I love traveling. I especially love traveling abroad . As some of you know, I’d love to live abroad for an extended period of time, if not indefinitely. Or at the very least, do a round the world trip of 5-6 cities for a year. But, my biggest hurdle was trying to save money for this. I know it’s not going to be cheap. More so the flights. I believe that will be the biggest cost, but I’m still researching. Experienced backpackers would have a better idea on what to expect as far as that goes.
But, there might be some of you out there who are thinking of doing the same thing with long term travel. So here are a few ways of saving for long term travel-
Open a Savings Account
This is probably a no-brainer, but let’s be honest, saving money is hard. Especially when you’re doing it with other responsibilities. A savings account is a must. Unlike most, I prefer to do my banking online. It’s more convenient for me to do so and I haven’t had any problems. You can pretty much get an account at any bank. There are two that I would highly recommend and that’s ING Direct and HSBC Bank. Both are great and both have very easy sign up processes.
Plan and Research
As I’ve begun to look around at prices for round the world tickets, I was amazed. Truly amazed! It’s not as expensive as I thought before doing research. For instance, in the cities I want to visit/live, the RTW price was $3100! That’s cheap in my opinion. And it will only be slightly higher if I want to add a few cities to the trip. My cities included in my trip living from Washington DC are London, Bangkok, Bali, and Hong Kong. I would come back to Washington DC. My opinions of round the world travel, like many others, was that “it was too expensive. ” “I can’t afford it.” These are more so excuses, than anything else. In fact, it’s MORE affordable to do round the world travel than simple round trip fares, especially overseas. The site I’m using for research is www.roundtheworldticket.com . They have a lot of useful information to plan your route and gives you an estimate as to how much it will cost you.
Choose Your First City Carefully
The first city I plan to visit in my trip is London. Out of the four cities I’ll be visiting, London is the most expensive and I want to get it out of the way first because it’s so expensive. (I’ve also been considering that as permanent residence, too. So, while there, I’ll probably be looking for work ;) Visit your most expensive city first, so if you over spend, you will do better in other less expensive cities/countries where your money will go farther.
My Round the World itinerary- draft
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. I can get the exact trip I want for between $1900- $2600 USD. Now this is just a ball park figure, but it definitely lets me know that it is entirely doable. If you’ve ever thought about world travel, I would suggest you really look into it. I think my next step is setting a time table for when I do this.
That’s the hard part. ;)
