Budgeting: How to save money to travel
“I want to travel but I don’t have the funds”
I hear you. I was the same exact way until I met this one person that was on a journey of traveling to 50 countries by the time he was 30. When I heard that, I thought to myself “If he can make time to do it, then so can I.” That is how my goal of traveling to 6 countries in 12 months began while going to school full-time and working part-time.
Traveling is something you can only do easily while you’re young and have little to no responsibilities to someone or something. Once you’re married, have a kid, a mortgage or whatever bills you have to pay as a functioning adult, it’s going to be harder to travel. So while you have less responsibilities, now is the time to travel.
It’s so easy to say you’re going to travel and end up never doing it. If traveling is something you really want to do then don’t let anything stop you from doing that. If you keep putting it off for the day that you can, it might never come. So to ensure that you do travel, you have to prioritize saving for traveling. I’ve made a worksheet to plan out your savings for traveling. This is how I saved to travel to 4 countries and 5 cities working part time and no paid vacation. You can use this to find how much you’ll need for your trip and how long it’ll take you to save that amount.
Travel Tip:
Once you have your first month of travel savings in place, I recommend booking your flight in advance.
(Maybe I’ll write a post on how to find a cheap flight in another post?)
How to use the worksheet:
Step 1:
Calculate how much your entire trip will cost you
Step 2:
Calculate how much your income is after all of the expenses
Step 3:
Calculate how much you’ll be putting towards your travel fund
Step 4:
Calculate how many months it’ll take you to save
Step 5:
Start saving executing!
