So, your best pal just suggested a six-city, two week grand European adventure, but you just washed your last paper plate and it’s still a week until payday?
Tell me ’bout it, honey.
How do you make this trip happen? Because, I don’t know about you, but when someone says ‘Cinque Terre’, I’m all:
Let me be real here: I am poor as fuck. This is due in equal parts to being a total fuckwit when it comes to saving money (also maybe due to a teensy addiction to filling every nook and cranny in my apartment with Bath & Body Works soap) and choosing one of the lowest paid professions: teaching. What teaching does enable me is the time to jet off to foreign countries. The salary just needs to catch up with my at-least-one-international-trip-every-year tastes.
I have also let my credit cards get the best of me, because it’d be wrong not to make that excellent credit rating work for me, right? Right? (More on this later.)
So, what is a broke as a joke idiot to do when travel just has to happen, because what is life without travel, ya’ll? Well, let your favorite idiot help you out with this one, because for once, I am kinda good at something. I know, I fell off my chair too.
Last summer, as many of you know, I went on a most glorious nearly six-week-long trip to Amsterdam, The British Isles, and Ireland. I went with my mom, aunt, and uncle, so we were able to save quite a bit on our house stays, but holy mother of the god of expensive shit, it was not cheap to travel for more than a month. Since I am always way too transparent here, I will just tell you what I spent. My grand adventure cost roughly $5,500.
Even more surprising- I had the trip paid off the month after my return.
I’ll give you a minute to get over the shock.
So, how did a certified money moron pull this off? Let me tell you!
1. Fun Shit is Magically Easier to Save For
First and foremost, when what you are saving for is weeks of travel in one of your favorite parts of the world, somehow, you have some extra money. It’s really crazy. Actually, it’s just easier to skip the latte when you are doing it for patat frites in Amsterdam. It’s easy as hell.
So, if you need to, make a vision board with all of the amazing things you are Starbucks starving yourself for and you will suddenly become Scrooge McDuck.
2. Cancel Your Ridiculous Amount of Subscriptions and Cut Any Non-Essentials
Even your Ipsy bag. Yes, I know it’s only $10 a month.
Before my trip last year was for sure-for sure, I was paying monthly subscriptions for Ipsy, Snack Crate, Weight Watchers ($20 a month and I hadn’t opened the app in months) and a handful of educational subscriptions, like Number Rock. These subscriptions totaled $56 a month. This may not sound like a huge amount, but they were all 100% unnecessary. After six months of not shelling out the cash for these monthly charges, I had $336. That is a lot of patat frites, ya’ll!
Also, I stopped getting my nails and eyebrows done. Any non-essential luxury had to go and it saved me tons. A unibrow and hangnail-riddled fingers ain’t nothin’ when you are Europe-bound. I kept my massage appointments, but those were for my health and sanity.
If I wanted to really deprive myself, I could have also canceled Netflix and Hulu, but since I wasn’t paying for cable, I needed something to do when all of my extra cash was hiding out in my secret spot.
Speaking of…
3. Save Literally Every Penny
One of the funnest things I did to save for my trip was to save loose change in a mason jar. I don’t know if it was the addicting clink of the coins when I dropped them into the jar or the satisfying weight as the amount grew, but I was addicted to finding change. I’m also super fun at parties, ya’ll.
My dude’s pants pockets, under the seats of our vehicles, and the couch cushions- nowhere was safe from my greedy beadies. I left no stone un-turned in my search for a forgotten eight cents.
When my jar got full and the time came to cash in, I picked up some rolling papers (no, not that kind, yo) or coin wrappers and did that shit myself. My hands smelled like the unwashed masses for days, but every single penny went to my trip, unlike what would have happened had I gone the easy route, i.e. Coinstar.
(Be aware that Coinstar takes 11.9% of your total amount as a fee and that means one less ice cream cone on the beach and that is un.accept.able.)
4. Set a Budget and Try to Beat It, Baby
One of the most effective ways I saved trip money was setting a strict budget. In order for this to work, I had to take a truly honest inventory of my finances. It was a real coming to Jesus moment, because it was like a huge smack across the face with my newest pleather TJ MAXX purse find.
HOW IN THE FUCK DID I SPEND 150 AMERICAN DOLLARS IN ONE MONTH AT STARBUCKS?
I investigated where my money was going (Starbucks) and where I could cut corners and spend less (at Starbucks).
I set a budget for how much I felt was reasonable for groceries and other essentials per week/month. I did the same for weekend spending money. I even set a budget for how much I could spend during the week. It seems like it would have made more sense to just set one amount for the entire week, but I knew that if I gave myself $80 for the week on Monday, I would have had precisely $2.84 left to use by Friday. Because I spend the majority of my work week at, uh, work, I decided I needed the majority of my weekly budget allocated for the weekend.
So, I gave myself $20 for the work week, and if that only got me two and a half morning Starbucks runs, so be it. I pulled up my big girl panties and dusted off the Keurig I just had to have and made my coffee the majority of my mornings.
On Friday, I would pull $60 out of the ATM and that had to get me through all of my weekend activities. If I had a sushi date with a pal, this would eat up almost half of my cash. This made me take a good, hard look at whether or not I really needed to eat 18 long rolls and then be dead to the world the rest of the day in a sushi and soy sauce coma. More often than not, I suggested a coffee date instead (this was also a surprise diet hack).
Where I tried to “beat my budget” was when I started to have money left over on Sunday evening. It was like winning a game I didn’t even know I was playing. I started to try to have money left over every weekend. I straight up felt like Ebenezer Scrooge as I stockpiled my cash and coins.
5. Kash is King
Not only did I set a budget, I pulled cash out at the ATM for my work week and weekend money (as mentioned above). This prevented me from accidentally spending too much using my debit card. Because math is not my strong suit, $20 could easily have become $40 when I mindlessly handed over my debit card and not cold, hard cash.
Further, when I had money left over after the week or weekend was over, I saved my cash in a secret hiding spot and not in my savings account. It was and is way too easy to transfer funds from my savings to my checking to be used on something dumb, because when the money is just some numbers on a screen it doesn’t have the same impact as digging for your cash, counting it out, and then guiltily adding it to your wallet for a non-travel expenditure.
6. Acorns
I am legit gonna sound like I work for Acorns or that I am getting some kind of kickback from them and while that is not entirely wrong, I’m not being sponsored to say what I am about to say.
I just love the shit out of this app.
If you have never heard of Acorns, make yourself a cup of tea or pour yourself a glass of wine, because you are going to want to hear this, and it is always nice hearing good news when you are enjoying a refreshing beverage.
So, in a nutshell (see what I did there?), Acorns is an investment app. This may sound scary, because if you are anything like me, you have not one iota of a fucking clue what investing involves.
Fear not, if you decide to try Acorns out, it is not a risky venture. I have been investing and saving with Acorns for more than a year now and I can confidently say I have not lost any pennies to Acorns. In fact, I am ADDICTED.
When you sign up for an Acorns account, the easiest way to start saving money is to turn on Round Ups. Whenever you use your debit card (yes, you need to connect your account, but it is secure), Acorns rounds up your purchase to the next dollar. When your round ups reach $5, that amount is withdrawn from your checking account into your Acorns account. Along with a monthly deposit of $25 from my checking, I saved over $400 to go towards my trip and I never even noticed the round ups.
It practically felt like free money, ya’ll.
When I first started Acorns, I’d withdraw money here and there when I wanted to make a purchase, but had I not touched my account, I would have $1400 today plus whatever dividends I made with my investment portfolio (which is conservative and means lower risk).
If I have piqued your interest, check out Acorns using my link here. If I can get 12 friends signed up and investing (I have already converted two), I will get $1000 from Acorns. YES, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. When you sign up via my link, you get $5 and so do I. That is what we call a win-win, friends.
*Bonus: The Guilt Gut Kicker*
The tips I shared above worked for me and why I am so excited about them again is that I am currently employing them for another international trip I just made official a couple weeks ago!
This time around, along with the poop-my-pants-excitement, I am feeling a bit of guilt.
I promised myself that this year I would focus on paying down my debt and the second another trip was a possibility, I threw finally being a real adult out the window faster than you can say “Peace out, bitches!”
Well, to combat that damn dirty feeling of guilt, I am planning to save $100 out of every months’ savings for my trip to be put onto a credit card. I hope to save for my trip AND pay off two small credit card balances.
Sometimes just having a plan to be a better adult can ease those poopy feelings.
Also,
What are your money saving tips? I am always looking for other ways to save/make some money when it’s for travel! Let me know in the comments!
