Minimize Costs
People always ask us how we can hold down a career, have kids and travel so much. It can be quite a challenge, but one of our core beliefs is that we should travel as much as possible, so we just make it a priority. One of the keys to traveling more is to minimize your costs on each trip that you make. We have developed dozens of tricks over the years to travel cheaply, but still comfortably (depending on your definition of comfort). In this section, we share our tips so that you can maximize your time on the road. Sometimes you need to spend money for an experience, so we share our philosophy of where to spend and where to save. We call this traveling cheap comfortably.Less Clutter–More Money for Travel
Walking in the Dolomites (Italy)
How to Save Money at Restaurants
This week’s post is another in our TravlMor series on how to live a minimalist lifestyle so you can afford to travel more often. If you enjoy this article, please see the links at the bottom of this post for more in this series.
How much food do you throw away? If you are the average American, you probably trash about 400 pounds of food per year. How many actual dollars do you intentionally throw away? My guess is none. But if you are wasting that much food, you are throwing away dollars every week that you could be using to go visit Borneo.
When I was growing up, I heard the same thing from my mother that most people my age heard from theirs, “Eat everything on your plate. There are starving kids in Africa/China/India that don’t have any food.” At the time, to be completely honest, Africa/China/India was such a nebulous concept that this line of reasoning did not really work for me. My world was my family, school, neighborhood and friends. I had no idea what kids in other countries were like and did not think about them much.
The point of this post is not to talk about starving children. The point here is to do what your mother told you and eat all of the food on your plate. Every time.
So how do you do this without getting to be 400 pounds yourself? Have you seen the portion sizes that restaurants give you? How can someone eat all of that food in one sitting?
Rent vs. Own For Travelers
A popular debate in the U.S. right now is whether to rent or to own your home. There is much advice and speculation on the Internet as to what is the right thing to do. Every situation is different and what works for one person/family might not work for another. Here we will attempt to share our opinion on what works if you like to travel a lot.
In 2005, Sara and I sold our home to buy a new home which was under construction. During that period where we were living in an apartment, I became obsessed with the housing market and what I began to think might be a housing bubble. After extensive research, we decided to not go through with our new home purchase and just rent for a few years to see what would happen. Long story short, we guessed correctly and sat out of one of the worst housing value declines in U.S. history. (more…) Choices: Time vs. Money
Everything in life involves choices. We are fortunate to live in a society that allows some pretty fantastic choices, but there is still no getting around the fact that we must still make them. If your goal in life is to travel more, then you simply need to make the choice to travel more (I am making a big assumption that since you are reading this blog on the Internet, you have the basics of food, clothing and shelter pretty much covered). OK, so it sounds pretty flippant and a bit nervy to say it this way, but the reality is that if you want something, anything, badly enough, you can obtain or achieve it. Most people just don't really want it badly enough.
The truth is that it is possible to travel very inexpensively, have an incredible time, and maybe even change your life, while still maintaining a job and having a family. Over the next few weeks, months, and, hopefully, years, we will explore how to do just that.
With almost anything that is worth pursuing, it comes down to a choice between two things: (more…)
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