I’ll eventually do a ‘What’s In My Travel Wallet’ post, but for now, know that besides my passport, this is the most valuable thing I keep in my pocket.
(Photo by Wyatt Smith)
How Does it ‘Save Money’?
To dig into that, you have to first understand the benefits of the card.
Benefits:
$300 of travel credit per year
Travel insurance included
Lounge access via Priority Pass Membership
One free year of LyftPink
$60 of DoorDash credits/year
DashPass Membership
$100 every four years for Global Entry or TSA Precheck
50,000 point sign up bonus after spending $4,000 in the first 3 months
No foreign transaction fees
3x points on travel and dining
How I have used them to save money:
Anything travel-related up to $300 comes right off of the credit card statement before I ever get billed. In my mind, that brings the ‘cost’ of the card down to $150 because I spend at least $300 in travel most months. This leaves me to justify only the last $150.
I could get a very expensive travel insurance package, but the benefits that my card comes with supplement my Allianz travel insurance so well that I save about $450/year on additional travel insurance. Chase refunded me all the additional expenses that I incurred by getting stuck in Hong Kong last year, thus justifying about $70 more of itself.
I mean, DoorDash credits = $60 of free food. What’s not to love?
My Global Entry was automatically credited back to my card – I didn’t have to seek reimbursements. This benefit (the ability to skip customs when entering the US) was $100 two years ago, but let’s call it $25 since it only is eligible every four years.
I get lounge access in most airports. This means free food, drink, napping space, and sometimes even showers. Considering the amount of time I spend laying over in airports, this could pay for the full cost of the card. I took 33 flights last year. If I stopped for a $10 food or beer (probably a conservative estimate on what airport food costs) in only half of those, the benefit would be about $115.
I’d have spent up to 3% of every single purchase I made abroad in transaction fees, but this card charges 0 transaction fees.
And I got a boatload of points on travel and dining, thus contributing to free flights
By my math, using this card instead of any other has saved me at least $950, and subtracting the cost of the card itself, has saved me $500 this year.
But what if you don’t travel as often as I do? This leads me to…
Is There A ‘Lite Version’?
Yup. It’s called the Chase Sapphire Preferred. I had it for a few years and loved it. No lounge access, no travel credits back, no Global Entry credit, but it has a great sign-up bonus and accumulates a lot of points on travel and dining. It has a better sign up bonus than the Reserve (75,000 points after $4,000 spent). Very worth it, in my opinion.
Do you use Chase, or have another card you use to travel? Let me know below, I’m always excited to hear about other options!
Do you want to pay off debt while traveling? It might sound like having your cake and eating it, too, but here’s how you can make it possible.
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Five years ago, I was 23. I had just graduated with a dual major in Marketing and International Business. I was about to spend 6 months traveling before going to work, had about $35k in student loans, and needed to buy a car. Yikes.
Oh, I was so proud of my first car though!
Three years after graduation, I was able to pay off all my debt while traveling to over 20 countries. Here’s how:
In this article, I will cover:
How I wrapped my head around my debt
The plans I developed to pay it off
How I learned to pay off debt while traveling
How I continue to travel on a budget
Let me start by saying this: my first salary out of school was $36k a year in Rhode Island. I’m not independently wealthy, but I am incredibly disciplined.
6 months out of school, I bought a $13k car and both my car and student loans were gaining interest. So your first question probably is, ‘How the heck did you crush $50k (let’s say $55k including interest) in 3 years with that salary? Here are the building blocks to how:
I made larger than necessary payments:
I was working in sales and received monthly bonuses until I took my first promotion and was on quarterly bonuses thereafter.
With my salary, I made $50 more than the minimum payment on my two major debts.
In practice, my car payment was $197. I paid $250 on autopay each month. My student loan payment was around $300. I paid $350 automatically each month. Then, whenever I received more than my regular paycheck, I put the difference toward my highest-interest loan. My monthly debt payments totaled $600.
That extra $50 per loan would have helped me pay off my car in 4 years instead of 5, and my student loans in about 8 years instead of 10. I also decreased the amount of interest I was paying on the loans by making larger principal contributions. I knew that even if there was a month that I didn’t get to make a big payment toward my debt, I was at least moving towards the ‘debt-free date’ faster than if I were making minimum payments.
I made lump-sum payments to pay off debt while traveling:
I was in sales, so I received bonuses of anywhere from $40 to $700 a month my first year working, and anywhere from $2000 to $3000 per quarter the following year. At first, 100% of every bonus was going to debt payments, but I realized that I also needed to treat myself, so eventually, I changed it to 70% to debt and 30% to things like plane tickets and fun!
The math: $2000/quarter = $8000/year towards debt means an additional $16,000 in my first two years. This brought down the principal from about $55k to about $39k. Remember, I was also making monthly payments that equated to about $7200/year, so the principal balance after year two would have been around $25k.
In San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua in 2016
Tax Return
I was fortunate that I got a pretty sizeable tax return each year. I took 60% for debt payment and 40% for fun and even put a down payment on my first home. I put probably $5k of tax returns to my student loans in that first couple of years, so my balance was then around $20k.
Moving Bonus
I was paid to move to Rhode Island by my company and that helped to put a down payment on my car as well as to throw an extra grand toward my debt. =$24k
What about year 3?
Great question. I took a new job about 2 years after I started working. I repeated the same process as the years previous with applying my tax return and moving bonus to my debt. My tax return was higher that year because I had purchased a home in year 2. I also had a decent year-end bonus, so I started year 3 with about $19k left to pay off.
Here’s Where it Gets Wild
I took a salary increase and upped the monthly contribution.
I paid off my car and was making the full $700 monthly payment to just my student loans (snowball method).
I would look at things that I wanted and could buy, and would then not purchase them and put that amount toward my debt instead.
Every month, I paid off my credit cards in full. Any money that was leftover would go toward my debt (Called the $0 balance method).
I was obsessive. One month, I made 12 small transactions into my student loan account IN ADDITION TO my monthly payment. The lowest amount was $12, the highest was about $100.
To this last point, I was INSANE about my money. I realized in April that I could possibly have my loans paid off by June, which would be 3 years after starting my first job/buying my car, and 3.5 years from graduation.
On June 30, 2018, I put about $1200 from my savings account into my student loans and paid off the final balance. I left myself with less than a couple hundred dollars in savings. This is perhaps one of the proudest moments of my life.
And then I had to start building up my savings again.
Now let’s look at the money I saved:
We can all save money in different ways, and most people have the option to save. Often, we choose not to for the sake of comfort.
Our chickens laid the prettiest eggs! And look at the farmcat’s little toe bean prints.
In Rhode Island, I lived outside of town and shared a house with two other people. We had a big backyard, raised chickens, and I got to keep a garden for the first time. I failed, but activities like that kept me from going out and spending a bunch of money.
I packed my lunch most days. I found ways to get super frugal by using the chickens’ eggs for meals and even sold the eggs to help pay for their food!
I generally live a frugal lifestyle. I had a small closet, so I didn’t need to fill it with a bunch of stuff. I don’t really shop, and rent books on my kindle. I can’t really pontificate here because it’s just second nature.
I put at least $40 of each paycheck into a travel fund that I could use to travel at least twice a year
I made my spending work for me rather than against me:
I took out 3 credit cards in my first 3 years out of school: Chase Sapphire Preferred, Southwest, and Delta Amex. I knew that I would spend a bunch of money when I moved out East, so I chose the Chase card for the signup bonus and free first year. I repeated this process with each card and spent as I usually would so that I could get hundreds of dollars in flight rewards. I paid every card in full every month.
Those flight rewards came in handy – which brings us to talking about TRAVEL. How the heck did I manage to pay off debt while traveling to 25 countries in those 3 years?
Let’s talk about travel – it’s expensive!
Yes and no.
A lot of the time, getting somewhere is half the cost of travel, and I nearly eliminated that by using my flight rewards.
It is my goal to visit every country, so I wasn’t really picky about where I went and typically chose wherever the cheapest flights and destinations were, which made it a lot easier.
I also believe that being frugal while traveling enhances the experience by bringing travelers closer to the culture that they are visiting. Read more on that whole concept here.
Travel to me meant staying with friends, meeting people along the way, and doing road trips in foreign countries. I had incredible adventures that I’ve shared on the blog over the years. These adventures decreased the cost significantly.
I also wrote a guide about how I planned vacations that cost less than $1000 including flights.
Photo from Cuba in 2018, taken of the courtyard of a hostel.
20 is a lot. What were they?
(Side note: Maximize your PTO) Each of these stories are linked for more details:
I took a road trip over Thanksgiving 2016 where I landed in Budapest and traveled through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia.
I took a two-week trip between my first and second job and flew round trip to Copenhagen. I visited Sweden as well and flew to Poland while there for a long weekend. In that same three-week gap, I popped up to Montreal with my aunt for my first visit to Canada. Both of those stories are buried here.
Additionally, I took a gap in Brazil after college.
I’m at 50 countries now.
Since becoming debt-free, I’ve visited The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Jamaica, Spain, Andorra, Portugal, the Bahamas, Panama, Lebanon, Cyprus, TRNC, Qatar, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Hong Kong.
And I’m not slowing down any time soon!
Thanks for joining me on the journey to all 196!
Was this explanation helpful? Did I leave any questions unanswered? Let me know below!
*EDIT 4/11/20: I was in a podcast where I discuss how to save money while traveling. Check it out here.*
THE MORE YOU SPEND, THE FEWER PEOPLE YOU MEET AND YOU’LL ENCOUNTER LESS CULTURE.
Or at least, this is what I wrote in a post back in 2016. This post is a cut-paste-edit of what I wrote back then, based on how my beliefs have changed ever so slightly.
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In summation, what I believe is this: If we spend money on things that make our lives easier, it impedes our opportunities for connection.
Let’s look at two extremes to illustrate my point.
Situation A: You fly first class to Paris and don’t see your plane neighbors ($5800RT). You take a private car or Uber ($100) from the airport to your hotel and have a professional driver, but you paid for data on your phone ($10) and do not engage in conversation anyway. Upon arrival at the international hotel chain($400/night) that you have points at, the concierge, check-in desk, and bellhops all speak English. You get to your room, relax in a private bath, and venture out to a restaurant($100/pp) that the concierge recommends, and finish off the night with a glass of wine from the hotel bar ($15). You eat out for 3 meals a day at an average of $150/day.=$9655 , not including museums, shopping, other meals, etc.
Situation B: Flying coach on a budget airline isn’t anyone’s cup of tea; if you’re lucky, the middle seat is open ($400). After plummeting through the air with 200 of your best stranger friends, you arrive at a crowded airport, make your way to the bus lines, and drop a few coins in the machine for an RER ticket ($12). 45 minutes later, you’ve seen the ‘real’ parts of the city you arrived in and walk the rest of the way to your hostel ($20). The people in the lobby are playing cards and pulling together supplies for supper. You stop by the grocery store down the street to contribute to this version of Stone Soup($10). Go back to the hostel, make dinner, and all share a 6 pack of 1604 ($5) while telling travel stories and making plans to do a self-guided walking tour the next day. You eat street food or cook three times a day with friends for an average of $30/day. =$867
Plane ticket, Transport, Lodging, Food, Drink. I’m nobody to say who had a richer experience, but I think that my opinion on which situation encountered more of the local vibe is clear.
A personal point:
I traveled to 3 central American countries in March of 2016 and including plane ticket spent about $1000 in 9 days. I traveled to 5 eastern European countries in November 2015 and including plane and car rental spent less than $1300. I traveled to three other Central American countries for 10 days in November of 2017 and spent less than $1200. That’s an average of less than $300 per country including plane tickets.
Now, here’s the flip side.
There are experiences that money CAN buy. Learning to dive was a bucket list experience for me, and I spent hundreds of dollars a day doing it in Thailand. However, the friends I made there were all staying in a hostel bedroom for $10 a night.
I travel to meet people, and to fall in love with places. People help me to fall in love. I want to stay in cheap lodging and have dodgy train experiences, and to eat the street food that the locals do.
I also want to be safe. I don’t eat from the gutter for the sake of saving money. I take private cars and Ubers at night so that I’m not out alone (especially in the US). I typically buy SIM cards so that I can call someone if I am lost.
What I’m saying is
We travel how we choose to, but a week in Paris doesn’t have to cost $10,000. It could be just as fun spending less than a grand.
And also… you probably CAN afford to travel more.
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I took a solo road trip and spent less traveling for six weeks than I would have if I’d had a home base. Yes, traveling CAN be less expensive than staying put. Here’s how.
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Let me start by saying: I’m not a numbers person. I have a lazy budgeting method for a reason. When it comes to numbers, I hide. I round up. I ignore.
It’s not just about money; I do this for all kinds of numbers. I budget exclusively so that I can travel, have no idea what I weigh, and use clothing items instead of temperatures to describe the weather. Not a numbers girl.
However, I quit my job with a number in mind of what I could spend per month to sustain myself for a year. Therefore, I have to keep tabs on what I’m doing and spending. The following numbers might not be 100% accurate (see the first paragraph), but this is the approximate total of what I spent and experienced over the last 5 weeks of my solo road trip around the United States.
A really mediocre drawing of the route that I took
Solo Road Trip: Cost of Gas, etc
67+ hours of driving
4,765 total miles driven
My Honda gets 33mpg hwy
About $370 spent on gas
Got an oil change before I left for about $55
Thought: this would be less if it weren’t a solo road trip and if I had friends to travel with!
Solo Road Trip: Cost of Lodging
Amarillo – CouchSurfing $0
Denver – stayed with friends $0
Wyoming – Solo camped 3 nights $30
1 night in a hostel in Jackson $50
Bozeman – 2 nights in a hostel in Bozeman $30
Billings – Conference hotel with a shared room for 5 nights – $140
Minneapolis – stayed with friends $0
Iowa – stayed with family $0
Kansas City – stayed with friends $0
Total cost of lodging: $250
Solo Road Trip: Cost of Food
Grocery run #1: $47
Grocery run #2: 53
Other food such as snacks at gas stations: Budgeted $6/day or about $200, but didn’t spend it
Dining out and drinks with friends: probably about $600 over 6 weeks (my family and friends treated a bit, and we did lots of at-home fun)
Beer runs: $150
Total food and beer bill: about $1000
Other Fun Things
10 States visited (TX, CO, WY, MT, ND, MN, IA, IL, KS, MO)
2 other states crossed (NM, OK) but no stops so they don’t ‘count’
2 side trips to NE Iowa and Wisconsin with family
Returning to the ‘not a numbers person’ thing, let’s say my car was in 13 states total
13 different beds/couches/tents
37 days away from home
2 weeks with family
5 nights in hotels
4 National Parks/forests visited $80 park pass
Total Solo Road Trip Cost Breakdown:
$1693 spent, plus some petty cash here and there
Averages to about $42/day including gas, lodging, food, fun, etc.
Doesn’t count the $340 plate ticket I purchased for later because I’ll pay it off with points
About $1100 on living expenses at home such as insurance, rent, etc, but not including investment/retirement accounts
Total home expenses + travel spend – money earned = $2180
Getting some work done while on a press trip
What the Numbers Mean
I’m still deciding what I’ve taken away from these numbers. My first thoughts are this:
If I didn’t have expenses at home such as rent, my loss would be significantly less. I’ve run these numbers several times over the last few years, and it’s what’s led me to decide that I’ll take next year off of having a home base. I can build my business and brand while on the road, thus marrying my living and travel budgets.
I spent 37 days traveling on less than $3000 – and could have done it for less. Even though I’m in the negative, I knew I would be and planned for it. Still, even if I didn’t make a little bit of money, I’d come in below $3k. This comes to less than $36k/year, which is a lot less than most people I know live on. Not bad, right?
Additionally, these numbers help me to realize what I spend in the US – one of the more expensive places that I spend time. If I spend time in cheaper places, I’ll have lower expenses.
Finally, it proves that I can work while travelingand that I can increase what I make on the road every month until I find a surplus. To that note, I have enough set aside to last me for a year, but every dollar made while traveling extends the amount of runway that I have before going back to the corporate world. My goal is to never have to go back, and that’s why I’m working to build my income up now rather than just traveling aimlessly.
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Where would you go if you had a month to spend on the road?
There are a million articles out there on how to find a budget that works for you, and a million more on how to budget for travel.
Whether you decide to create a zero-based budget or set a certain amount aside each month for a travel fund, here’s a few ideas I’ve used to make sure that I can keep traveling, even while paying off debt.
Cereal – kind of a go-to meal when saving money to budget for travel!
How to Budget for Travel When You’re Not Making Much Money
Let me make this clear: In my first job out of school, I was making about $3000 a month before taxes. I chose to live very frugally and worked hard to make bonuses and work my way up. I had over $50,000 in debt between my car and my student loans. In other words, I didn’t have much wiggle room to budget for travel.
While I acknowledge how much privilege I have, it’s important to note that I worked hard to be able to balance paying off debt, sustaining a lifestyle, and saving for future goals – all while traveling regularly.
I paid off all that debt in 3 years and traveled to about 20 countries in that time as well. And I was SUPER lazy about it. How did I do it?
Lazy Budgeting Tips:
I’ve always paid myself first. This one is my favorite because I hate budgeting. Paying myself first allowed me to avoid the ‘b’ word completely by forcing me into a spending habit. I’m not good at sticking to a strict number and always feel like I’m ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ as my grandma used to say. In other words, if I overspent on groceries, I would feel like I was taking from the entertainment funds I set aside for myself. So, I just set up two checking accounts for my direct deposit: one for my bills, one for my ‘fun’. (Bills = rent, estimated utilities, insurances, investments, car payment, student loan payment, $100 of extra in case of miscalculation). All my bills were on direct deposit from this account. Then, I paid my credit card out of my ‘fun’ account. Whatever was left in that account at the end of the month either went to next month’s ‘fun’ (travel, etc.) or to make extra contributions to my debt payments.
Getting crafty with my budget. At this point, I just did my best to keep that ‘fun’ bill at the end of the month down. Whether it was carpooling to work to decrease my gas use or packing eggs and beans for lunch (about a $1, super filling meal that won’t win any culinary awards), I cut corners wherever I could. Even when traveling, I’d couch surf or stay in hostels to decrease my overall spend. I grew food in the backyard of my house, packed snacks to avoid buying food while out, and spent my free time running or at the work gym rather than joining a pricey studio. Most of my clothes to this day are secondhand from friends or thrift shops. Additionally, I made it a point to travel to places that are inexpensive to be in. I also prioritized places that are inexpensive to get to. If somewhere was expensive to get to, I leverage credit card points.
Credit card points. If you’re new to credit card points, check out some of the blogs like GodSaveThePoints or ThePointsGuy. If not, then you know that by paying off my credit card every month and leveraging sign up bonuses, it’s easy to accrue points pretty quickly. This is true even as a small spender. I’ve probably purchased about half of my flights in the last 5 years due to having points to leverage.
So there you have it: save money, spend what you do have wisely, and spend free money whenever possible.
You know those things you know that you should pack, but choose not to and then kick yourself later? I notoriously pack light, but sometimes leave out the essentials. Like these other travel mishaps, I now know that it is essential to buy travel insurance.
For example, ‘I’m going to Texas in September, I’ll never need this umbrella.” or “It’s warm in Spain in June, I won’t need the extra jacket.” My personal favorite: “I’m going to travel for several months in Southeast Asia. What could possibly go wrong that I would need to buy travel insurance for?” *Rolls Eyes
I have always had a similar attitude toward whether I should buy travel insurance. You know, the ‘for all the times I don’t need it and pay for it, then I’m losing the money I could spend on an incident when I do end up needing it’ mentality. But here’s the thing: I have been stuck paying for last-minute international flights twice in the last 4 months after unforeseen cancellations.
What would I do differently? Probably pay for travel insurance.
Does insurance save you from falling?
Why Would I Buy Travel Insurance?
Let me be clear – when I say travel insurance, I don’t mean the add-on that pops up when buying a flight. That is typically extra assistance from the airline in the case that you have issues making your flights or need to change them. The instances that I ran in to were completely out of my hands, and that’s where travel insurance would have saved me over $1500 this year.
Here are the two stories:
Beirut:
I was flying Cyprus Airways from Beirut to Larnaca. They operate one flight a day. However, due to a small number of travelers between the two countries, flights often get canceled. In this case, the flight was canceled and I was not notified until I arrived at the airport. With only one flight per day, there were no airline representatives working. I asked around to other airlines and the service desk, and nobody could find the Cyprus Airways desk. In fact, several employees told me that Cyprus Airways didn’t even fly out of Beirut. That wasn’t true, but I couldn’t make an international call to Cyprus to work things out, so I was stuck.
Eventually, someone at a ticketing counter sent me down a hallway, past several security checkpoints, and onward to find the Cyprus airways office. To be clear, I, a white, curly-haired, relatively innocent midwesterner with limited knowledge of Arabic, went down the long, gray, poorly lit hallways and corridors of the Beirut Airport.
It probably should not have happened. Seriously- in no way should security have let me just slide right past them the way that I did. But I suppose that if I walk like I own the place, people think I do. I did not.
I walked down cement corridors and eventually saw plaques on doors that read, ‘Emirates’, ‘Qatar Airways’, and ‘Air France’. Eventually, I noticed half of a piece of printer paper with ‘Cyprus’ written on it in pencil. This ‘sign’ was taped to a closed door. This had to be a joke. I was alone, tired, and confused as to what to do next.
Total cost to me: $350 including an extra night in Beirut and last-minute flight for the next day.
The day before my botched flight out of Lebanon
Hong Kong:
I was slated to fly from Hong Kong to Shanghai and then back to the US. I had a one-way ticket on August 12 at 8 pm. Because of the protests going on around the city, I went to the airport early. My bus arrived at the airport at 4 pm. The protests that day were in the airport, and it shut down right as I arrived. That whole story is here.
My flight was canceled and my booking website, credit card, the airline, and the consulate couldn’t tell me anything about what to do. I searched online, but had no resources. A political uprising is relatively unprecedented in tourism. The fact is, next time, I want to have someone available to ask.
Total cost to me: $1200 including a last-minute flight, additional night in Hong Kong, plus incidentals.
What I could have done differently:
This is the part where I admit that I was wrong.
In both of those instances, I could have had someone in my corner if I had an insurance policy. I could have had someone tell me the right things to do, and my trip would have been protected.
As I head off on my nomadic life at the beginning of next year, I will buy travel insurance. I haven’t purchased a plan yet, but it looks like I’m going to use Allianz Global Assistance. At $450 for the year, it’ll help me if I run into similar airline issues and other silly things like:
