How To Travel If You’re Poor: A Post Series

In 2007, I spent 6 weeks in Switzerland on around $1000. In just a few weeks, I will leave for a 10 week trip to France which will also cost me right around $1000. These days, this sort of travel is now my bread and butter, but not too long ago, the idea of traveling the world for months at a time without bankrupting myself was more of a pipe dream than a reality.

I don’t know about you, but for me, the #1 barrier to traveling the world was money. I saw all these bloggers taking $20,000 round-the-world trips and thought to myself “I don’t even make $20,000 in a year. I’ll never be able to do that.” It was incredibly disheartening, and I felt like you needed to have a “real” job with a desk and coworkers and a salary that was over the poverty line in order to save up enough money to quit said job and travel the world. Every time I read about some new traveler who quit their job to travel the world, it didn’t inspire me, it just pissed me off.

You see, I’ve never had a normal job or a steady paycheck, and have merely dreamed of the type of money that most of these bloggers were so readily giving up. I was pissed off, and pretty much gave up on travel for awhile. I even stopped reading travel blogs, because all but a few merely made me grit my teeth in frustration.

But then it all changed. One day I realized that being jealous of other people wasn’t helping me. In fact, it was holding me back. All that negative energy was doing nothing for me. So, I decided to change, and use that energy for something else: figuring out how to travel the world on my rather paltry income of around $15,000 a year. It has taken me awhile to get here, but I’ve finally come up with a travel methodology that works for people like me who really, truly have no money.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a post series about how to travel when you’re poor. I make only around $1200 a month, but I still manage to travel at least 4 months out of the year, so I think that I’m pretty qualified to talk about this subject. I’ll be writing about what I’ve figured out, what works, what doesn’t, and how to do what I’m doing.

I hope you stick along for the ride!

Coming Soon:

• How To Travel If You’re Poor: Saving Up
• How To Travel If You’re Poor: Getting There
• How To Travel If You’re Poor: Eating Cheaply
• How To Travel If You’re Poor: Staying for Free
• How To Travel If You’re Poor: Free Entertainment
• How To Travel If You’re Poor: Networking
• How To Travel If You’re Poor: Rethinking the Concept of “Need”

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