My husband works at a museum, and I’m an elementary school teacher. How can we afford to travel 3-4 times a year, for at least 5-6 weeks a year, if not more?
How to Afford to Travel
Priorities
It’s all about priorities. We all have some income. If you’re reading this, you probably have food and shelter. That means you have choices. What do you want to do with your one life? What is your money actually for? For us, money buys us time: time to travel, time to spend with our loved ones, and time to share experiences together. We can afford to travel because that’s our priority.
Here are 7 considerations to help you figure out how to afford to travel!
Reflections
First, some reflections. I haven’t written in a few months because I got a slipped disc. Recovering has given me a lot of time when I couldn’t be productive, but I could reflect on my life so far. During that time, I read Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
This book is a really practical, worthwhile read. If you have credit card debt, student loan debt, if you’re not yet investing, if you are paying 1% or more fees to invest, if you’re paying credit card fees…Sethi has step-by-step instructions and scripts on how to avoid all of these extremely costly issues.
Because of my injury, I couldn’t go on a trip I had planned this February. Not much fun traveling if you can’t sit, stand, or walk! Luckily, I do have travel insurance, so I was able to cancel the trip without losing any money. My travel insurance is through my Dutch health insurance, but if you don’t have that option, I strongly recommend buying some sort of insurance. This one is the best I’ve found for Americans, for example!
When I told friends that I had to cancel my trip, their first question was whether I could get my money back. Yes, I could. But that missed the point. I didn’t want the money back- I wanted the trip I’d planned! I’m grateful for the travel insurance, and extremely grateful that it was the first time I’d needed it…but I’d much rather have the trip and my health than the extra money!
My experience with my injury has given me the time to think about what really matters to me. I am sad about the missed travel experience I was planning on sharing with my husband and 14 month old baby. The extra money is much less important to me than the missed memories. Hopefully, we’ll all be able to travel together again soon!
Conscious Spending Plan- What is your “rich life”?
What I found meaningful in Sethi’s book was his Conscious Spending Plan. It is so straightforward and easy to fill out, and yet it makes your spending so clear and your choices so obvious. I highly recommend downloading it and filling it out now.
The goal of the Conscious Spending Plan is to figure out with your family what a “rich life” means to you. For some people, it means saving a lot to retire early, or to buy a second home, or to feel comfortable quitting a job you don’t like and going after your dream job. For others, it means being able to eat out regularly, or spend all you want on clothes.
For our family, a “rich life” has always been about time. Having time to pursue our hobbies and spend time with our loved ones is the point of money for us. Being able to afford to travel is essential for us. What’s the point of money for you?
Having the money to take a year off was the best use of money we’ve ever spent. Having the money to afford to both work part time and to take care of our baby ourselves, without daycare, is a rich life to us. Our financial goals include Sethi’s 10% savings, 10% investments, and 60% fixed costs…and our rich life is spending the rest on vacations now and planning for a year off at least every 10 years of work as long as we are physically able to travel.
What matters to you? What is your money for? How does being able to afford to travel fit into your life goals?
The Big Picture
1. Your Day to Day Life Right Now
First consideration when figuring out how to afford to travel: How do you spend your weeks now? Not your vacations, but your ordinary weeks? Is your job “good enough” for what you want and need right now? Is your time outside of work what you want right now? How you choose to spend your time is what matters to you. If you write down what you’re doing every 30 minutes for one week, would it accurately show what you want to be doing with your life right now? If not, how could it?
For example, before living in the Netherlands, I lived in Sri Lanka. My vacations were wonderful- every weekend I went someplace gorgeous in Sri Lanka, and on long weekends I went everywhere there was a direct flight. My work at the school there was lovely.
But my day-to-day outside of school was lonely. Horrible traffic and pollution, challenging gender norms, and the location of my school and apartment made going anywhere after work frustrating and unpleasant.
So after my two-year contract was over, I resolved to find a new home where my work week outside of school would also be pleasant. I looked all over the world for a place known for a good quality of life, work/life balance, lots of expats, locals who speak English well, and a school where I would be paid enough to enjoy the city.
The Netherlands always is near the top of those quality of life surveys- while being far more open to foreigners than the other countries that do well on those lists, like Scandinavia and Switzerland. So I deliberately chose to live in a country where I would be safe and comfortable walking, biking, and taking public transit- alone as a woman, and where I could make friends and find a partner outside of school. And I did 😉
Now that we have a baby, the day-to-day is even more important. How will our child get around the neighborhood? Get to school? Go to afterschool activities and playdates? What opportunities are there for college? What will his friends be like? What will the pressures be like for us as parents? How will we as parents need to spend our time? How can we afford the life we want for him?
Think about the hours of your typical 7 day week. If helpful, actually track it for a week. What you spend time on is how you are spending your life. It is what you are prioritizing. How many waking hours are you spending working? How many hours on your phone? How many actually talking with and listening to your family? Your friends? Your hobbies? Sleep? Exercise? Is this how you want to spend your life? Is this what you want to prioritize? If not, how could you use your money to create the life you actually want?
For example, right now I’m spending 8am-4pm at work, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. From 7am-8am and 4pm-7:30pm, I’m spending time with my baby and husband those days. The other days, I’m with my baby 7am-7:30pm. When he naps, I’m reading for fun, planning future trips, or working on this blog.
After 7:30pm, I’m either doing my own hobbies (reading, talking with friends/family, vacation planning, blog) or spending time with my husband before bed. This schedule prioritizes time with my family, and gives me several hours a day of my own hobbies and time with my husband. This is how I want to spend my life right now.
Does your schedule accurately reflect how you want to be spending your life? If not, how could you change your life so it does?
2. Your fixed costs and “guilt-free spending” right now
Your second consideration in figuring out how to afford to travel is how you currently spend your money. The conscious spending plan has just a few clear categories: fixed costs (50-60%), investments (10%), savings (10%), and guilt-free spending (20%-30%). If you realize that your fixed costs are too high, then now is the time to think about how you can change that. Otherwise, you are not to be saving or investing, not doing anything fun- or you’re losing money each month.
One of the most powerful lessons my parents taught me is that everything is a choice. If you have food and shelter, you have choices. If your fixed costs are too high, you have choices:
- Move to a place with cheaper rents/mortgages
- Move to a smaller apartment/house
- Rent/sublet out a room
- Cut subscriptions, cut the grocery budget (average for a family of 4 is $800-$1200, but this website goes into more detail), cut anything you don’t need
- Add income- either more hours, an extra job, negotiating a raise, etc. Ramit Sethi has lots of ideas here. I also really like Simone Stolzoff’s book The Good Enough Job. It’s about figuring out how you can make your life and your self-worth separate from your job. He describes how to make your job support your life, instead of your job being your life!
Once you have your fixed costs, savings, and investments in control, then you have your fun money. That’s when you get to decide what you want to prioritize with your money. For us, it’s saving for vacations and another year off in the future. It’s also worth it for us to make less money right now while our baby is so young and both work part time.
What is it you want to do with your extra money? What do you want your time right now to look like? Use your money to make that happen! If your goal is to afford to travel, then make that your priority.
If you want to learn more about how to travel like an expert so you don’t waste money or time, please check out my article here. If you want help finding accommodation affordably, here’s my article for that!
3. Your future!
Your third tip to plan how to afford to travel is what you want your future to look like. One of the most important conversations you can have with your family is what you imagine in the future. What do you want your life to look like in 5 years? 10? 20? 30?
When you’re 80, looking back on your life together, what do you want to have spent your time doing? What are you worried you’ll regret if you don’t try it now? Is being able to afford to travel essential for you?
I decided to become an international school teacher because a wonderful friend asked me this simple question: What have I always dreamed about doing but never done- and why haven’t I? For me in 2015, still teaching in San Francisco, the answer was simple: I had always wanted to live abroad, and I hadn’t because I was afraid of moving to a strange country alone. Saying that aloud to my friend made me realize I needed to try it out. So I did: I moved to Sri Lanka less than a year later, starting my international teaching life!
What about you? What have you always dreamed about doing but never done- and why?
Some people want to retire early, and that’s what they are working towards. My husband and I both enjoy our jobs, and think we can do them for many decades, if our health allows. So it’s not important to us to retire early (which is good, as the retirement age in the Netherlands is tied to life expectancy, so it keeps on going up and up…likely to be about 70 for us).
It is important to us to afford to travel as much as possible while we are physically able to. So for us, it’s worth spending the money regularly to travel throughout the year during my school vacations, saving up for a year off every 10 years, and retiring when we’re about 70.
But what about you? What do you imagine as your future?
The Details
4. Credit card debt and student loan debt
Okay, it’s going to be hard to afford to travel if you’re already in debt. So, let’s start with a plan to get out of any debt you have. Here is a debt payoff calculator, and Ramit Sethi also has a money coaching option– so that might be helpful for you to tackle your personal situation. I’m not an expert at paying off debt, but Sethi has walked many people through those challenges, and I’ve found his money talks really sensible.
5. Credit cards: Points and Fees
Your credit card (just like your investment account, savings account, and anywhere else you have your money!) should be making you money, not costing you money! It’s going to make it harder to afford to travel if you have foreign transaction fees, ATM fees, or even fees to have a savings account or credit card!
It’s okay to pay an annual fee if you are positive you are making up for it with the rewards, but that should be the only fee you are paying. You shouldn’t be paying the bank- they should be rewarding you for giving them your money!
Please check your bank accounts and make sure you are paying zero fees. I do have the Chase Sapphire Rewards Credit Card that is $95 per year- if you click this link and sign up, you and I both get a huge bonus.
I like the Chase Sapphire Rewards Credit Card because I have $0 in ATM fees worldwide- very important when traveling!- and zero foreign transaction fees. We’ve been places where the ATM fees are $7 a transaction…and withdrawals are capped at $20! Think of how much money that would waste!
I also get 5x points on travel booked with Chase Travel- for example, we rented a car for 4 weeks on our New Zealand trip for free with my points! Every little bit helps to be able to afford to travel.
I pay $0 for my savings account, $0 in fees to any other credit card fees, and 0.14% for my investment accounts with Vanguard (see below). If you are paying more than that, call them and fix it. Ramit Sethi’s book I Will Teach You To Be Rich has scripts for you to practice before calling!
6. Investments, fees and calculators
You can’t afford to travel if you have nothing saved for retirement. So it is essential to put aside 10% each month for retirement, whether that happens automatically from your work or whether you need to set it up to happen automatically yourself.
Okay, let’s say you haven’t been investing yet but are ready to start- today is better than tomorrow! Of course 10 years ago would have been even better, but you in 30 years will be SO grateful to you right now if you set it up today!
Really, please don’t delay. If you invest just $100 a month every month for the next 30 years, you would have about $150,000. The key steps:
- Use Vanguard. It’s the best. It’s owned by you, the investors, and it’s the most low-cost option. Never, ever use any human money manager. If the fees are just 1%, you will lose one third of your profit to that person!!! If the fees are just 2%, you will lose 2/3 of your profit! This is how investment bankers get rich. Your goal is for you to make money, not the bank!
- Open up a brokerage account and invest your money in any low-cost (less than 1%) index fund. If you’re at all nervous or uncertain, just call Vanguard. They have great customer service, and they’ll walk you through it all.
- You can read all about how and why to do it in this clear article from the New York Times.
- Invest what you can now, and set up a monthly payment plan to your Vanguard mutual fund every month. Don’t touch it at all, no matter what the market does, unless you need the money for a house/college/other big important purchase.
- You will not guess correctly. If you miss just a few random days, you can make wildly less money. You can’t predict when the market is at a low or a high. Just continue to put money in automatically, and only withdraw if you truly need it. That’s all.
- For an example of what to invest in- in my Vanguard account, I have these mutual funds:
- S&P 500 Index Fund ETF
- Vanguard Growth ETF
- Vanguard Large Cap ETF
- Vanguard Total International Stock Exchange ETF
I have more than doubled the money I have put into Vanguard over my years working. I have made more than a year’s completely free salary thanks to investing in Vanguard. It’s free money. Start investing today, and your future you will be so grateful!
So in sum: Invest as soon as possible in a mutual fund that has a broad swath of the whole market (US, international, or your own country). Make sure your fees are well under 1%- with Vanguard, it’s about 0.14%. 1% will be a huge cut of your profits, and just free money for some investment banker who definitely doesn’t need it!
Use this investment calculator to see how much just $100 over 30 years investing will make you- or plug in the numbers you can do to see why you really need to start right now! Set it up automatically so you don’t spend it and don’t have to think about it again.
If you set that up automatically, you can’t spend it, and you won’t even notice it if it happens without you having to press any buttons. What you don’t have, you can’t spend! You can read about how to do that here, or contact your bank.
Once you have your investments set up and every month you’re adding to it, you know you can safely afford to travel!
7. Savings
Ideally, you are saving 10% each month. If you want to afford to travel, you need a rainy-day fund of accessible cash. Sometimes unavoidable expenses come up, and you don’t want them to come out of your vacation fund! So put aside 10% automatically when you get your paycheck so it doesn’t get spent.
If you have 10% set aside every month, when you need cash for something you didn’t plan for, it’s not stressful. You have the money, and you don’t have to take away money from your fun- or from your investments for retirement. Again, your future you will thank you! You will be able to afford to travel once you have these systems in place.
Bottom Line: Can you afford to travel?
I know this article is about a lot more than just whether you can afford to travel. Having money available to travel is about so much more than how much money you make. It’s about your income, sure, and your fixed costs…but it’s more about your priorities.
The truth is, my family makes far less money than my friends back in San Francisco. And yet here in the Netherlands, I can afford what for me is a rich life: working part time, sending my child to a great school, letting him play unsupervised outside (in the future!), biking to work…and traveling to different countries multiple times a year.
We couldn’t afford to travel like this back in San Francisco- we couldn’t afford what for us is a rich life. I miss my family and friends. There are always tradeoffs. What are your priorities?
What is it that you want to do with your life? If you want to be able to afford to travel regularly, how can you change your life to make that happen?
Don’t just wait and hope your life will get better or you’ll be able to afford to travel “later”. Have a conversation with your family. Figure out what a rich life is for you. Use these 7 considerations to make a plan.
If you want to be able to afford to travel now and in the future- if that is truly a priority- use these tips to figure out how to get your money in order to make it happen! You can afford to travel if that’s what you really want!
