How to Save Money to Travel

Do you want to travel, but the funds are a little bit low? I’m going to show you some ways on how to save money to travel that are easily implemented and ones that I use all the time to fund my travels. 

Not everyone likes to save money, spending money is so much more fun, but when you save money to travel the payoff at the end is an amazing adventure. A lot of people think that it is very expensive to travel and sometimes it is, but it doesn’t always have to be. Regardless of the cost of your trip, let’s figure out how to pay for the trips you want to take so you don’t come home in debt. I’ve never come home in debt in any of my travels and I highly recommend that you don’t either.

How to save money to travel in three easy steps

When you save money to travel, there is a little bit of an outline I use to figure out how much you’re gonna need for your trip. 

Step 1: You want to decide where you’re going to go.

Step 2: You want to figure out how much this trip will cost you, an estimation is fine. There are many places online that can help you figure this out, just Google something like “how much is a 2 week trip in France”. 

Step 3: You want to decide when you’re going to go.

Once you have these three things determined you need to do a little bit of math. Take the cost of your trip and divide it by the number of months until you go on your trip. Once you have this number, you know how much each month you’re going to have to save to get to that point. 

Cost of trip ÷ number of months until your trip = what you need to save each month

Eg: $1400 ÷ 8 (months) = $175/month

If you don’t think you’ll be able to get to that point within that time frame you can always move your travel dates further in the future to give you more time to save the money. So if I use the example above but change the number of months until I leave:

$1400 ÷ 12 (months) = $117/month 

This reduces how much money you need to save each month.

The next step after you determine how much money you’ll need for your trip is to set up a savings bank account. Make this account one that does not allow debit card withdrawals so it’s harder to take out money. To save money to travel you want to make it less tempting to withdraw money for everyday things by requiring the account to transfer money into a different account before you can take money out. There are a lot of different bank accounts and try to find one that doesn’t charge you any fees. Once you have it set up you’ll be able to put your money in and watch it grow.

A favourite trick is to set up automatic deposits into your travel savings account from your paycheques. When you have a paycheque come in, determine how much you want deposited into your savings account. When you have this money automatically put into your savings account each payday, it makes it easier to not forget and to not spend that money if it sits in your regular debit account.

The last part is to find extra ways to save more money. There are many ways to do this, but I’ll go through a couple of ways to find the money. Not everyone wants to do these things, but if you want to travel and explore different places there are some things you can do to get you there. These suggestions don’t have to be permanent, they can be implemented to just get you to your goal and then you can go back to it.

1. Limit or eliminate going out for meals. 

2. If you buy your coffee at a cafe, start making your coffee at home and only get those fancy coffee’s occasionally.

3. Limit how much shopping you do for extras

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4. Track your spending and see where you can limit or eliminate spending

You can also declutter your house and sell all those items online like Facebook Marketplace which is super easy to set up and sell. This money gets put into your savings account. 

These are just a few of the tips to save money to travel so you can take your trip without worrying about being in debt once you come home. The sooner you start to implement these techniques to save money to travel, the sooner you’ll be able to take that trip you’ve been dreaming of.