | Food can be and generally is very inexpensive if you, number one, eat like a local and number
00:40:28.720 | two, you do the cooking from scratch, from basic ingredients.
00:40:34.500 | If you change any of those things, then food starts to be more expensive.
00:40:37.840 | If you eat imported foods and you don't eat like a local, then you're generally going
00:40:43.680 | to start paying more money and then number two, if you are paying someone else to cook
00:40:48.480 | for you or if you are cooking not from just the basic ingredients that you can find in
00:40:53.880 | the local market, food can generally be fairly expensive.
00:40:58.360 | So you would have to decide what is important to you.
00:41:03.280 | Back to the inspirational story from the Canrush couple.
00:41:07.120 | For two years, they spent a total of $1,736 on groceries and they spent a total of $844
00:41:16.520 | on restaurants for a couple of two and they ate while they traveled the world.
00:41:21.900 | So you can spend only a few thousand dollars but you're going to need to be prepared to
00:41:26.560 | do quite a bit of cooking.
00:41:28.320 | What most people will choose to do is to generally cook for themselves, generally eat local foods
00:41:34.720 | and then plan their restaurant experiences for a time when they get maximum value for
00:41:39.920 | the money.
00:41:40.920 | I won't belabor the food thing.
00:41:42.680 | I will point out you also need some cooking equipment.
00:41:45.800 | One of the best things about hostels, if you stay in hostels, is you generally have the
00:41:50.120 | opportunity to use the cooking facilities, the sink, the stove, etc. and there's usually
00:41:56.580 | pots and pans, things like that.
00:42:00.020 | You may also just simply carry your own equipment.
00:42:02.080 | If you are traveling in your car, you'll probably have room for more elaborate equipment.
00:42:06.800 | Might bring your own stove, might bring your own appliances.
00:42:08.920 | If you're traveling with a backpack, you might just simply need to travel with a small amount
00:42:13.000 | of equipment.
00:42:14.200 | Most backpackers who are doing extended travel but just going with what they carry, they'll
00:42:18.640 | have a small cooking kit, small pot, maybe a cup, usually something like an immersion
00:42:24.080 | heater, maybe a small stove that they carry with them to allow them to cook even if there's
00:42:29.000 | not cooking facilities available in their hostel.
00:42:32.200 | Back in episode 518, I did a show called Tools, Tips, and Techniques for Cooking on the Road
00:42:36.240 | so you can actually afford to travel.
00:42:38.000 | That one would be useful mainly focused on car travel, US-American travel where you have
00:42:42.960 | a hotel room, things like that.
00:42:44.320 | I suggested some solutions like traveling with electric pressure cookers such as an
00:42:47.320 | instant pot or rice cooker.
00:42:49.240 | You can do most of the things you need with those two tools.
00:42:53.360 | Lots of things that you can do there.
00:42:54.400 | So food is something that you will have to decide on.
00:42:58.800 | The good thing is in Western countries, food at restaurants is going to be more expensive.
00:43:04.680 | When I'm in Western countries, I would tend to do more cooking than eating out because
00:43:08.760 | of the major price differential.
00:43:10.660 | You go to more third world countries, developing countries, generally food in restaurants is
00:43:15.680 | far less expensive.
00:43:17.320 | And so personally, I choose to eat out more and enjoy the eating out experience in many
00:43:21.360 | of those contexts.
00:43:23.040 | Then we come to entertainment.
00:43:25.160 | Now in many ways, we need different words to describe different things.
00:43:29.640 | In thinking about this, I think a word like travel is different from a word like tourism.
00:43:37.120 | Just simply that you can travel without doing any tourist things and tourism doesn't necessarily
00:43:42.160 | always involve traveling.
00:43:44.440 | So the best thing to do here is to get a concept of what you like, what entertains you, what
00:43:49.280 | you enjoy.
00:43:51.360 | If you're the kind of person who enjoys the act of traveling, act of moving from one place
00:43:55.960 | to another, interacting with locals, being a part of the local culture, you could do
00:44:00.000 | that on a fairly tight budget.
00:44:03.000 | If you're the kind of person who really values the tourist focused activities, the rides,
00:44:08.560 | the attractions, the things that you have to buy tickets for, you're going to wind up
00:44:13.740 | spending more money on that.
00:44:15.940 | Now not necessarily will that be cost prohibitive.
00:44:20.160 | Many tourist activities are expensive and they're especially expensive if you're on
00:44:24.200 | a tight schedule.
00:44:25.200 | Then you have to pay a lot to fit them in, but they don't necessarily have to be, especially
00:44:29.520 | if you spread them out.
00:44:30.520 | This comes back to the amount of time that you have.
00:44:33.120 | If you're on a 10 day trip to see every site, you're not going to have time to cook.
00:44:38.400 | You're not going to have, so you're going to be eating out two, three meals a day.
00:44:43.240 | Then you're also going to have to fit in a lot of things.
00:44:45.280 | You might be paying for a museum entrance in the morning, paying for an attraction in
00:44:48.760 | the afternoon, hiring a tour guide, hiring transportation, et cetera, to get you from
00:44:52.280 | one place to another.
00:44:54.200 | A short term trip, the way that most of us do in the vacation model, usually costs quite
00:44:58.920 | a bit of money.
00:45:00.080 | If you're in the more longer term travel model, you can cut down those expenses because you
00:45:04.700 | limit them.
00:45:05.700 | One day your entertainment is walk around the town and you spend your entertainment
00:45:10.160 | money on a really great restaurant meal.
00:45:13.000 | The next day you cook for yourself, but you spend your entertainment money on a tourist
00:45:17.000 | activity or a ticket entrance fee, something like that.
00:45:20.720 | Think about that.
00:45:22.720 | I would encourage you, consider what you actually care about, what you actually want to do.
00:45:28.680 | Simple example, many people throughout the world save for years and plan to go to an
00:45:35.720 | attraction like Disney World.
00:45:38.160 | I understand it.
00:45:39.160 | I understand the attraction a little bit.
00:45:41.880 | I'm not attracted to it.
00:45:44.120 | I don't like Disney.
00:45:45.520 | I don't want to go to Disney.
00:45:48.240 | By being clear on that, when I get opportunities and invitations to go to Disney, unless I'm
00:45:53.040 | going with somebody who's got the family hookup and gets me in and says, "Let's go and eat
00:45:57.420 | around the world at Epcot," there's just not any point to going.
00:46:01.440 | I don't want to go.
00:46:04.560 | Choose for yourself.
00:46:05.880 | Don't think that just because everyone else in the world wants to go to Disney that you
00:46:08.600 | have to go.
00:46:09.600 | I have other things that I like that other people don't like.
00:46:13.760 | Consider what's important to you and then think about how that will fit in.
00:46:19.040 | Other aspects of traveling are probably fairly minor.
00:46:23.200 | You will need, for example, a travel document.
00:46:25.680 | You'll probably need visas if you're going to go to interesting places.
00:46:29.280 | Depending on the strength of your passport in terms of the number of visa-free countries
00:46:32.000 | you can go to, depending on the places that you care to go, you may be spending some significant
00:46:36.380 | amount of money in visas.
00:46:38.920 | Let me go run down, as I close the show, let me run down the costs that this particular
00:46:45.080 | couple, Canrush, spent.
00:46:46.080 | Again, I'll just link to their video.
00:46:47.760 | I won't strip the audio and play it.
00:46:48.760 | I'll just link to their video.
00:46:50.240 | You can watch it if you would like.
00:46:52.920 | They spent $3,221 on cars.
00:46:56.080 | They had some bad experiences on this.
00:46:59.080 | In traveling the United States, they planned to buy a car.
00:47:02.640 | That really is one of the best ways to travel around the United States.
00:47:06.040 | I've met lots of people, Australians and Europeans in the United States.
00:47:09.360 | They fly in, buy a car, use it for a few months traveling around the United States, and then
00:47:13.200 | sell it and then go on their way.
00:47:15.280 | It's a really, really great way to do it.
00:47:16.800 | Met a great Australian couple when I was out in Arizona who was doing that.
00:47:23.320 | They flew into Canada because it was easier for them to buy a car in Canada, bought an
00:47:26.840 | older Chevy Astro van, converted it in a day or two to be a camping van that they were
00:47:31.640 | sleeping in, and then used that and traveled around the United States for several months
00:47:35.180 | with a plan of selling the van at the end of the trip.
00:47:37.560 | We're having a really great experience with their DIY camper van.
00:47:42.360 | In this case, the couple spent $3,221 on cars.
00:47:45.920 | They had some bad experiences where they bought a car, broke down, fixed it, and got rid of
00:47:50.320 | it.
00:47:51.320 | Then they bought another car, broke down, fixed it.
00:47:52.640 | Finally, they gave up and just started renting cars instead.
00:47:57.000 | That was their biggest category expense.
00:47:58.880 | Then flights, $2,300 for two years of flights, mainly intercontinental flights.
00:48:04.160 | They chose when they would cross continents by choosing when the flights were less expensive
00:48:09.120 | and the specific flights that were less expensive.
00:48:11.920 | $1,700 on groceries, already talked about.
00:48:15.960 | $1,300 on gas for the cars.
00:48:18.200 | Then they spent about $1,200 on visas, visa fees for them.
00:48:23.360 | In their case, they were traveling on a Canadian and a Russian passport, so they had to get
00:48:26.560 | some various visa fees to get into the different countries.
00:48:29.400 | Those fees do add up.
00:48:30.760 | Some are simple, the visa on arrival.
00:48:33.360 | Some you have to pay in advance.
00:48:35.080 | Some fees, generally most countries will charge you some amount of money to come in.
00:48:40.200 | Then sometimes it's very large.
00:48:41.920 | Just research that based upon the countries that you look at.
00:48:46.640 | $845 on restaurants over the course of two years.
00:48:50.320 | Transportation, buses, local transportation, et cetera, not including flights, was $784.
00:48:56.280 | Category of other for $407, $361 of gifts, $266 of cell service.
00:49:01.920 | Even some miscellaneous stuff, $250 on electronics.
00:49:04.400 | They spent $154 on entertainment, some money on clothing, et cetera, smaller numbers for
00:49:09.400 | total expenses of $13,431 to travel the world for 752 days.
00:49:17.120 | Now if they can do it, you can do it.
00:49:19.280 | If I can do it, you can do it.
00:49:21.880 | Don't take any idea that you don't like of what I've said and think that you have to
00:49:26.200 | do it.
00:49:27.200 | Think for yourself about what's important to you.
00:49:29.960 | Don't try to live somebody else's trip.
00:49:31.760 | Don't try to take somebody else's trip.
00:49:34.040 | But if you want to travel, don't let money, don't let these things stand in your way.
00:49:40.320 | You do have opportunities to make a lot of, to go.
00:49:45.680 | Don't let money stand in your way.
00:49:46.680 | It really doesn't need to.
00:49:47.680 | It's only a lack of imagination and a lack of skill that would ever lead someone to have
00:49:52.560 | money being the number one reason why I can't travel.
00:49:57.400 | You might choose to say, "I'm choosing not to travel right now because I'm saving money
00:50:01.540 | or I'm waiting for this specific type of travel that I want to do.
00:50:05.280 | I really want to travel in my own four-wheel drive vehicle.
00:50:07.520 | I really want to do that."
00:50:08.520 | Okay.
00:50:09.520 | But don't let money in and of itself be an excuse as to why you say, "I can't travel."
00:50:14.640 | You can travel if you want to.
00:50:16.980 | You just have to figure out how to adjust the details to your budget.
00:50:20.960 | That's it for how to travel on the cheap.
00:50:22.400 | I guess the best thing for me to plug for you today would be my course, which is not
00:50:27.600 | cheap but is very useful.
00:50:30.640 | The course is called How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis.
00:50:35.080 | One component of it is travel.
00:50:39.520 | Originally when I was thinking about writing that course, I had a working title called
00:50:43.320 | something like basically bugging out of the economic crisis.
00:50:47.040 | The idea being if things are bad where you live, if you're in an economic crisis, one
00:50:51.000 | of the best things to do is just leave and go somewhere where things aren't bad.
00:50:54.320 | It's a very simple concept but it's under discussed in my opinion.
00:50:58.000 | If things are bad where you live, just leave and go where things aren't bad until things
00:51:02.160 | get better and then if you want to come back, come back.
00:51:04.680 | But in order to do that, you've got to have some comfort and familiarity with travel.
00:51:08.280 | Most people have so little comfort and so little familiarity with travel that they can't
00:51:15.000 | conceive of it.
00:51:18.800 | It's best to practice.
00:51:21.120 | Having practiced, I know that my family and I, if things went bad, we would pack up eight
00:51:28.240 | or ten suitcases.
00:51:29.840 | We would get flights to the other side of the world where things are better.
00:51:32.840 | I'd go on Airbnb.
00:51:33.840 | I'd rent a house and get us settled for a few months until I found something that we
00:51:38.480 | wanted to be for longer and we would be very happy living somewhere else while things are
00:51:42.600 | bad at home until we wanted to go back home.
00:51:45.560 | But it takes practice.
00:51:46.560 | It takes some and the best way to practice is just through vacation trips, just through
00:51:50.160 | some travel trips.
00:51:51.640 | So in that show or in that course, in addition to all the ways of how to survive and thrive
00:51:56.360 | in an economic crisis by staying put and how making sure you simply avoid the crisis in
00:52:00.200 | the first place, I have an extensive discussion on traveling including a lot of international
00:52:04.840 | travel, a lot of tips and techniques.
00:52:06.760 | It's a great course.
00:52:07.760 | I'm really proud of it.
00:52:08.760 | Probably more proud of it than anything I've produced thus far.
00:52:11.080 | I've got more up my sleeve but I'm really proud of that one.
00:52:13.680 | So go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/store and try out the How to Survive and Thrive
00:52:18.080 | During the Coming Economic Crisis course.
00:52:20.160 | I think you'll really like it.
00:52:21.160 | Thanks for listening.
00:52:22.160 | Bye.
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