25 Random Travel Necessities You May Not Think to Pack
Money-saving hacks I’ve been trying recently
I talk a lot about money-saving on here because it seems that is still the number one reason why people can’t travel. It’s not that they don’t want to, or don’t have the time, it’s just that they don’t have the funds. Recently, I posted about ways you can cut down on your actual travel budget. I wanted to share with you ways that I’ve cut down on my every day spending.
Savings can be used for anything, but we often like to spend our savings on travel. My husband and I have our ups and downs when it comes to getting serious about saving money. Some weeks we do real well, and other weeks we through caution to the wind and go straight to the mall and out to eat wherever we feel like.
Ways I’ve cut down my travel expense budget
If you’ve been following any of my travel tips, you know that starting out with a travel budget is essential before you even start saving for the trip itself. You need to know how much to save, so that requires a lot of research and coming up with an estimated budget to work from.
Once you have that estimated budget, and you’ve looked at your general finances, you may notice it’s going take you some time to save for that trip. Let’s say you have $150 a month to commit to saving for a trip and you see that your dream trip is going to cost $3,500. That means it is going to take two years to save for the trip. If you don’t want to wait that long and/or you’re willing to change a few things around, you could go on that trip sooner.
But I don’t speak their language… can I still visit?
I took American Sign Language in school, which was great, but doesn’t help me with traveling. (Although I do know a few universal signs like “toilet.” So if I ever have to go to the bathroom and am around a deaf person, they can help me out.) There are challenges to going to a country where I don’t speak the language. However, I’ve been in large cities where a lot of people speak English (such as Rome and Paris) and I’ve also been in some very small towns where no one speaks a lick of English (such as very small villages in Ecuador.)