This is your first stop for figuring out how to be broke but also fly to Germany at the same time.
- Stop buying coffee/weed/kombucha/booze/weed on a daily basis. Find the holes in your budget.
I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW everyone says this and its so obnoxious. This is just always step 1, every single travel blog on this earth talks about it, and if you’re an adult with access to only 3% of your total will power: YOU CAN DO THIS. Think of this more like an assessment of your spending habits: you need to start looking for loopholes in your spending to find money that can be put away.
The instant gratification of buying a beer > saving money you cant see in a bank account that depresses you. I get it. But hear me out….buy that beer in Dublin instead. Thiiiiink about it.
Speaking of buying beer, it is crazy to me how often people go out for drinks multiple times a week or out for dinner every weekend. If you take away the food and drink aspect of those kinds of gatherings, you are just fulfilling the need to socialize. Ugh, primates.
This is fine, but you can socialize for free most places and not spend $13 on a mixed drink that better be fucking made with Emma Watsons spit. I personally think that making home cooked meals while drunk is an adventure. If you’re friends don’t want to come over, take their bras off, and cook drunk with you, are they really your friends?
If you absolutely CANNOT find something to stop spending money on, don’t worry, keep reading.
- On top of #1…Stop saying Treat Yo Self. Look at the holes in your budget and acknowledge that they are contributing to the ‘I want to travel’ problem.
Listen, I love Parks and Rec as much as the next educated and attractive genius, but this is something you need to stop saying to justify your unhealthy spending habits. Think about how much you could spend at your favorite store without batting an eyelash and justifying it with a swift ‘Treat Yo Self’ kick to the wallet. I’ve walked through Sephora once for free samples, ok, I know how much shit in there costs.
If you know you cannot be trusted alone in a store, order everything online for in-store pickup! I had to do this during Christmas time at Target so I wouldn’t buy more decorations. THEY HAD SLOTH TREE ORNAMENTS, I MEAN. Did I buy 3 sloth tree ornaments? This is beside the point please mind your own business.
3. I won’t say you should start meal planning….buuuut
Usually when I do everyone’s eyes usually roll so far back into their heads that they topple over and start seizing. Technically, its not a medical emergency if its just natural selection taking its course.
Meal planning has a very muscular and sexually confused chokehold over Pinterest. So if you don’t know where to start, prepare to be over-fucking-whelmed with the *free* possibilities once you hit enter. If they have meal plans for vegans (read: people who don’t have enough energy to meal plan), then they have fucking meal plans for you.
If you can save just $10 a week from just making meals in advance, that’s $240 in 6 months for your travel fund. Math is neat.
4. Download the Qapital App and save your money without even thinking about it.
This is a free app that puts away money for you into a savings account that you have access to 24/7. Its kind of like Venmo: its linked to your bank account so you can send as much as you want back to yourself at any point in time. Qapital is a goal-focused savings account that lets you decide how you’re going to save. It has several options for you to make this happen after you’ve linked it to whatever bank you use:
- Rounding up every purchase you make to the nearest dollar. For instance, if you spend $50.38 on groceries, Quapital will take an extra 62 cents from your account and puts it in to your new savings account.
- You can schedule it to take a specified dollar amount everyday, every week, or bi-monthly, etc. (The amounts and timelines are completely up to you) I find the $1-5/day is the least painful.
- You can link it to your Apple Health app and have it save $5 every day you do or don’t hit your step goal.
- You can have it take a percentage of every direct deposit, or a percentage of every direct deposit that is only over a certain amount. (ex: take 10% if the amount is over $500, but only 5% when the amount is less than $500)
- There’s dozens of different customizable options and I’ve tried most of them.
Before my trip to Germany I saved over $300 only by rounding up my dollars, and taking out 10% of my direct deposits. For those of you who want to save money by doing absolutely nothing, this is actually a pretty solid way to do it. I have never had trouble with the app or with my bank information being compromised.
6. Stop asking for things for the holidays/birthdays
Start asking for investments to travel instead!
~Stuff~ is great and all but it will never equate to the excitement of finally boarding your flight abroad after months and months of planning.
I think asking for money is always weird and makes me very uncomfortable, but you can usually plan on getting at least one gift card from someone (ie: someone like my grandma who has 15+ great-grandkids just dripping from the ceilings and does not have time for your gift list bullshit). Delta flies all over the world and has gift cards! Most hotel chains have gift cards, as does Airbnb and train companies like Rail Europe.
Asking for travel related gift cards might help you get to your final destination, and it also might also tip off your friends and family that you need travel related paraphernalia (can we talk about how weird that word looks for a moment) and not a hedgehog shaped fondue pot you’ll use one time because you mentioned that you thought hedgehogs were cute in front of your aunt last October.
If you are going to ask for things because you already booked your flights, then get some travel gear ready! See my 16 Things I Pack Every Time article for a list of things I’ve learned I can’t travel without.
7. Book everything piece by piece. Spacing things out is a big part of how traveling can be more accessible to you.
If you read my guide for booking flights as a student, you know that booking individual flights weeks or even months apart from one another can help to dramatically cut down on your budgeting anxiety. Buying a one-way ticket in June, and then not buying your ticket back until September, helps to space out your finances. Don’t panic, there will never be shortage of flights and you will never get stranded with your one-way ticket if you just stay on top of things.
Sometimes this ends up being much cheaper because you can make your own layovers at international hubs. Not all American airlines have affiliations or connection agreements with the cheap domestic airlines from other continents: this means that booking a flight internationally can cost you out the ass because of your limited hub options.
Visual learner? Adorable. Me too. Let me explain:
- Try and Google Flights a one way trip from any city on the east coast to Scotland. Fucking atrocious, right?
- Now search instead for a flight from the same east coast destination to London or Reykjavik on the same date. Probably cheaper.
- Aaaaand now look at a domestic European flight from London or Reykjavik to Edinburgh? Stupid cheap. Odds are that making your own connection in London or Reykjavik was cheaper than just booking direct to Scotland.
So if that was your trip, you could book piece by piece: One way ticket to London first, your one way ticket back from London a few weeks later, and then a few weeks out you could pick your $30 flight to Scotland. BOOM.
Know you’re going to be checking a bag? You don’t have the pay for that RIGHT when you book your ticket. As long as you pay before you check in at the airport, you will not be charged extra. Sometimes luggage fees for international travel can be up to $80, and that’s not even for an overweight bag. Wait until you’re in a good place financially to give yourself time to recover from booking flights.
Now fucking, gooooo.