Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a 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 name is Joshua, and today I want to help you to live a rich life now while not damaging your plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less with a discussion of how to travel the world on the cheap.

I've been out traveling the last couple of weeks, and I'm now back at home, back in front of my microphone, and ready to get back to work. Of course, when you're on the road, it's a useful time to think about the subject of travel. It has been my personal experience that the vast majority of people have, at least they say they have, a major life goal of traveling.

The reason I modify the statement is when you ask them, they say they want to travel, but when you look at many people's lives, it seems to me that most people don't actually want to travel because most people don't. But for years I worked as a financial advisor, and as part of that process I would ask people about their life goals and their financial goals, and especially I would talk to them about retirement.

And I would estimate about 80% of the time when I would ask somebody what they wanted to do when they were retired, they would say something like, "I'd like to travel more." And then I would try to open them up and say, "Well, what do you mean? Where would you like to travel?

How would you like to travel? What does that mean?" And I learned that everyone says they want to travel, and yet very few people are clear on exactly what it is they want to do or how they want to do it. Few thoughts on why this is. First, many people don't like traveling, and I think that's perfectly fine.

Frankly, after traveling I'm always happy just to get home. One of the best things about traveling is that it makes you appreciate your house. It makes you appreciate home. So that can be useful. In fact, I'm at a place where at the moment I don't particularly want to travel much right now.

I have been very fortunate and blessed to be able to travel quite a bit in the past. I'm sure that I will travel more in the future, but right now I don't want to do any more traveling. And there are lots of people who just recognize that they're unproductive when they travel, they're uncomfortable, they don't see the point.

They'd rather sit at home and be in their comfortable surroundings and watch travel videos on their TV, which is fine. It's a free world, right? Nobody has to force anybody to do anything they don't want to do. But I know that a lot of people have this desire to travel, and I want to help you if you have that desire.

I want to help you do it soon. I want to show you how you can travel now, how you can do it soon. I do believe there is great value in traveling, because traveling, being in unusual situations, unusual places, it exposes you to things that can have a formative impact on your life.

It can shape your life. It can help you to see the world differently. It can help you to appreciate other people. It can help you to consider your own ideas and consider are they really true, or are you just think they're true because you haven't been exposed to alternative ways of seeing the world.

And so I want to help you. If you say that you'd like to travel, I want to help you do that. I want to help you do it quickly. I was also inspired by stumbling across a video on YouTube from a channel called Canrush, wherein a couple, a Canadian husband and his Russian wife who live in Russia, profiled and talked about the way that they traveled the world.

And so they traveled the world for a total of 752 days. So that's about two and a half years, or just over two years. They traveled nonstop from Moscow, Russia. On this round-the-world trip, they traveled from Moscow across to China, across India, then to Egypt, then they hitchhiked all around about eight countries in Africa.

They flew from Angola to Brazil, did the whole tour down and up through South America, up through Central America, and then all across the United States and Canada. I don't remember the exact number of countries, but probably 35-ish countries, 30 to 40 countries in that time. But they traveled for, again, 752 days.

And in that time, how much do you want to think that they spent as a couple traveling for just over two years? The total that they spent, and they were very diligent about tracking their expenses, the total they spent to travel for two years was $13,431. And when they left Russia, they just had money in a bank account, I think something like $15,000, $10,000 or $15,000, and they just went out planning to travel until their money ran out.

And because of that, they were extremely frugal and used it, and were able to stretch their travel time out to a total of two years. I'll go over some of their expenses in a minute, and I'll make sure to link you to the video. Maybe I'll pull the audio from it and share it with you so that you can listen to him talk about their actual expenses.

But I found that super inspirational. A couple, two people traveling for over two years with a total money of $13,431. Their daily cost, of total daily cost, was $17.86 per day, including all of the expenses. Now that is expenses included buying and selling several cars, renting cars, et cetera, in the United States.

And so they could have traveled cheaper if they'd had some better fortune with the cars that they bought, but total it was $17.86 per day. If they pulled out the cars and such, it came out to about $12 per day. So I found that inspirational. So let's talk about some strategies that you can use.

If you want to travel, but you feel constrained by money, here are some useful strategies to help you accomplish your traveling goals sooner, to help you do it on the cheap so that you continue to save money, or to help you to do it when you don't yet have a lot of money.

The first thing is to recognize traveling can be done by any person in the world who wants to do it without regard whatsoever to your financial condition. You can travel if you want to do it without regard whatsoever to your financial condition. It's very simple. If you want to travel, you walk out your front door, toss the keys to somebody, walk out your front door, turn right or turn left, and go.

And voila, you are now traveling. Any person in the world can walk out their front door, leave the keys in the lock, and turn right or left or maybe straight ahead and start walking. And you are now by definition traveling. Now maybe you walk, maybe you stick your thumb out and wait for a ride, maybe you go down and buy a bus ticket, maybe you get on a bicycle, buy a bicycle and start pedaling, but that is by definition traveling.

And walking is by definition traveling. And you can walk your way across the world. Over the years I've always had an interest in extensive travel stories. I've read, I don't think I've read books, but I've read essays and websites and articles about people who have walked across the world for years and years.

I've read essays about people who've bicycled across the world. I've read essays about people who ride motorcycles and drive. There's a great website that was curated by an Australian couple called Lost Horizons who over the course of about a decade, maybe a decade and a half, rode one Harley Davidson motorcycle to every country in the world.

Remarkable and they chronicled it all on their website. It's just a remarkable website. So you can do it in all different forms, but you can do it just simply by walking. And you can walk without a dime to your name. And along the way you can figure out how to provide for your sustenance.

Now that's probably not what you were thinking of when you talked about traveling and wanting to travel. That's certainly not necessarily what I'm thinking of. If I really wanted to travel and I had never traveled, I would consider walking out my front door, turning left or right, but that's never been my particular thing.

Maybe someday it will be. Maybe I'll walk across the United States or walk across Europe. But thus far that's never really appealed to me. So you do need to think about what you are trying to accomplish in your travels and clarify that. But don't assume that because somebody else travels in a luxury personal automobile or a giant RV or first class airfare all around the world in five star hotels, don't assume that that's exactly what you want to do and what you need to do.

I think most of us, if given the choice between flying around the world using first class tickets on premier airlines, staying in five star hotels and eating at fine dining restaurants without regard to the cost, if we were given the opportunity to travel in that way versus the opportunity to walk across the world, sleep on the ground under the stars and eat what people gave us to eat, most of us I think would prefer the five star hotel route.

But if your choice was between traveling on a budget, even a severely restricted budget, and not traveling at all, I think a lot of us would choose the traveling on a budget as being better than not traveling at all. Not everybody would. If you're comfortable in your home, again, realize, "Hey, I don't want to travel that way." Good, don't.

But there are a lot of us who would rather travel on a budget because it provides that grist for the middle of our life experience. Consider if that's you. Now, there's a very decent chance that you have more resources than simply a pair of shoes that you're going to walk around the world in.

You probably have stuff already that works for you to travel. You probably already have a car, for example. Well, that's probably your best place to start. If you have a car and you want to travel, consider just simply traveling in your car and using that to be your means of transportation.

In some places, that can be a very inexpensive way to travel. Probably the best here would be the United States and Canada. Traveling around the United States and Canada in car is probably going to give your best solution and be really your most frugal strategy. Busing around is hard.

The hostile network is not like it is in other places. Having your own car can be a very low price and effective strategy. This can be very freeing for you. When I was younger, newly graduated from college, one of the things that I did that was really for me quite helpful and empowering was I took a trip around the United States in an old car that I had, the first car that I ever had.

I paid $2,000 for it. When I graduated from college, it was an old Honda Accord. It had almost 200,000 miles on it. I wanted to travel, but as memory serves, I think I had a couple thousand dollars in my savings that I could use for travel. I just thought, "Well, how can I do it?" I was scared to go off in my car and drive this car with 200,000 miles all around the country, but I thought, "You know what?

Worst case scenario, the car breaks down. I leave it on the side of the road and I buy a bus ticket or a plane ticket home and I go home. I'll make sure that I have enough money to buy a bus ticket or a plane ticket home and I'll take the car." I took the car and drove it all around the United States, all around Canada.

I exclusively stayed with friends. I mapped my trip out by where I knew people and so I could stay on people's houses. That also helped with food because I could eat with them. I spent a good bit of money on gas, but almost nothing on lodging and traveled for several months for a very low budget.

I don't remember the exact numbers. If you have a car, consider using that. If you don't have a car, then look and say, "What else am I trying to do?" From here on out, I'm going to talk about international travel because I would guess that for most of us, international travel is probably somewhere that we have a bit of a bent, a lean.

Yet, you can walk out your front door and you can go 10 miles down the roads and set up a tent in the woods near your house and you are, by definition, traveling. But you're probably already doing that, so you don't need much input from me. You can go to the next state over, but again, you probably don't need much from me to do that.

But if you're thinking about going on to the other side of the world, perhaps that might be a little bit more challenging for you. So let's talk about how do you save money and travel the world on the cheap. In traveling, there are a few different categories of costs.

Your number one cost in traveling is going to be the cost of your life at home. This is a very important concept for you to grasp. Your biggest cost will be your life at home. If you rent a house or have a mortgage payment and you continue to maintain that rental house and that mortgage or that mortgaged house while you are traveling, you will have your home expenses and your travel expenses to pay for.

That's a big, big cost. Now, it's possible that you may not have those expenses if you live in some way where you don't pay a monthly rent payment or you own your house outright so you don't owe a monthly mortgage payment. That can help quite a bit. But your biggest cost of travel is going to be if travel is added on to your normal expenses.

So you have to think about this and ask yourself, "Is there a way that I can eliminate these normal expenses?" In 2018, my family and I traveled around the United States in a travel trailer, in an RV. But one of the things that we did in that time was we made sure that we abandoned all of our previous housing.

So we stopped renting the apartment that we were renting previously. We made sure that we canceled all of our expenses so we had no expenses from home. And that makes a massive difference. In traveling the country full-time, we spent more or less the same amount of money traveling as we spent living in South Florida.

It's just the numbers were changed a little bit. Now it wasn't perfectly more or less because of the purchase price of vehicles and such. So it wound up being a little bit more based upon the cost of the transportation. But in terms of being on the road, once you buy the vehicles, which that can be budgeted for if you buy an RV or need a car or whatever it is you need, once you're on the road, then the basic costs are just what you have on the road.

And so if you eat at home, you have the cost of eating at home and you have the cost of eating on the road. That's the easiest one to adjust. But if you are used to paying $1,500 a month on rent, you can either pay $1,500 a month on rent in Boston, Massachusetts, or if you have an RV, you can pay $1,500 a month in RV parks all around the country.

But it's your costs that are additive that make it tough. This is where the vacation model becomes really challenging. If we go with the basic concept of a two-week vacation where you say, "Okay, we have our normal life, but around the holidays or in the summer, we're going to take a two-week vacation or a four-week vacation," all of your travel expenses generally are going to be added on to your normal cost of living.

Thus, your vacation is going to be very high. If you can figure out a way to eliminate or defray your expenses at home, then your travel costs are fairly straightforward. How do you do it? Well, first, you can eliminate them. You can do the drastic step of giving up an apartment, not renting an apartment anymore, of selling your house, putting your things in storage, or getting rid of all your things.

It's a very big step. It's a lot of work, but it can be done and it can give you that ability to go where you want without being tied down. It's really unique. It's something that I think very few of us ever do. I like to do things myself before I talk about them, but I've gone through the various stages of size of your possessions.

When I was younger, of course, I had few possessions. My wife and I lived in a tiny studio apartment when we first married. Then we bought a big house. I adjusted our possessions to fit the big house, had tools and stuff everywhere. Then we downsized into an apartment, downsized into an RV, and then ultimately downsized into about seven or eight suitcases and traveled with all our children across the world with seven or eight suitcases.

It was remarkable how we could be perfectly comfortable living out of seven or eight suitcases. There were some things in the seven or eight suitcases that we really missed. That was more due to the challenge of being parents of young children. For example, you have a small number of toys fit in the suitcases, which was great.

A small number of books fit in the suitcases, which was great. But we got really tired of reading the same 15 or 20 books again and again and again and again. So there are some downsides to that. But in terms of the flexibility of recognizing that, wow, with eight suitcases, even though in my case I have a large family, I can move my entire family in a minivan or a sedan.

It's remarkable how much freedom that can bring to you. So it's really freeing to be free of possessions. I'm not a proponent of the philosophy of minimalism as being good in and of itself. I think that's silly. I think it's short-sighted to say that there's somehow a prize for whoever has the least number of physical possessions.

To me, it seems that the number of physical possessions that you have should fit the lifestyle that you're living. So if you want to live on the road, pack light. Just have a few things. If you're going to be a farmer, you're going to need more possessions because trying to be a farmer and live out of a suitcase can be very, very frustrating.

The hoe doesn't fit in the suitcase or the tractor. You insert whatever you want to. So consider the cost of your life at home. Another way to cover those costs is to defray your expenses. Now you can do this formally or you can do this when you see an opportunity.

For example, you can do a vacation house swap. Let's say you have a house and you live in Boston, Massachusetts. You'd like to go to Dublin, Ireland. Well get online, go to one of the house swap websites and see if you can do a house swap with somebody. And you can live in their house in Dublin, Ireland and they can live in your house in Boston, Massachusetts.

You can also do this when you see an opportunity for perhaps a low-maintenance tenant to rent your house. Maybe you have a family member who's going through transition time and they're looking for a house to rent but just on a short-term thing. Well put them in your house for a couple of months.

Let them use your stuff. Have them pay you rent. That covers your cost of home and go travel for a couple of months. It allows you to not have to move out of your place but it simply allows you to go on the road and you can do that of course with a more arm's-length rental transaction as well.

Rent your house out for a year, go travel for a year, come on back, open up the lock shed in the back where you put your personal items, put them back in your house and you're ready to set up your life again. But think about how you can eliminate the costs of your life at home.

This is why being free of debt is so important so that you don't have a big debt load because if you don't have debt, it's very easy to cut off your home expenses. This is why keeping your life relatively contract-free, not having contracts on your cell phone and not having contracts on your internet and all that stuff.

So then anytime you want, you can just turn the stuff off, say that's it, this is the last month. You can easily cut your expenses at home, go on the road and then come back and pick them up. But recognize your biggest cost is most likely going to be the cost of maintaining your life at home while you're traveling.

Now with regard to actual travel expenses, your first category is transportation. Transportation for you from one place to another. And so one of your major strategies needs to be to minimize the costs of your transportation. So you should choose an appropriate travel methodology for your goals and think about low price.

In my example of turning out the door and walking, that could be a great strategy for an active, healthy young person who just has a little bit of money and isn't too concerned about going to the other side of the world necessarily. That would be harder for somebody like me with young children and babies who don't really walk very well.

They don't have quite the hiking stamina that you would like. And so when I would think about traveling, I think about how am I going to minimize the cost of the transportation in an appropriate way. So think about your region of travel. What's available? Are buses available and inexpensive?

Are trains? Should you consider buying a car? Should you hitchhike? There are lots of things that you can do that will allow you to move yourself around the world without much money. The very inspiring story that I shared with you about the Kenrush channel where the couple spent the $13,500 to travel for two years, they exclusively hitchhiked in every place except the United States and Canada where they bought a car and with the exception of a few international flights to get them from one continent to another.

But in order to conserve their money, they exclusively hitchhiked in every country. And they saved massive amounts of money and had incredible adventures by hitchhiking. So you could do that too. That'd be something worth considering. Another big strategy is to do this, to stretch out your time between transportation so that your daily cost of transportation is much lower.

I'll give you a simple example. Say you're an American and you live living in the United States and you want to go on a European vacation. Well if you plan a 10-day tour of Europe and you buy plane tickets for a 10-day tour of Europe, let's assume your ticket costs $1,000 to get from the United States to Europe.

With a $1,000 ticket on a 10-day tour, you have a daily cost of $100 of airfare. Every day of your trip, you're going to be spending $100 on airfare as we amortize the $1,000 expense over 10 days. Now if you will increase the time in Europe from 10 days to 30 days, you'll have the same $1,000 but now your daily cost is lower.

You'll have $30 per day on airfare instead of $100 per day. Or if you extend it out even further to a 200-day tour of Europe, now your airfare costs are only $5 per day instead of $100 per day. Question is, is that a good thing for you to do?

Well it depends. If you were paying a bunch of at-home expenses for your house in the United States, then maybe that 10-day tour is all you could afford because you had to get back and stop the travel expenses. If you're staying in very expensive hotels and you additionally have a $200 a day hotel bill, then certainly it's going to be more expensive for you to be on a 30-day tour at $200 a day than a 10-day tour at $200 per day.

But if you can adjust those accommodation expenses in Europe and you can adjust those home expenses by simply lengthening out your trip, you'll lower the overall impact of the cost of airfare. In the example that I gave you with the Canrush couple, the total that they spent on flights was $2,300.

They flew from India to Egypt, then they flew from Angola to Brazil, and then they ultimately flew from Canada back to Moscow. And so they chose the flights based upon inexpensiveness, but they traveled around the world for a total airfare of $2,300. Whereas if they had gone from their home in Moscow to all these other places, it would have been tens of thousands of dollars of airfare.

Well, how'd they get there? Because they had more time and thus could make more efficient choices. Now, the other thing is if you'll stretch out your time between transportation, you can very quickly have much cheaper options on even the airfare itself. For example, if you want to go to France and yet the tickets to France are very expensive, if you only have 10 days, you can't fly into the other side of Europe where you could fly in for $500 and then make your way on the train system to France.

You just got to get to France, do your France things and get home. But if you have more time, then you can take advantage of a discount ticket or something that's just massive discounts to fly into the other side of Europe and then make your way slowly to France, which would be much cheaper on the local system than the international airplanes.

So consider stretching out your time and calculate your daily cost of air transportation. Here are a couple of other things that I would suggest that you do with regard to air transportation. First, if you don't care much where you go, first figure out where it's cheap to go and then figure out what to do there.

When you're trying to travel, the time that you will pay the most money in air transportation is when you need to be in a specific city on a certain set of dates. Then you have almost no flexibility. I have to be in London from the first through the eighth because I have these events scheduled.

Well, you're pretty much stuck with whatever the airlines are charging for you to be in London from the first through the eighth. So even when you go out and try to get a good deal on a ticket, you're going to have a very difficult time. But if you'll shop the tickets based upon what's cheap to get to and you say all of a sudden find a cheap ticket to Germany and you say, "Well, that'd be interesting.

I bet I could find interesting things to see in Germany." Then you can take the cheaper ticket, go and then look up and figure out what interesting things are there to do in Germany. So think about where you can get – find the ticket first that's cheap and then think about what there is worth doing there.

A couple of tools that I use there without doing a full lesson on it first. The Kayak Explore function is fantastic. If you go to a website called kayak.com/explore, you can put in your home airport and then you can see where in the world you can go on a certain budget.

Again that's kayak.com/explore. And that's a really, really useful function. So if you live in Miami, you can see where can I fly from Miami, from Fort Lauderdale, from West Palm Beach, from Orlando, from Tampa. And then you can see the tickets that are available. And this can be a really useful tool.

You can check it every day, every couple of days and you can find some really great deals on airfare. There are a number of deal websites and subscription services that also will help you find discount airfare. So if you're not going to go and travel for a year, you just want to travel from time to time but you're open to it, search those companies, find those people who are compiling them and do that.

Another tool that I think is so useful is the Matrix software. The website for Matrix is matrix.itasoftware.com. I'm not going to go deep into this tool but basically it's in many ways a travel agent tool which you can use to find interesting flight itineraries. It's owned now by Google and it's the software that powers Google Flights.

Many people use Google Flights. It's a little bit more user friendly. But if you're looking for a way to figure out how to put together massively discounted airfares from interesting places to interesting places, it's hard to see how you're not going to be using matrix.itasoftware.com. Search the internet for the world of travel blogs and airline mile lessons and things for how to use the software.

But it's extremely useful. And one of the things I like to do is just to use it to segment out flights in a way so that you can stay. For example, one of the things you can do with matrix is you can force long stays in a certain city.

So if you want to have a long layover, say you want to have a 22-hour layover in a city so you can get a good night's sleep in a local hotel or do some sightseeing without paying extra for an extra stopover, the matrix software allows you to do that.

I find that to be really useful. And then think carefully how you maximize your transport for the number of people that you have. If you're a single person traveling alone, hitchhiking is going to be very, very simple for you because you can easily fit into a car. It is one person.

My family, it's hard to see how anybody is going to have enough room to pick us up. So we can't all stand by the side of the road with our thumbs out unless we're expecting somebody to ride in the back of a pickup truck or ride in the back of a truck.

Common in many parts of the world, less common in other parts of the world. So we're more likely to choose the efficiency of a driving option of some kind, of owning a car or having our own car because it's really efficient for the number of people that we have to move.

But you may be able to do that too. Let's say that you are in the United States but you want to take a road trip in Central America. Well, instead of you just going, get a couple of your friends together. If you get four dudes in a car, the weight is going to lower the gas mileage a little bit as compared to one, but it's going to be pretty close to cutting your costs on transportation by 75%.

Every single border crossing in your car is going to be cheaper because the fees for the permiso for your car is going to be cut by 75%. Your fuel costs are cut by 75%. Your insurance costs are cut by 75%. You'll even save money on the lodging by being with some other dudes.

So plan it out and think about, is there a way that we can maximize the number of people? That's enough for transportation. Your major strategy is, of course, choose a low-cost transportation option that's appropriate to you. Don't forget walking and riding bicycles. You can travel the world or your state or your country walking and riding bicycles.

Very efficient, very flexible, very low cost, and you can have some wonderful experiences. Just obviously, if you're walking, you're going to meet a lot more people if you're walking or riding a bicycle because you're in the people. You're in the crowd. You're going to try to hide the way that you can if you're hiding in your car, surrounded by walls.

You're not really talking to people so much. So think about what's an appropriate transportation strategy for you. Next would be lodging. So how are you going to sleep? Where are you going to sleep at night? Where are you going to stay? Where are you going to be? Here your major strategy is simple.

Minimize your needs and then consider what would appropriately fit those needs given the constraints that you have. Another solution is you can just simply sleep wherever you find yourself. The vast majority of our ancestors, when it came time to sleep, simply lay down on the ground and slept. That was what they did.

And it wasn't that long ago that they did that. They lay down on the ground and they slept. If you were a cowboy riding your horse across the range on a cattle drive, when it came time for you to go to sleep, you would lay out your bedroll, which was a blanket, basically a sleeping bag.

You lay it out on the ground. You didn't have a pad. You didn't have a lot of cushion, etc. And you lay down and you slept, which yes, means that you're hot when it's hot, you're cold when it's cold, you get rained on when it rains. It's uncomfortable generally, but that was what the majority of people have done throughout history and even today, what many people in the world do.

It's really tough to be a rich Westerner and say to people, I don't do this to my family. I don't tell my wife, we're going to sleep on the floor. We spend the money and I buy the hotel room and get the comfortable bed and such because we're soft, we're spoiled.

But it's not that way throughout the rest of the world. Just two quick stories. Years ago, I was in Asia and I was traveling in a very poor part of Asia, traveling with some very poor people. And we traveled from one village to another. We were staying and stayed for dinner.

And at the end of dinner, I look around and I realized that all the noise from all the children had disappeared. And I look over in the corner and there's just a heap of kids just lying on the floor in the corner of the little house that we were in.

And it really, in one way, impressed me because it was normal for those children that they were a bunch of people going from one place to another, but there weren't any fancy accommodations. There wasn't a nice guest room. And so the children had just basically collapsed after they were done playing and lay down in the corner of the floor.

I slept on the wood plank floor on a bamboo mat. And you don't sleep all that well, but you do sleep. So those options are there. Years ago, when my father was growing up, my grandparents would drive back and forth from Colorado to California. And at night, they would be out in the middle of the desert.

They didn't have money for a hotel. They would pull over on the side of the road. My grandmother would sleep in the car. And my grandfather and my dad, they would go out in the bushes and sleep on the ground. That was the normal. They'd pull off the highway a ways.

That was how things happened. And even today, if you travel around, you'll see people doing this. I go to rest stops, and you see people just sleeping in their car at the rest stop without any particular accommodation. Now I don't like to travel that way. That's not... I like to be a little bit more comfortable because I'm kind of soft and weak.

But the point is you can do it. So you could just travel and sleep wherever you find yourself. Now with that as the baseline, now you can move up some levels of luxury as your budget allows. First obvious example would be a tent. Throughout history, many people have lived their entire lives in a tent.

Many people today continue to live in tents. And you can do this the old-fashioned way. Build yourself a teepee and live out in the woods. When I was traveling around the U.S., I spent a bunch of time talking to a guy who did that. He still lived in a teepee in the woods and had for decades.

Or you can purchase a more modern tent, carry it in your car, strap it on the back of your motorcycle, carry it in the back of your bike, and use that. The ability to set up a tent, roll out a modern sleeping bag, modern sleeping roll, pad, you can be very comfortable and yet not have to pay every night for accommodation.

And in most of the world, you can find a place to put up a tent. Even if you're in the city, in most cities of the world, if you are a traveler and if you're traveling in some way that's obvious that you are a traveler such as walking, carrying a backpack, riding a bicycle, if you go into a residential neighborhood that has backyards and you knock on a door and you explain, "Hi, I'm traveling.

I'd like to just have a safe place to put up my tent for the night. Could I stay in your backyard?" Probably 80% of the time, you'll get a yes answer. You'll probably be invited for dinner, beers afterwards, you'll meet a local person, you'll probably make a friend, they'll show you everywhere around the world.

You can do it in a tent. You don't have to spend a lot of money on hotels. You can, of course, live in a vehicle. If you're traveling in a vehicle, I've done several shows on living in your car and loving it. It's a great option, can be extremely comfortable, is well worth considering.

Very great example would be couch surfing. The website and other associated websites that you can use to stay with people who want to open up their couch to you. You can do this through one of the websites all around the world, that Canrush couple. One of the things they did is on their over two years of traveling, they said they paid for lodging only 11 times.

The rest of the time, they were couch surfing, using the website, staying with hosts all around the world. Couch surfing is a tremendous option. Again, for one or two people, can work out really well. If you are five or six people, it's going to be a little bit more challenging, but couch surfing can be a great solution.

You can consider some kind of work stay arrangement. There are variations on this. In the United States and Canada, there's work camping. If you have an RV where you go and you're given a place to park your RV in exchange for some work. There is the woofing community, worldwide opportunities on organic farms, to volunteer on organic farms.

You can go and be a woofer and you stay with a farmer and you, in exchange for room and board, you volunteer some hours of your day as labor. If you are open to volunteerism, you can do volunteerism and go and stay with many places. If you will work, generally a part-time opportunity, you'll go and work with them.

Then you can have room and board provided for you because of your volunteer activities. Volunteerism is a tremendous way for you to travel the world because it provides some of the needs of the traveling that many people don't think about. First of all, working is good for you. It gives you an opportunity to do something useful.

You feel productive. You feel like you're having an impact on something probably that's important to you. But working in some of these arrangements is usually done on a very reasonable schedule, half a day, three quarters of a day, leaving time free for other things. I always enjoy doing fun touristy things more if I've done a good day's work before.

If you work in the morning and then go to the jump and swim in the waterfall in the afternoon, I enjoy that usually a little bit more because it feels like a reward for work done than if you just spend the whole day swimming in the waterfall. Your mileage may vary, but that's a little bit of my opinion.

Also, when you're volunteering, you're usually going to have a built-in community. One of the biggest challenges of hotels in places where there isn't a hostile culture, etc., is in hotels, everybody does their own thing. It's hard to make friends. It's hard to find people to do things with. But volunteering usually provides that.

You have friends, people that you meet. You have people in the community that you're interacting with. It opens up relationships and can result in a much more meaningful travel opportunity than just simply going through and staying at the hotel and buying the package sightseeing deal. I would be remiss if I didn't point out hostels here.

That's my favorite thing about hostels. Hostels do certainly allow you to save money, sleep less expensively, $10 to $30 a night depending on the city versus much more for hotels generally. My favorite thing about hostels is the community. In a hostel, generally there's a place for people to hang out.

There's hammocks. There's a yard where people are hanging out. It's very easy to meet people and a little easier than meeting people in a hotel. There are cooking facilities also which allows us to defray costs on food which is our next category. Consider your lodging strategy. You can go from free to very inexpensive to as expensive as you want.

Probably your best solution would be to put together some of these things as strategies and have options. If you travel with a small tent, then you know, "Hey, if I can't find any place to stay, at least I have a tent." That can be useful. If you are additionally couch surfing or volunteering but you have the tent as a backup plan and you also have money to go to a hostel if you need to, that's a really good strategy to have a diversity of options so that as you go into different places, you can try different things.

Let's move to food. Food will for many people be after transportation and lodging will be the next biggest category of expenses. Here think about what resources you have and what kind of food experiences you want to have. There are many people for whom gastronomy is the most important thing of a trip.

They plan their trip around their eating experiences. Some people food is less important and there are other aspects of travel that are more important. Food can be and generally is very inexpensive if you, number one, eat like a local and number two, you do the cooking from scratch, from basic ingredients.

If you change any of those things, then food starts to be more expensive. If you eat imported foods and you don't eat like a local, then you're generally going to start paying more money and then number two, if you are paying someone else to cook for you or if you are cooking not from just the basic ingredients that you can find in the local market, food can generally be fairly expensive.

So you would have to decide what is important to you. Back to the inspirational story from the Canrush couple. For two years, they spent a total of $1,736 on groceries and they spent a total of $844 on restaurants for a couple of two and they ate while they traveled the world.

So you can spend only a few thousand dollars but you're going to need to be prepared to do quite a bit of cooking. What most people will choose to do is to generally cook for themselves, generally eat local foods and then plan their restaurant experiences for a time when they get maximum value for the money.

I won't belabor the food thing. I will point out you also need some cooking equipment. One of the best things about hostels, if you stay in hostels, is you generally have the opportunity to use the cooking facilities, the sink, the stove, etc. and there's usually pots and pans, things like that.

You may also just simply carry your own equipment. If you are traveling in your car, you'll probably have room for more elaborate equipment. Might bring your own stove, might bring your own appliances. If you're traveling with a backpack, you might just simply need to travel with a small amount of equipment.

Most backpackers who are doing extended travel but just going with what they carry, they'll have a small cooking kit, small pot, maybe a cup, usually something like an immersion heater, maybe a small stove that they carry with them to allow them to cook even if there's not cooking facilities available in their hostel.

Back in episode 518, I did a show called Tools, Tips, and Techniques for Cooking on the Road so you can actually afford to travel. That one would be useful mainly focused on car travel, US-American travel where you have a hotel room, things like that. I suggested some solutions like traveling with electric pressure cookers such as an instant pot or rice cooker.

You can do most of the things you need with those two tools. Lots of things that you can do there. So food is something that you will have to decide on. The good thing is in Western countries, food at restaurants is going to be more expensive. When I'm in Western countries, I would tend to do more cooking than eating out because of the major price differential.

You go to more third world countries, developing countries, generally food in restaurants is far less expensive. And so personally, I choose to eat out more and enjoy the eating out experience in many of those contexts. Then we come to entertainment. Now in many ways, we need different words to describe different things.

In thinking about this, I think a word like travel is different from a word like tourism. Just simply that you can travel without doing any tourist things and tourism doesn't necessarily always involve traveling. So the best thing to do here is to get a concept of what you like, what entertains you, what you enjoy.

If you're the kind of person who enjoys the act of traveling, act of moving from one place to another, interacting with locals, being a part of the local culture, you could do that on a fairly tight budget. If you're the kind of person who really values the tourist focused activities, the rides, the attractions, the things that you have to buy tickets for, you're going to wind up spending more money on that.

Now not necessarily will that be cost prohibitive. Many tourist activities are expensive and they're especially expensive if you're on a tight schedule. Then you have to pay a lot to fit them in, but they don't necessarily have to be, especially if you spread them out. This comes back to the amount of time that you have.

If you're on a 10 day trip to see every site, you're not going to have time to cook. You're not going to have, so you're going to be eating out two, three meals a day. Then you're also going to have to fit in a lot of things. You might be paying for a museum entrance in the morning, paying for an attraction in the afternoon, hiring a tour guide, hiring transportation, et cetera, to get you from one place to another.

A short term trip, the way that most of us do in the vacation model, usually costs quite a bit of money. If you're in the more longer term travel model, you can cut down those expenses because you limit them. One day your entertainment is walk around the town and you spend your entertainment money on a really great restaurant meal.

The next day you cook for yourself, but you spend your entertainment money on a tourist activity or a ticket entrance fee, something like that. Think about that. I would encourage you, consider what you actually care about, what you actually want to do. Simple example, many people throughout the world save for years and plan to go to an attraction like Disney World.

I understand it. I understand the attraction a little bit. I'm not attracted to it. I don't like Disney. I don't want to go to Disney. By being clear on that, when I get opportunities and invitations to go to Disney, unless I'm going with somebody who's got the family hookup and gets me in and says, "Let's go and eat around the world at Epcot," there's just not any point to going.

I don't want to go. Choose for yourself. Don't think that just because everyone else in the world wants to go to Disney that you have to go. I have other things that I like that other people don't like. Consider what's important to you and then think about how that will fit in.

Other aspects of traveling are probably fairly minor. You will need, for example, a travel document. You'll probably need visas if you're going to go to interesting places. Depending on the strength of your passport in terms of the number of visa-free countries you can go to, depending on the places that you care to go, you may be spending some significant amount of money in visas.

Let me go run down, as I close the show, let me run down the costs that this particular couple, Canrush, spent. Again, I'll just link to their video. I won't strip the audio and play it. I'll just link to their video. You can watch it if you would like.

They spent $3,221 on cars. They had some bad experiences on this. In traveling the United States, they planned to buy a car. That really is one of the best ways to travel around the United States. I've met lots of people, Australians and Europeans in the United States. They fly in, buy a car, use it for a few months traveling around the United States, and then sell it and then go on their way.

It's a really, really great way to do it. Met a great Australian couple when I was out in Arizona who was doing that. They flew into Canada because it was easier for them to buy a car in Canada, bought an older Chevy Astro van, converted it in a day or two to be a camping van that they were sleeping in, and then used that and traveled around the United States for several months with a plan of selling the van at the end of the trip.

We're having a really great experience with their DIY camper van. In this case, the couple spent $3,221 on cars. They had some bad experiences where they bought a car, broke down, fixed it, and got rid of it. Then they bought another car, broke down, fixed it. Finally, they gave up and just started renting cars instead.

That was their biggest category expense. Then flights, $2,300 for two years of flights, mainly intercontinental flights. They chose when they would cross continents by choosing when the flights were less expensive and the specific flights that were less expensive. $1,700 on groceries, already talked about. $1,300 on gas for the cars.

Then they spent about $1,200 on visas, visa fees for them. In their case, they were traveling on a Canadian and a Russian passport, so they had to get some various visa fees to get into the different countries. Those fees do add up. Some are simple, the visa on arrival.

Some you have to pay in advance. Some fees, generally most countries will charge you some amount of money to come in. Then sometimes it's very large. Just research that based upon the countries that you look at. $845 on restaurants over the course of two years. Transportation, buses, local transportation, et cetera, not including flights, was $784.

Category of other for $407, $361 of gifts, $266 of cell service. Even some miscellaneous stuff, $250 on electronics. They spent $154 on entertainment, some money on clothing, et cetera, smaller numbers for total expenses of $13,431 to travel the world for 752 days. Now if they can do it, you can do it.

If I can do it, you can do it. Don't take any idea that you don't like of what I've said and think that you have to do it. Think for yourself about what's important to you. Don't try to live somebody else's trip. Don't try to take somebody else's trip.

But if you want to travel, don't let money, don't let these things stand in your way. You do have opportunities to make a lot of, to go. Don't let money stand in your way. It really doesn't need to. It's only a lack of imagination and a lack of skill that would ever lead someone to have money being the number one reason why I can't travel.

You might choose to say, "I'm choosing not to travel right now because I'm saving money or I'm waiting for this specific type of travel that I want to do. I really want to travel in my own four-wheel drive vehicle. I really want to do that." Okay. But don't let money in and of itself be an excuse as to why you say, "I can't travel." You can travel if you want to.

You just have to figure out how to adjust the details to your budget. That's it for how to travel on the cheap. I guess the best thing for me to plug for you today would be my course, which is not cheap but is very useful. The course is called How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis.

One component of it is travel. Originally when I was thinking about writing that course, I had a working title called something like basically bugging out of the economic crisis. The idea being if things are bad where you live, if you're in an economic crisis, one of the best things to do is just leave and go somewhere where things aren't bad.

It's a very simple concept but it's under discussed in my opinion. If things are bad where you live, just leave and go where things aren't bad until things get better and then if you want to come back, come back. But in order to do that, you've got to have some comfort and familiarity with travel.

Most people have so little comfort and so little familiarity with travel that they can't conceive of it. It's best to practice. Having practiced, I know that my family and I, if things went bad, we would pack up eight or ten suitcases. We would get flights to the other side of the world where things are better.

I'd go on Airbnb. I'd rent a house and get us settled for a few months until I found something that we wanted to be for longer and we would be very happy living somewhere else while things are bad at home until we wanted to go back home. But it takes practice.

It takes some and the best way to practice is just through vacation trips, just through some travel trips. So in that show or in that course, in addition to all the ways of how to survive and thrive in an economic crisis by staying put and how making sure you simply avoid the crisis in the first place, I have an extensive discussion on traveling including a lot of international travel, a lot of tips and techniques.

It's a great course. I'm really proud of it. Probably more proud of it than anything I've produced thus far. I've got more up my sleeve but I'm really proud of that one. So go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/store and try out the How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis course.

I think you'll really like it. Thanks for listening. Bye. Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and save. You may qualify for an 18% discount. Visit SDG.com/FERA to find out more.