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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My guest today is Philip Fry from the website Valiant Growth.

Philip, you're going to give us all the tools and tactics we need to travel rich today, even without a lot of money. Is that right? Exactly. So, you've been a long-time listener of Radical Personal Finance, and we had some long-time patron as well, and we were having some conversations, and I came on your show, and you said, "I'd like to come on Radical Personal Finance." And I said, "What do you want to talk about?" And you said, "Well, I'm an expert at extreme travel.

"Let me tell about my frugal trip across Europe "on a student's budget." And I love this approach to life, and I love how traditionally there's a culture of students traveling, and traveling cheap, and having their perspectives and their world opened up a little bit without a lot of money, but in many ways, it's lost in our modern culture.

Many people view travel as something they can only do when they're rich and when they have lots of money to spend. So, I'm really looking forward to this. So, tell us, to start off, tell us a little bit about your background and how you wound up heading across Europe on a student's budget.

So, at the time, this was three years ago, and at the time I was 20. I had just dropped out of college, and I had a bit of free time on my hand, but the trip itself was pretty accidental. So, a friend and I, we headed out to a camp in a neighboring country, kind of a youth camp kind of thing.

And on our way back, we said, "Well, we might as well go and visit the next country." In Europe, it's not a huge leap, especially in Central Europe. It's like going from one state to the next here in the US. Yeah, yeah, something like that. So, we said, "You know, if we're already invested in getting here, yeah, might as well go visit the next country." So, we didn't have much of a budget, being students, and I was in Romania at the time, so a Romanian student budget is especially challenging, especially in Western Europe.

So, think of something like $200 a month. That's what I was living on at the time. Wow. Not including school expenses, though, right? Yeah, yeah. School was subsidized by the state? Exactly. That's the system in Romania. But, yeah, that was kind of the living and every food, shelter, everything had to be included in that $200 when we were in Romania.

But then, well, didn't have a lot of reserves or anything like that, so that was also our travel budget. So, yeah, so we said, "Let's go to the next country." And then when we were there, we said, "Okay, well, might as well keep going and visit the next city or the next country." And, well, in the end, it ended up being a 45-day trip, a very low-budget trip where we got from Romania, which is Eastern Europe, all the way to Paris.

That's impressive. That's very impressive. Europe has a reputation, I think it's rightly deserved, of being a pretty expensive place to travel, so it's pretty cool to see that you could travel inexpensively if you were willing to deal with a little bit of discomfort, I would imagine. So, tell us practically, tactically, how did you actually do it?

Yeah, so when it comes to travel, there are, I would say, probably two main expenses, and those are travel and accommodation, and then we can get food as well. But let's begin with travel and accommodation. So we had the budget for neither, so when it comes to traveling, what we did is we hitchhiked.

And in Romania, hitchhiking is not-- it's quite common, I would say, though people expect to be paid, like the drivers expect to be paid. But we didn't have a lot of hitchhiking experience outside of Romania, and we didn't really know how it works in Europe or whether it works or not, but basically we had some papers, we had a pad of papers, we had markers, so we said, "Let's give it a shot." So we simply wrote the next city, Vienna.

At the time, we wrote Vienna on a piece of paper, and we stood next to the road. And we hoped someone would pick us up. And we began doing this at around midnight, which wasn't the best timing for this kind of stuff. But eventually someone picked us up, and they dropped us off at a train station, and now we're coming to the shelter bit.

It was the first night of kind of a move, getting into Western Europe, getting into Austria. And we had nowhere to sleep, so we said, "Okay, might as well kind of try and sleep a little bit in this." It was a little village in their train station. And yeah, nobody--we were well-dressed, that was important, and nobody assumed that we would be kind of vagrants or homeless people and stuff like that.

So they just assumed that we're waiting for the first train in the morning. And we played along, we played along. And yeah, we spent the night there, and right before the first train, we sneakily disappeared from that train station. And this was our first experience, and this kind of defined our travels.

So we continued to hitchhike, and we hitchhiked all the way, not on our way back, because at that point we were kind of tired of it. But we hitchhiked for 45 days, and we could basically get anywhere through that method. And when it comes to shelter, we used couchsurfing.

I don't know if you or your audience is familiar with couchsurfing, but in a nutshell, the idea is that it's a community where people offer their couches, so to speak, or spare rooms or things like that for free for travelers. And in exchange, you talk to them, and there's this kind of--there's a cultural exchange.

And yeah, you get to meet new people. That's kind of the system, and hopefully when you get back home, if you have a couch, you offer it up yourself. So it sounds pretty scary, but it's a system that works very well because you have--well, in the same way that eBay works in this place, you have ratings as well, and dangerous or unstable people get rooted out pretty fast.

So yeah, so we depended a lot on the kindness of strangers, both when it comes to hitchhiking and when it comes to shelter, and it worked. And when we couldn't find a couchsurfing place, which happened because we were always too late with it, the smart way of doing it is kind of reserving places in advance.

We never had the time because we were always going to the next city. So when we couldn't do that, we would actually sleep in train stations, airports, once or twice on the street. That wasn't very much fun. It was pretty cold because this was in autumn. But we did it, and we kept going.

And kind of at the end of the journey, we had a bit of surplus, and we were also pretty tired, so we did a few nights in hostels, which is still pretty inexpensive. So yeah, and when it comes to hitchhiking, we kind of wisened up along the way. So basically we started out with no plan and no experience, which I think is important.

So we made it despite that fact, so someone with a little bit more research can get even better results. But we kind of learned along the way, and there are websites that show you the best hitchhiking spots. And again, in a social way, people share how much time it took them to get picked up and how it works, and you can read a little bit about the country's legislation and things like that.

And if you use maps and websites, HitchWiki in particular, you can go along pretty efficiently. HitchWiki, that's new to me. I'll have to check that one out. I want to pause on tactics for a second and come back in a moment, because the burning question that's on my mind listening to a story like this is, is it fun?

Because to some people, going and sleeping on a train station floor sounds like fun, but I think that the percentage of people for whom that sounds like fun is probably a minority of the population. Many people hear something like that and say, "Why on earth would you do that?

Why is it fun? If you have no money and you're not doing anything, what's the point of traveling?" Was the trip fun? Yes. But yeah, that's a fair point. Usually when I talk of the tactics, I have to mention, to present the complete picture, all the hardships and the difficulties that we encountered along the way.

So it can come off as sounding pretty rough. And it was at times. And that's undeniable. And that was because both of our inexperience and our really small budget. But overall, it was an amazing experience. And of course, we got to visit 20 or 25 cities. And we met all sorts of great people, all sorts of amazing people.

If you do it like this, especially with couchsurfing, that was great. And it was also valuable, I will say, because it, in a kind of a stoic way, showed us that even if it showed me personally, at least that even if things get really rough, I always have options like this at my disposal.

And they're not as bad as they sound. And you get a lot of cool stories coming out of it, which you wouldn't expect. Right. I think, and I'll share just a couple of my stories in line with that. I think that's probably one of the most valuable aspects of a trip like this.

It's not necessarily, is it the favorite way to travel? If I had plenty of money and I could go traveling, would I rather stay in a nice, comfortable hotel or would I rather sleep on the street? Well, I think all of us would rather stay in a nice, comfortable hotel.

We could all go and live in a field in a tent if we wanted to. Most of us choose something different. But I think these experiences can be so formative because they pull down some of the barriers. They pull down some of the, they make some things possible. And you can always go back and say, "Well, this is possible.

So therefore, in what I'm doing now, I'm choosing to do it." I'm thinking of three trips that I've done. One was, I spent a week, while you were talking, I pulled up my budget just to see. And I spent a week in Columbia and traveled down there myself and had a $235 plane ticket from Florida down to Columbia, spent a week down there and total all in, including entertainment, including gifts, including things.

I spent $555.07 on that trip for a week by myself traveling around Columbia. And I learned a lot on that because that was one of the more frugal trips that I did on an international trip on my own. And I learned that I could have a good time and I could really enjoy myself on a pretty inexpensive budget.

Now, that's nowhere near $40 a week, but I did have to get there. And I was staying in a hostel and paying retail prices for things. And there was quite a bit of entertainment here, tourist attractions, horseback rides, things like that that were a couple of expensive meals, lunch at the peak, overlooking Bogota, things like that.

But it changed me because I realized, "Wow, this travel thing is really accessible." Another trip that I did around the US was I took off and had an old car and did a 13,000-mile road trip all around the United States with my old car. And it opened up and I was totally willing to go with the flow.

And it opened up the possibilities. And so just like with – it opened up my mind to the possibilities. And I realized that many people put off going after an experience because they see, "Oh, it's not possible." And so since I'm willing to do certain things, it makes me more courageous to go and address other things.

And so an experience like that where you say, "Hey, I have done this. I have lived on the street. I have been homeless. I have depended on hitchhiking. I don't want to necessarily go and do there. I'd probably do that again. I'd probably rather do it a little more comfortably.

But hey, if I lost everything, that doesn't mean that my life has to be miserable." Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That was really valuable. And after that experience, listening to Radical Personal Finance episodes, for example, where you have people doing all sorts of crazy frugal things like the homeless people and the RV people and all of that.

And I just think of it now and I'm like, "Yeah, that sounds cool." And I know that that's doable. I personally know that that's doable. Whereas before even this trip, I was a pretty comfortable guy. And if you would have told me what I would do on the trip, I wouldn't have believed it myself.

Right. Right. It changes your perspective. And that's what I love about what I've been doing here at Radical Personal Finance. And I still think this way. Just this morning right before we got on the call, I bought a camper van recently and I've been having a few things fixed up so it's ready to hit the road.

And I ran it over to the mechanic because there was something that he fixed on it and it wasn't fixed well. And along that route, there's a guy who's selling a van. And it's an old Ford. It's called a Ford Aerostar van. I think it's only a U.S. model.

So any U.S.-based listeners might remember this old van. But it was well known as being a very reliable van. It had a reliable motor in it. And this van, he's been using it for his business as a small, cheap delivery van. But I'm looking at this thing and he's got it for sale for about $600 on the side of the road.

I talked to him about it because I always call on these old vehicles and try to keep my skills sharp. And I'm just looking at it saying, "Somebody in a right situation, man, get that thing for $350. It's perfect. Turn it into a little mini camper." There is an adventure waiting for some broke person that wants to go off on an adventure.

It's a very fuel-efficient engine. It would be a great road trip vehicle. It's been well-maintained even though it's old and cheap. So it opens your eyes and then that has a way of changing things. So I think that's a huge value just to reemphasize the point. So with regard to tactics, how did you handle – you talked about travel, hitchhiking.

You talked about accommodation. What about food? How did you handle food inexpensively? Well, with food, basically, I would say that was the least exciting aspect of our budget. Basically, what we did is stick to supermarkets and stick to cheap food. We cooked when we had the possibility, but when we didn't, you can go very far with simple, if not necessarily the healthiest options.

So yeah, we kept that budget pretty low just through buying from supermarkets and keeping it simple. And yeah, we didn't go to restaurants. And we actually experienced the local cuisine through staying with people and having them cook for us. And then we'd cook our own national foods for them.

And to be honest, I think that that can be a way more authentic way of experiencing what the actual local people eat than going to tourist trap type restaurants. So yeah, I think clever and frugal ways can be found with food and while also not sacrificing the local flavor.

Have you thought about going and doing a trip like this again? Of course. So do you think you'll actually do it or have you just kind of considered, here's how I would do it if I were going to do it again? Yes, I have. I have considered it. At this phase of my life, I'm currently in the middle of some projects that don't allow me to do this.

But I'm definitely planning on when I get the mobility. And for instance, perhaps when I can switch to a fully online income source, I could get back into it. And I would probably do the same things, except now with more knowledge, I will say. So I would prepare my couch surfing in advance.

I would look up hitchhiking in more detail, be more prepared about it. But I might very well do a very similar thing. Okay, so what I'd like to do here is I want to go through with your experience. And I've spent, even though I haven't done this style of travel, anytime I see somebody, for example, here in the US, hitchhiking or walking, some people will go and walk across the country.

I always go and talk to them and try to think, "Okay, if I were in that situation, how would I handle it?" So I've got some ideas of some simple, inexpensive things that would make it much more comfortable. So I'd love to kind of sketch out if any listener, and I'm anticipating here, probably a younger, age doesn't necessarily matter, but there's a phase of life that this works really well, younger single person who's going to head out.

And they just want to go off on an adventure, but they're feeling pretty short on money. And I want to talk about some of the skills and strategies that would really make a difference. So let's bat some things back and forth. First, expand on what you mean by what you would do, knowing what you now know, what you would do in advance with regard to couchsurfing, so that you could make better use of the couchsurfing platform.

Right. So I would simply, well, I would do two things then. Number one, you need to have a profile. And in the future, I know that kind of the platform is not in its best place right now. Some users have gone away. So it could be a different platform, but the ideas remain the same.

So I would begin with building a bit of a profile, which means traveling to, if you have access to nothing else, local places and getting a few reviews and giving a few reviews yourself. So when people look at your profile, they can see that, yeah, you're a good guest.

Perhaps you've hosted people as well. They can trust you. That's important. We started out with a pretty incomplete profile and kind of got built up along the way. But that's important. And number two, I would simply make sure to book well in advance. Well, create a kind of plan of where I plan to go and book the cities with, I would say, at least three weeks advance.

And also be prepared for the fact that certain cities are so full and so crowded in terms of people wanting to use the service that it's very hard to get on it. We ran into this trouble in Amsterdam, for instance, getting a couch in Amsterdam in the weekend is next to impossible.

So kind of plan around that fact. And if you see that you cannot find a place, find nearby towns that work for you. So that's what I would do. What would you do to be comfortable in case you couldn't find accommodation? Would you bring a tent next time? Would you bring a pad to sleep on?

Yeah, I would probably do both of them. But it depends on where you're traveling. But if it's Western Europe, it's entirely possible that you might not need these things, especially if you're traveling kind of in urban areas. So what I would do better is research properly where you can sleep in public places that are actually safe and relatively comfortable.

I would go for that because we had no idea when we set out on this journey, but there's this huge network of kind of invisible people because you don't meet them day to day because they're doing their own thing. But there's this invisible community of travelers out there. And whatever you're planning to do, it's been done before.

So, for instance, if you're looking for places to sleep, public places to sleep for free, there are hundreds of people who've done it in whatever major city you go in. So you can find out, for instance, about airports. They're the best. They're really nice, for example, and just do your research.

So a few things that I would do. I would spend some time and I've spent an amount of time checking out some of the blogs and information articles by the ultralight backpacking community because I think there's a sweet spot. If I were going to do this kind of trip, I noticed in just the pictures that I saw on your site, your friend that you were traveling with just had a small duffel bag.

I think there's a sweet spot with the amount of gear, and it's not to have a huge cross-country backpack because that becomes so unwieldy. You can't wear it comfortably. You've got to stash it somewhere. You want to have a bag that's small enough to be able to keep with you at all times.

You want to be able to be complete, I think. You want to be able to be completely mobile. But you also want to have enough things to make things comfortable if you need to be in an unusual situation. So something like a medium-sized backpack I would think would be an important sizing to go to.

And the way to be able to do it and be comfortable is study what the ultralight backpacking community does. If it were me, I would spend the money and I would try to get a small one-person tent to have shelter. Because if you had a small one-person tent, in most places you can find a little out-of-the-way place.

You can find somebody's backyard. You can just ask them, "Hey, can I set up a camp in the backyard?" or something like that. I would have a little tent, and I would have a small sleeping pad of some kind. There are a few different varieties that you can look at.

Some of them are more bulky. Some of them are less bulky. I would also consider, depending on the climate, something like carrying a small hammock. They have a very small hammock, and it can be relatively simple to set up a small hammock in different places to be able to have a comfortable place to sleep.

And if you're in an urban environment, the sleeping pad and something like a sleeping bag will take a night spent in a train station and transform it from completely intolerable to, "Okay, that's not so bad." And if you're in an environment where you can find a little patch of woods, a little park, or some place where you can safely spend a night, a tent and a sleeping pad will make all the difference.

And if you have that in your back pocket, the biggest value to me of having some accommodation in your back pocket, whether it's a tent or whether it's your car, depending on the context you're traveling, is it helps you to be a little bit more aggressive with the things that you actually want to do.

For example, if you're looking for hotels and you know, "My traveling is being constrained based upon the availability of hotel rooms," it starts to get late in the day, you can't jump on this little adventure, you can't necessarily be getting an invitation to go with somebody and, "Hey, we're going to the beach, you want to come down with us?" You can't accept those invitations because you're worried about, "How do I find hotel accommodations?" You get to a certain time in the day when you're traveling, you need to start to find your accommodation.

But if you have a backup plan, then whether it's a car, a tent, a sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, it allows you to press forward and embrace the adventure. It allows you to embrace the evening bonfire on the beach. It allows you to embrace the people that you met that said, "Hey, why don't you come with us to do XYZ?" Because you know, "Well, I can probably find a hotel later or I can probably find accommodation with one of these people.

But at the end of the day, if I can't, I've got my tent and my sleeping pad and I'll be able to get a decent night's sleep." So, there's so many great options there by the ultralight backpacking community. I would personally allocate a little bit of money from my budget to purchase some of that equipment for sleeping accommodation.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And I would also emphasize, it was a mistake that I made. It's very important to pack light. Make it comfortable, make sure that you have the things that you need. But be really careful to make it light because I had a big backpack and it was fully packed.

And we weren't prepared for this trip. We had no idea we would do it. And yeah, the first two weeks were like constant back pain for me because of carrying a huge backpack around. And I built the muscle in the end and I got used to it. But yeah, if you can go light, that's very valuable.

And I would add to that, it's good to have good walking shoes. It might be a basic thing, but it's important to think about. So, good, sturdy walking shoes, preferably light walking shoes if the climate allows for it. That's good. Having some tools to fix your clothes. That's also very valuable because especially if you walk a lot, they might not last.

And with a bit of patching and sewing things, you can keep going with no problem. I actually had my backpack. It was a pretty old backpack. And it got worn down during the trip. And every day I'd wake up and I would sew up the hole and kind of fix it.

And it doesn't sound fun, but it was fun. It was fun to kind of maintain my own things. Right. So, the next thing that I would think that I would place a high premium on would be a mobile device and a way to keep it charged. So, how I would approach this, the value of being able to have a cell phone, whether you have a data plan turned on or whether you are simply using Wi-Fi is incredible.

The ability to email people on CouchSurfing, the ability to connect, the ability to search online for the forums to find things, the ability to download maps, use it as a navigational tool. Or one of the other things would be to keep a good social profile going. There are lots and lots of people who are willing to help, who are willing to employ you for the day if you need some spending money.

There are lots of people who are willing to give you accommodation for a day as long as they're not scared of you. And so, obviously, there are some simple things to do. You shave. You keep your hair trimmed. You try to look presentable so you don't look so scary.

But if you've got a profile, an Instagram profile, a Facebook profile, something that's publicly available and you're just posting things on your trip, then somebody can quickly see, "Oh, this person is legitimate. They've been traveling across this country for a few weeks, a few months. I can see that they're probably not going to murder me in my bed." And so, a cell phone, I think, is mandatory equipment.

Whether it's connected to a cellular system or not, it'll obviously be easier if it is, if you can buy a local SIM card. Or if not, Wi-Fi in most places, unless you're doing wilderness backpacking, Wi-Fi in most places is available enough to make a big difference. A couple of accessories that I think are mandatory is, number one, especially if you're doing a trip like this, spend the money and get a good external battery.

So, you can get something from 13 to 20, some are 15 to 20,000 milliamp battery, milliamp hour battery. I have a few of those. You can get them for 20 to 30 bucks. But if you've got a 15 or 20,000 milliamp battery, that'll give you a full charge on your phone up to, let's see, so a phone like my iPhone, I think, is something like a 2,600 milliamp hour battery.

So, you have a 20,000 milliamp hour external battery. You wind up with about four to six additional charges of your phone. And this makes a big, big difference with your ability to, "Hey, I'm going to camp for a night where there's no electricity." The fact that you can still use and connect with your phone is a big, big deal.

In addition to that, I would have some – I would make a point of carrying some simple power harvesting equipment. And the best person that I've ever seen, that I've learned from, is a man named Stephen Harris. He's been on the show, but he has a website called Cellphone1234.com.

I'll link that in the – I'll make a note, try to link that in the show notes. But just remember, Cellphone1234.com. But he has done a tremendous job of demonstrating how you can keep your cell phone charged even in difficult circumstances. And so, he has a variety of ways on there.

I always carry when I travel an extension cord, a couple of multiple adapters to be able to split the extension cord out. I carry some adapters to be able to use something like a light socket. So, for example, if you're in a public restroom and there's no – you need to charge up your devices, charge up your phone, but there's no light socket.

Excuse me. There's no power outlet. I would – you can harvest power off of the light. You can carry a pair of alligator clips to be able to harvest power from any battery that you find. And I would make a point of making sure that I had that cell phone, that I had an external battery, and that I had the ability to charge those devices consistently so that I can use all of the electronic tools to enhance my trip.

So, I see very few people that pay attention to that. But, man, it makes a big, big difference. So, I encourage anybody, check out what Stephen Harris did. He sells a product there, a video, which is good. I've bought the video and used that. It's at cellphone1234.com. Yeah. I think that's all sensible advice and I wish we had done it at the time, which we didn't.

And because we didn't, I can give kind of the lower budget alternative to what you said, the even lower budget alternative. Go ahead. So, we had a tablet and, well, my friend had a phone and I had a tablet. And, yeah, so let me just clarify, first of all, because not a lot of people are aware of it.

You mentioned it, but I think they might not have noticed it. You can actually download Maps. And three years ago, you had to do it through like a special application. Now, if you use Google Maps, it's a built-in feature. So, you can actually pre-download Maps, so you don't need a data connection for that.

And GPS is free. I don't know how it works in other places, but in Europe, yeah, GPS, you don't need to pay anything. Like, it was a tablet with no SIM card in it and we could get GPS, which when you have the map downloaded, the GPS locates you.

So, you can navigate with no problems. So, that's pretty good. And you can charge your phone, which we had to do, or tablet or whatever. You can charge your phone in a lot of places. And when you're in need, you will very quickly figure out those places. And by the end, we had very little problems with charging the tablet or the phone.

So, if you don't get the external, though I recommend Power Bank, you can still probably get along in kind of an urban, civilized area. And you can keep your phone charged. And then when it comes to kind of social interactions, you can just go with Wi-Fi and kind of batch it up for the times where you have a connection.

So, we would just take the photos and then when we'd get a connection, we'd do our social media activities for that. Yeah, absolutely. Wi-Fi is becoming so much more plentiful that it's becoming so much easier to use these tools. And it makes a huge difference to be able to have access to the information.

I mean, Lonely Planet is still valuable. If you're going to head out on a trip, a guide like the Lonely Planet is so helpful because it allows you to know in advance, "Okay, here are eight hotels. These are the ones that are my price range. So, I have a place that I'm going to head to.

So, at least I have a starting point instead of showing up in the middle of a town." And you have no idea where to even start to try to find a hotel or a hostel. Well, you take that and you add on all of the resources of the crowdsource data from the web and it's tremendously valuable.

All right. Food and water. Tell me about what you did to eat and drink while on the road. Yeah. So, as we said, we just generally went to supermarkets and got food that you could – when we had no access to a cooking area, which hostels do have. And if you do couchsurfing, people do have.

But if you don't, you can get some really basic things. I'm not going to go into details, but – or should I? I think people can figure out. I'm going to give some details, but go ahead. Okay. So, the things we got, we get some – yeah, depending on what we had access to, we get some simple things like bread, apples, sliced meat, cheese, bananas.

Things like that. And all of those you can kind of eat on the go. And you can also have fun because even though supermarkets are kind of more international, you can still always find the local things and try them out. So, yeah, that's – we did that. And we carried them with us at times.

We got pretty used to not eating. Sometimes we didn't have access to it. So, we got a little bit resilient around that and drinking as well. So, yeah, even if you don't do proper planning on it, your body will adapt to it and you can go. Did you carry any kind of cooking equipment with you?

No. No, we didn't. Would you do that again if you were going to go again? Well, maybe you have some good tips. So, if I were doing it, you want to take advantage of food opportunities. But one of the challenges is figuring out how do I eat inexpensively. So, the answer, of course, is supermarkets.

But if you don't have any cooking facilities or cooking equipment – yes, in many hostels, there's a communal kitchen which you can use, which is nice. But if you don't have any cooking facilities, it limits your options to things that you can eat raw and things that you can buy already done.

And if you're trying to do this on an extreme budget, which I'm trying to point out kind of the radical extreme style, you're always going to be – you're generally going to be paying more for things that are already done. So, there's a big difference between paying supermarket prices for a loaf of bread.

Of course, that's a lot cheaper than going and buying at a restaurant. But paying supermarket prices for a loaf of bread versus making something yourself, you can make tortillas very inexpensively. You get some flour, some salt, a little bit of water, a little bit of oil. Those things cost nothing and you can make things like tortillas.

And your cost even drops to nothing. Something like the ability to cook rice and to cook beans. You can get rice and beans and a little bit of meat and you can make a delicious satisfying chili. You can make a delicious satisfying stew. You can make a delicious satisfying hot meal, which will make a big difference between being completely miserable and just eating something cold from a can if you're out in the woods and you had to set up your tent because you didn't have another facility.

It's a big difference between a hot satisfying bowl of rice and some chili that you made versus a cold banana and a peanut butter sandwich. So, I would – personally, I would prioritize having some basic cooking equipment. And again here, if you research what the backpacking community has come up with, there are some incredible very small little stoves that you can use and have with you.

The majority of them will run on a fuel source of some kind, whether it's an alcohol or some sort of butane or gas bottle that you – or propane gas bottle that you carry with you. You can get those. But those require you to carry a gas bottle with you.

Those are going to be the most convenient. You can get very small bottles of gas and have a very small way to do that. You get a small cook set and you can cook on those. There's also what I'm fascinated by, some people who have developed a couple of different solutions for cooking just simply with sticks and twigs and things that you can find around.

There are little collapsible cooking stoves that just are made out of five or six little pieces of metal that you put together and you create this tiny little way where there's very thin and light titanium metal that you just fold them together and they come out and they fold completely flat.

And you can make a little stove that you put twigs and sticks into and you can use that to cook. There's also a couple of people who have built a rocket stove technology where it does a double burn of the gas while it's burning, the wood gas that's being released from the wood while it's burning.

You can get a tiny little rocket stove that you buy and you can set that up and that is a much more efficient way of burning. And so, with a little rocket stove and a little cook set, you can just use whatever scraps of twigs or – and I mean twigs literally.

You're not out splitting firewood and starting up a big campfire. You just need a couple of handfuls of twigs and a few leaves to start the fire and a little lighter and you can have a stove going which allows you to cook. And that opens up a ton of options to you to be able to use the food from the supermarket and have a much better experience of actually enjoying the food, being able to have hot satisfying meals, having some flavor while still purchasing food that is very, very inexpensive.

You can eat on rice and beans and tortillas and peanut butter and you can eat on these things for under a dollar a day, a dollar, two dollars a day if you know what you're doing, you know how to cook inexpensively. And then along the way, you add in some of the vegetables and things that you can find to keep your diet with some nutrients in it.

And again, most vegetables are going to require some kind of cooking. Well, you can easily come across a few vegetables here and there in the United States. There's where I would shop for vegetables, a place like fruit stands. You can get all kinds of stuff much cheaper and when you're out traveling, you can come across those.

And if you have cooking facilities, I think it will make a big difference with your ability to do it. But you don't have to add a ton of weight with some of the modern technologies that have been developed. Yeah, and I think everybody has to kind of decide how important this is to them.

To be honest, if I went again, I would, you know, maybe I will look up these things, then I will change my mind. But I wouldn't do it because financially, the difference is really minor. So if you're not smart about buying things that are pre-made, like ready-made meals, yeah, it's going to break the bank.

But if you pay attention to it, if you look at how many calories you get for a dollar, things like that, and you don't want cooked food every day, that's not something that's important to you. I think it's simpler and you can still maintain a very good financial situation.

Things like biscuits. Let me just think. For instance, beans, kind of a fun fact, beans are not cheap food, or at least not the cheapest food. But yeah, biscuits, anything with sugar, again, not the healthiest thing in the world, but on a short term trip, yeah, anything with sugar is usually cheap.

Any kind of confectionery, things like that. And yeah, you can keep going without it. But if it's important to you, then absolutely. Yeah, I mean, life is a buffet. You can pick and choose. For me, things like being able to have a hot meal brings a satisfying enjoyment to the end of the day.

If I've been out traveling, I want to sit down and being able to cook a hot meal puts a bookend on a day. I'll enjoy the experience much more. Eating cold food, eating some crackers and biscuits for dinner, to me, is not an enjoyable thing. So yes, everything I've talked about, you have to purchase the equipment and there's a cost to that.

You have to carry the equipment, there's a cost to that, having to have the extra weight. Certainly, it's not necessary to keep alive, but each person will have to assess and consider their own personal style. But for me, something like having a hot meal of rice and a chili that I've made would be much more valuable than eating a cold peanut butter sandwich.

What about water? What did you do for drinking water and what did you do to stay clean while on the road? Yeah, so water is an interesting challenge if you do it the way we did. Not because of carrying it and things like that. We just simply had plastic bottles.

But yes, listeners might not think of it and we didn't think of it, but the issue that you run into is that you don't have access to toilets often. It can be a hassle, especially when you're kind of on the road, on highways, or I mean, it depends on where you're traveling.

In Western Europe, they're usually paid and you have to pay. And it's not a huge sum if you have a decent budget or even an okay budget. But when it's your food budget for the day, it's pretty grim. You don't want to get involved with that. So, we got used to actually being very careful not to drink water when we had no access to toilets, such as when we were staying with people.

And we'd actually not drink water until we had kind of a base or we found this free toilet and then we would get on with drinking water. Why didn't you just carry a bottle with you, like a pee bottle? Yeah, we could have. That's a possibility. It kind of didn't seem very appealing to us.

Come on, man, you're a hitchhiker, you gotta know these techniques. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you do to stay clean? And with staying clean, it was again, couch surfing provides for that. So, you can use people's showers. That was it. But I'm curious. I'm sure you have some more hardcore solution.

Yeah, at least it's just ideas for people. So, with regard to bathroom facilities, Western Europe would be very different than the United States. In the United States, bathroom facilities are abundant and they're generally free. You don't have the same system where you have to pay to use the toilets.

Western Europe, of course, would be very different. But practically, if I were in that situation, I'd carry a pee bottle. I'd just carry a large bottle and then when you have that, you can use it in a way that's private enough where you're not having a problem. And then you can dispose of it properly in another place.

That doesn't solve your needs for something more than that. But we'll leave that to people to think about alternative ways of solving for other needs. With regard to water, of course, yes, carrying them. And again, here in the United States and in Western Europe, this would be different if traveling in, say, Central America or South America or some place where the water supplies are not going to be so good with your stomach.

There, I think you have to budget to purchase water to drink or you need to carry a filtration system. Again, from the backpacking world, there's some really great filtration systems. Some of them, you have to be careful, make sure you're buying the type of filtration system that's going to be effective on the organisms that you're concerned about in the local water supply.

But I have a number of water bottles that are meant for hiking that just simply have a built-in filtration system. So I could safely fill them up from any local municipal water supply or any sink that I could find and use that as my source of drinking water. So I would consider doing that.

That would make a big difference to be able to have drinking water. With regard to staying clean, one of the challenges is finding access to water. So I've never hitchhiked around Western Europe. I don't know what it's like there. But for my US-based listeners, there are many options for that.

If you're in places like beach towns, the beach will often have a lot of shower facilities. We have a lot of public restrooms that have facilities. What I would do if hitchhiking and traveling in the United States is I would carry two tools with me. I would carry a length of hose, something like about a six-foot length of hose.

And I would carry a tool that's called a Silcox key, S-I-L-L-C-O-C-K, a Silcox key. In the United States, Philip, we have many public buildings have external water spigots on them. These are common. Public and commercial buildings have an external water spigot. But in order to keep people from using them, they remove the handles.

And the handles that they use are a small square or a small – basically you need a small tool to operate them. But this tool, which you can buy for five bucks on Amazon – I'll make a note and link it in the show notes. But you can purchase the Silcox key, and what it allows you to do is to access any of these other water systems and water facilities.

And so there are lots of places where with this, if you were traveling through US cities, you could easily find a municipal building. You could easily find a public park. And there would be lots of spigots. And if you have the Silcox key, you'll be able to operate those spigots.

So with a small length of hose, about five or six feet, and with that, you have the ability – as long as you can do it in a private way, whether it's at a desk or in a less populated place where you can do it with some privacy – you have the ability to use that and you have access to water easily for using your filtered water bottles.

Municipal water supplies in the United States are safe to drink. So you have access to water without problem, and you have the ability with your length of hose to have a shower, basically a shower, where you can wash up and keep yourself clean. And cleanliness is going to be a big deal for your personal state of mind and your enjoyment of your trip.

But also it's going to be a big deal for how you're perceived by other people. It's a lot easier to get rides if you don't smell from 10 feet away. Yeah. And we luckily – well, it was an issue with the – it was pretty cold, but the good side of that, because we went kind of in autumn, near winter, we didn't have so much of that issue where we could go a few days without major problem.

I forget about that. I live in Florida, so I don't think about things like winter very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly right. Different perspective. But yeah, that's an interesting solution. And I'm guessing if you're already cooking, would simply boiling the water do the trick? Generally, yeah. Boiling water is generally going to render it safe.

And so you can carry – there are a couple of simple ways that you can do. You can carry – it depends on what you're asking for as far as what's the water supply. But yeah, boiling water is generally going to render it safe. And just a little tip for people who are boiling water, if you're ever in a situation – because when you're cooking, fuel is limited.

You only have a limited amount of time. You don't actually have to boil the water for any sustained duration of time. By definition, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. And what you're essentially trying to do when you're in that situation to purify your water is you're trying to pasteurize the water.

So if you get to 212 degrees, I think pasteurization happens at like what, 160, 165 degrees, somewhere in that – don't quote me on that number. Search me out. But somewhere in that range. And you need to have it at that temperature for a certain amount of time. So all you need to do is just bring your water to boiling and then you can remove it from the heat source and you will have effectively pasteurized it.

Also, you can purchase water purification tablets which will help with purifying if you're not able to boil but you have a source of water and you don't have a filter. There are a bunch of methods of filtering your water and making it safe to drink. Right. All right, Philip, any other tips, tactics, techniques, things that I forgot or that we've missed so far that if you were going to do it again, you would take into account?

Yeah. Well, do you want me to go into the more hardcore things? Yeah, yeah. And one thing I want to mention, don't let listeners not pass over what you said about being able to have a sign and carry with you paper to write on and a marker to write on it.

Because if you are going to be hitchhiking, it's going to be much more effective for you to have a specific destination and to be able to have a sign of saying where you're going even if you're just putting on there the next town versus just sticking your thumb out and seeing who stops.

I think it will make a difference that, "Hey, I'm traveling purposefully. I have a destination in mind." And it will be helpful to help you get in the right direction. Yeah, yeah. That's very important. The truth is that if you stick your thumb out, probably nobody's going to stop like that.

At least that's our experience. So, yeah, you need the piece of paper. And again, you go to Hitchhiking and you can figure it out. In some places, it's better to write the actual place that you're going, the city or town or village or whatever. In other places, people write the name of the road.

So you'd say, "Okay, I'm traveling on M1" or something like that. And then they would know, "Okay, if I'm planning on sticking to it, then I'll pick you up." So, yeah, and another advantage is you don't have to pronounce the name. So, it's kind of funny, but we had a major issue with this in France because I speak some German.

All the way there, we were okay. But in France, neither of us spoke French and we actually got delayed a couple of hours because we couldn't pronounce the name of a place. And we were pronouncing it wrong and we kept going to people and telling them, "Okay, we're trying to get to this place." I think we were saying "Rheims" or something like that.

And the proper pronunciation is, don't quote me on this because it's from memory, but something like "Rons" or something pretty different. And it took like 20, the 20th person said, "What do you mean, Rons?" And we're like, "Oh, yeah." It's like you guys are pronouncing it completely incorrectly. So, yeah, with the sign, that's not an issue.

And I will add to it, I don't know how I forgot it, but even more effective than having the sign, at least here in Western Europe, the best way of hitchhiking is through gas stations. So, by far, so especially if you're going long distance and you need to go on highways where it's usually almost always illegal and well, generally not advisable to hitchhike because you have very high speeds cars that are not going to stop.

So, what you would do is you'd hop from gas station to gas station and you can simply go walk up to people and it's a good exercise in developing your kind of sales pitch. And you can just try to convince them to, like, "Hey, these guys were doing this trip, we'd like to get here and there, can you take us?" And you kind of have a captive audience there.

So, you have much better chances than simply holding out the sign. So, we started doing that after some time and we tried to stick to it because it's just more effective. Right, right. And I think this would be where using, if I were doing this, and this is speculation, I haven't done this type of trip, but I have a couple of buddies who have and we've talked about it.

If I were doing this, I would either print up and have printed for cheap in the United States, you can get some free business cards with, what's the online one? There's a free business card place where you can, if they put their advertisement on the back, you can order some from one of these online printing places.

I'll come up with it in a moment. But you can get some business cards printed up for free and just I would put on there my name and where I'm from and I would put a link to something like my social profile, my Instagram profile, my Facebook profile. So, that somebody could take a look and check me out or my blog if I'm maintaining a blog.

Blog would be great, but it's a lot simpler to manage an Instagram profile or a Facebook feed from a mobile device than it is to maintain something like a WordPress blog. But I would go ahead and put that information on there and then use that as a way of passing it out.

Put my Twitter handle on there, use that as a way of passing out to telling somebody either if they've given me a ride, "Hey, thank you so much. Please check out this so they can keep in touch with me." Or of saying, "I'm traveling. Here's where I'm traveling from.

Here's a card." If you don't have anything printed, then you can go ahead and just at least write something up. Use some of your paper and write up some little cards so people can keep in touch with you after the fact or so that you can establish, "I'm not a murderer.

I'm a traveler and this is the way that I'm choosing to travel." Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Okay, so let me get to the more hardcore things we did. So yeah, we had a point when we ran out of money. We just ran out of money. And we actually, one day we begged in the streets of Vienna.

So basically, we had the pen and paper, so that was good. So we simply made a little sign. It was kind of a humorous sign. I think it said something like, "Please help us get some beer." And we crossed out the beer and we wrote train tickets. And both of those were untrue because we were actually just looking for some money to buy food.

But yeah, so we had that little sign and we stood around the street and we collected some quick money there so that helped us out. And we didn't do it afterwards. But yeah, for someone really broke or really adventurous, that is a possibility or you can find jobs alternatively.

But that's a realistic thing. Absolutely. I did that one time when I was in college. A friend of mine and I were curious about what it would be like to be a panhandler sitting on the side of the street. And so we were just sitting around. I said, "Let's go do it." So we made some yellow signs and we put a message on there about… I think our message, I have a picture somewhere.

But something like, "Please help us pay for our college tuition." So we put a message on there. We were in college. We were paying for school and it said, "Need money for college tuition." And I wanted to see what it would be like to… because people often have very hardcore feelings about you should support yourself.

And I wanted to see what would be the reception of people if I put on there that, "Yes, I'm trying to be a freeloader to have you give me money for college tuition." And so we wrote that on our signs. We went out to a local street corner near his house and we spent a couple of hours out there holding signs.

And I couldn't believe how many people gave money. Now, they did talk and I always just told them, "Yes, we wanted to see if people would be willing to help." And people were very, very generous. But I don't particularly think that's the best approach to take to finance your life.

But it was fascinating to see what it was like to be standing there on the street corner. In the United States, it usually happens at an intersection. And it gave me a lot of sympathy. I was glad I did it because I learned about the eye contact and people not wanting to look at you and people not even reading the sign.

But you would see some of them that would read it and they would start laughing and then some people would give money because they wanted to. I don't remember how much we earned in the day, but it certainly could. It certainly can work. And if you're hungry and you need some food, you can use that technique if you need to.

Yeah, yeah. It's doable. Definitely, I would say. And actually, the interesting thing is the better dressed you are, the more it works. At least that was we looked at kind of for competition for regulars. We were watching the regulars around us, you know, people who do this as a career, quote unquote.

And we were making more money than them. And I think people are more open to helping out someone who's in a bit of trouble rather than fund this as a lifestyle. I think that's probably the case. Yeah, if you needed it and you just wrote traveling from West Palm Beach to New York City, ran out of money, I think people would want to help.

And if your message matches your appearance that, "Hey, I'm traveling. Here's my backpack," and you tell people the story, then certainly people have generous hearts and they would want to help you get a ticket and get a little bit of money. Did you do – you didn't do any work while you were on the road?

No. And, you know, maybe we're not so familiar with how this kind of black market works with when it comes to kind of work. But it could also be the fact that it's Western Europe and employment in Western Europe is a tricky thing. And you don't have a lot of people just accepting day jobs.

So government has cracked down on this pretty heavily to the point where it doesn't really happen anymore. So in the US, that would be simpler than in Western or even Europe in general. Right, right. Yeah, definitely. I wouldn't be so confident with my ability to make it happen in other parts of the world.

In the US, you could definitely find enough work, especially if you're in a more rural environment or a more suburban environment. You could definitely find enough just day jobs to keep yourself on the road with a little bit of food in your pocket and a little bit of money in your pocket, a little bit of food in your backpack with just part-time here and there and odd jobs that you could pick up.

What other radical tips, Filip? We're coming up to the end of our time. What else you got? Yeah, well, the last thing I will say that we did is when we were really hungry, we did sometimes go into fast food restaurants and find leftover food, like things that you could eat without a major concern, like especially French fries.

We would pick that up. I think that was the most extreme thing that we did. And I'm guessing that if you go to other restaurants, not chain restaurants, you can possibly at the end of the day, you can pick up some free food as well. We didn't try it.

Going to chain restaurants, I don't recommend it because they usually have a policy and they're not going to be able to do that. Yeah, and I think this would be where one reason why I would try to have cooking facilities is the ability to cook food that you find, especially if you were dumpster diving.

Hard in the urban center, like around me, places where you can get food out of dumpsters is they're largely closed off. They use this style of dumpster where you can't have any access to it. The trash is compacted and it's put in there and you can't have access to it.

But if you're in a less urban environment, you can often find lots of good food in a dumpster. You could find lots of good food being thrown out, but you always have to worry about the safety. So you need to use your nose. But the ability to cook would make a big difference for either making sure that it's safe to eat or making sure that it could be actually transformed into something that is a little bit nicer.

You take some old bread and it's a little bit stale, but if you turn the old stale bread into toast, it transforms it and makes it much more palatable to eat versus eating it when it's just stale and not cooked at all. Yeah, and when it comes to dumpster diving, you have some episodes on that.

So that's the radical end. Yeah, it is. I tell you, I need to do another show on it. It's been a while since I've done a show on dumpster diving, but there's so much stuff that is tossed out. And I find food, at least here in my area, I haven't ever been able to dumpster dive for food.

But man, we find all kinds of other stuff. I could do a whole business just buying, getting stuff out of dumpsters or off the side of the road and selling it on Craigslist. I could make some decent extra income just simply doing that here in my area because people throw away so much stuff.

It's very different. Again, context is everything. That's very different than if you're in a place where the wealth of the society is much less and people are much more careful or where the culture is different. In the United States, US Americans just tend to be much more wasteful than other cultures.

My impression, you would have to tell me the actuality, but my impression would be that people in Western Europe would be more careful, less likely to discard things that are useful. So I would guess that there would be more plentiful dumpsters filled with stuff in the United States than some other places.

But you can look and there's always resources if you look. There's always opportunities if you look. Yeah, people will probably know. Again, you research the internet, things like that. I don't know the US. Western Europe, I think you could get away with it. Eastern Europe, no way, no chance.

Well, Philip, awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your story. You're doing a podcast. Tell us about your podcast, your website, anywhere else that you'd like people to go and check out what you're doing. Yes, so I have a podcast on personal development and one of the topics is personal finance.

But I kind of I have a broader range than radical personal finance. So if you're interested in things like psychology, relationships, productivity, things like that, you can you can find it at valueandgrowth.com. That's the easiest way of finding it. Or if you're listening to radical personal finance, I have a similar app and you can find me in the same directories.

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, Philip. And thank you for sharing your experiences. Many happy miles to you in the future. Thank you. And I wish some of your listeners tried this out because it's fun. And if they need a couch surf in where you are, what town are you in so they can reach out to you and stay on your couch?

Exeter. Exeter, Germany? Exeter, United Kingdom. United Kingdom. Sorry, I got confused for a moment. Exeter, United Kingdom. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, Philip. My pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance. If you're interested in building financial freedom for yourself and your family, please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode.

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