Travel Hack #1- Saving tips to help reach your goals! 💸✈️🏡

To make our travel dreams a reality we worked and saved to fund our worldwide adventures- we have been on the road for almost 2.5years now! The following tips helped us immensely in achieving our savings goals so thought I’d share. I know a lot of these are common sense but I also know A LOT of people who would benefit from re-reading these tips!

[1] Figure out what you are saving for and how much you think you’ll need. If you have a solid goal and/or time frame it is A LOT easier to find the motivation.

[2] I HIGHLY recommend tracking where your money goes, whether you’re saving for travel, a house etc. Once you start to see where your money goes it’s MUCH easier to adjust your spendings accordingly. I’m sure there are templates online or if you know excel, it’s not hard to make one, even a pen and paper will do the trick. This is a screenshot of the excel spreadsheet from last year that I made and use, change the categories from Accom. etc to whats applicable for you.

[3] Figure out your general weekly cost for everything- bills, rent, food, entertainment, transport etc. Then you can calculate how much you can save per week and how long it will take you to reach the goal. Be realistic.

[4] Open a savings account or high interest bank account and transfer what you calculated you can save (in Tip 3) as soon as you are paid so it’s out of sight out of mind.

[5] Plan your meals for the week (roughly) and do one big shop instead of popping to the corner store where things are twice the price every other night or worse- getting takeaway.

[6] Do you know someone in the finance industry who can better manage your money? Or even a bank that might have a better savings or high interest account you could open if investing is not your thing. I know nothing about finance nor does reading about money excite me in the least but it does for others…Find those people and ask them questions. Make sure it’s someone you trust…just like you wouldn’t contact a plumber if you needed a hip replacement make sure your person is well versed in what they do. People fluke things and people lose things and they are always willing to share their opinion of the ‘next big thing’ so find good, quality advice to make sure your money is safe. A look at their portfolio and how they have done so far would be an absolute must!!

[7] Finally and very importantly stop buying unnecessary things…do you really need the $100 dress/anything you love to splurge on to add to your collection of 20 others, knowing you’ll probably only wear/use it a few times anyway? Most likely not..I totally get that some things are just to die for and you must have it right now but I like to compare the price of things with a meal/day in a foreign country. More often than not an item of clothing can cost more than a days accommodation and meals in SE Asia or somewhere similar which makes the purchase totally unappealing to me! I’ll take life experience over materialistic goods any day. Not to mention if travelling is what you’re saving for you’ll most likely have to get rid of it anyway! [Image courtesy of google]

💰 I hope these few tips help you along in your savings goals, they sure helped us! Good luck!

For anyone interested I have also kept track of how much we spent in each country we visited, plus an average daily cost. I will break these countries and costs down in future posts. Stay tuned 😊 Or you can check out our blog for more :) http://sunsurfsoul.com/