How to Save Money to Travel the World
Daunted by how to save money for your round the world trip, extended long break or just a weekend away? It can seem like a mammoth task to build up your savings but I’ve put together a collection of 20 tips and ideas from my own, personal experience to help you save money to travel. Read on and you’ll be booking that flight in no time!
Travel and Accommodation Savings
How to find cheap hotels, how to find cheap flights to anywhere and how to earn cashback on travel purchases.
- Use cashback sites such as TopCashback to earn money on your purchases at online and high street retailers. How does it work? TopCashback rewards you with cashback every time you shop by simply passing on the retailer commission to your account – and you can earn some serious cash this way! You can earn cashback on travel sites such as Booking.com, Lastminute.com, Expedia, British Airways and lots more. Sign up to TopCashback here!
- Instead of paying for your accommodation upfront, use sites such as Booking.com and look for the deals with free cancellation and pay later options. This means when you make a reservation, you lock in the price you originally booked at so there are no unexpected price increases later – and if you find a cheaper deal in the meantime or change your mind, you can cancel with no charges to pay. I use Booking.com for all my reservations and highly recommend it!
- Be flexible with your dates. Save money on flights by using Skyscanner and search for your destination and choose ‘cheapest month’ for depart and return, then you can see the cheapest dates on which to fly.
- Be flexible with your destination! I love Skyscanner’s ‘Everywhere’ option. Just choose your departing airport and then pick ‘everywhere’ and it will show you the most pocket friendly destinations you can fly to – along with throwing up some destinations you may not have thought of. This is how I found direct flights from Glasgow to Barbados in December for £299!
- Are you a frequent or long haul flyer? Consider getting an airmiles credit card. When you shop with an airmiles credit card you’ll earn points based on what you spend, and these can later be put towards flights to worldwide destinations of your choice, or you may benefit from extras such as priority boarding or airport lounge access. Compaire airline credit card here.
Little Ways to Save Money To Travel
How to collect points to turn into cash, make savings on your mobile phone contract and get budget beauty products.
- Sign up to your local supermarket points rewards scheme. I use the Sainsbury’s Nectar card and collect points on my weekly shop and petrol. I even collect points on eBay purchases and on Expedia – I received 2000 points after booking my Venice trip through Expedia! The points soon build up and I use these to pay for my weekly food shopping.
- Save money on beauty products and be a guinea pig by signing up to home product testing trials such as Alba Science where you will receive products in exchange for filling out questionnaires about them. I recently received a full size tub of intensive conditioner and my friend received St Tropez tanning mousse (which isn’t cheap!).
- Cancel all those non essential direct debits. Yep – that’s means Netflix, your unused gym membership, magazine subscriptions and those monthly subscription boxes you never get around to opening.
- Renegotiate your mobile phone contract. Sign up to Billmonitor and it will analyse your bills and match you with the best contract for your buck.
- DIY beauty. Forego the monthly salon trips and do your own nails, tanning and waxing.
Earn Some Extra Money
How to earn money by working from home, get paid for watching TV and where to sell books, clothes and electronics.
- Sell your skills. Great with Photoshop? A dab hand at copywriting? Advertise your services on Fiverr or Upwork and set your price.
- Take on a second job. What about waitressing, a weekend retail job or working in a bar after your 9-5?
- Earn cash for your opinions by completing surveys online for points which you can then redeem for gift cards (or sometimes even just cold, hard cash). Try I-Say, Valued Opinions, Swagbucks, Crowdology, MySurvey and Toluna.
- Sell all the stuff you don’t need. Put all your old clothes on eBay (private sellers get 20 free listings per month) or Depop. Sell household items on Gumtree.com, local Facebook groups for your area or a good old fashioned car boot sale. Trade in old CDs, DVDs, games, phones and electronics at Music Magpie. Sell your old books on Amazon Marketplace. For anything that doesn’t sell, use a recycling service that will pay cash per kilo for your clothes, household goods and bric a brac, such as Cash 4 Clothes.
- Get paid for your TV opinions. Sign up to The Viewers and get paid between £40-£70 for a group discussion, offering your feedback for all things telly. Online surveys and tasks are also available.
Drastic Ways to Save A Ton of Cash
How do you save enough money to travel the world? You make some big changes in your life and make your bank account richer.
- Move back in with your parents or another family member.
- Own your own house with more than one bedroom? Consider renting out your spare room to a lodger.
- Rent out a room or your entire house on Airbnb.
- Renting a place by yourself? Think about moving into a large house share instead.
- Sell your car and take public transport instead.
What did you think of these tips? Do you have any money saving ideas to add?
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~~ Jackie Jets Off contains affiliate links throughout the site. If you choose to purchase items through these links, I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. These commissions help toward the cost of running this site. Thanks! ~~
16 comments
Partho Pratim Mazumder 08/11/2015 11:54 am
Thank you . 🙂 It will help me at the time of my Travel time .
View CommentJackie 08/11/2015 7:28 pm
Thanks for reading!
View CommentJasmine Eclipse 08/11/2015 4:17 pm
These are amazing tips, Jackie! I recently moved out on my own and I’m financially independent for the first time in my life, so posts like this are really helpful to me. I also booked my first trip, and I really wish I had come across this post earlier! There’s a lot of posts like this that offer advice on saving money to travel, but honestly these are actual tips that will be super helpful. Thanks for a great post!
View CommentJackie 08/11/2015 7:29 pm
Hi Jasmine, thank you so much for your comment! I’m glad you found my tips useful – hope you have an amazing trip!
View CommentCarolann & Macrae - One Modern Couple 10/11/2015 8:33 pm
These are incredibly helpful tips! You’ve really made the main point clear: get rid of excess, be smart about purchases and utilize your skills!! We had to do a lot of these before we started travelling, and still do many as we go. We also heard about Airtasker (like Airbnb but it’s jobs and tasks vs accommodation) we’re not sure how widespread it is as we believe it started in Australia, but similar sites like it and Fiverr are great for short-term paid-projects!
View CommentJustine 11/11/2015 9:13 pm
Take on a second job! Yep! I do this! The money from my second job pays for my travels! 🙂
View CommentMar 13/11/2015 3:13 am
Oh I had never heard of Quidco such a great thing! I have a flat on airbnb and rent a large flat which I sublet to reduce my rent. It is a bit of a pain but it does save me a lot of money!
View CommentMarta Grilo 13/11/2015 7:01 pm
It’s always good to keep in mind these kind of ways to save money. Travel is such an amazing thing to do. People should realize that it’s not that difficult to find a way to do it with a short amount of money.
View CommentHimanshu 15/11/2015 3:33 pm
Kudos to you for putting efforts and compiling these tips. Certainly they are useful for every traveler.
View Commentevan kristine 16/11/2015 2:27 pm
Great tips! I’m not sure about becoming a human guinuea pig for beauty products but oh well with all the chemicals in our stuff nowadays, what worse could come that hasn’t yet 😀
View CommentMary Charie | Two Monkeys Travel 16/11/2015 6:23 pm
Great list here dear! Been doing some of those and definitely helps me saved some pennies!
View CommentCai Dominguez 17/11/2015 8:34 pm
Thanks for sharing. I screenshot some of them 🙂
View CommentJoe Ankenbauer 18/11/2015 2:21 am
Some very useful
View CommentTips! Thanks for sharing!
Trisha Velarmino 23/11/2015 4:59 pm
Very useful tips, except it will be hard for me to execute them! Having two jobs will be extremely tedious but I am really glad these things work for you. Thanks for sharing, Jackie!
View CommentVery Hungry Nomads 25/02/2016 5:38 am
Great advice on saving money! It is the most common question we get asked after traveling the world. How can you afford it? As you mentioned, if you really want to travel, it should be easy to give up a few luxuries and save for that epic trip! We have now seen over 100+ countries with fairly average wages so yes, it is possible! Keep on traveling and sharing that passion! Happy travels!
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hotelsetc 25/02/2016 10:20 am
Very useful tips! Thanks for sharing…..
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