10 Money-Saving Travel Tips: How I Travel on a Very Small Budget

Many people believe that in order to travel, you need to spend a lot of money. Well, if your idea of traveling is staying at a fancy hotel, eating at nice restaurants everyday, and participating in costly sightseeing tours, you do need to shell out for that. However, the type of traveling I do is not like that, and I actually spend less money in a typical month of traveling than I would in a typical month if I was back in the U.S. working a normal job and paying rent and various other bills. Read on to find out how I keep my costs down, allowing me to travel for months at a time on a very small budget.

The first thing I must make clear is the difference between how I travel and many people's ideal situation. I do not consider my traveling to be a "vacation." I consider it to be an exploration of the world, so I am more interested in simply seeing the places as they are and soaking up the atmosphere as opposed to staying at a resort for a week or two and pampering myself with all of the luxuries a place has to offer. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that--I know I wouldn't mind doing that every once in a while also--it's just a different mentality, and I know that my financial situation would not allow me to splurge on that kind of relaxing, indulgent getaway. So, if you are interested in my type of adventure, here are my best tried-and-true methods for saving money on the road.


1) Have a frugal mindset

This is the most important aspect of traveling on a budget, and it starts even before you leave on your trip, which is why it deserves the top spot on this list. The first step when planning to travel is saving the money to go, which for most people will involve some changes in your daily handling of money. I have been focused on saving money for traveling for several years now, so these frugal habits are ingrained in my financial decisions, but all it takes is being conscious of what you are spending money on and realizing what is important and what is not.

Here's what I do: first, I write down my set expenses every month--rent, utilities, food, car payment/insurance, gas, health insurance, student loans, whatever it is for you that is consistent from month to month. At the very beginning, you should look at this list and decide if any of them are optional expenses. Maybe you'll realize that you don't need to spend $50 a month on cable TV, and instead watch Netflix or other streaming services. Even something small can add up over several months. For me, I decided a few years ago that in order to reach my savings goal faster, I would get rid of my car. This eliminated my expenditures for car insurance and gas, which saved me $600 a year on the insurance alone, plus whatever I would have spent in gas. For those of you with car payments, you will save even more if you choose this money-saving technique. In exchange, you will have to spend money on public transportation, but in most places you will find that it is a much smaller expense. I know from experience that this decision is not a convenient or easy one, but for me it was worth it for the savings, and I also feel good about taking public transportation instead of driving a personal vehicle because it reduces my carbon footprint.

Next, take that amount you spend every month and subtract it from your monthly income. This gives you the amount of flexible income in your budget. Of course you always have little purchases you need to make throughout the month and you want to have some money to spend on fun activities, so factor in an amount per month that you want to give yourself for those things. Once you also subtract that amount from your monthly income, voila! You now have the amount you can save for travel each month. I have a separate savings account connected to my checking account, so each time I get a paycheck, I immediately transfer this travel money into my savings account, and I don't touch it until I start planning my trip.

In addition to budgeting, you can also change your mindset about day-to-day purchases. Whenever I want to buy something I ask myself, if this necessary or optional? If I see something I want to buy or spend money on, but I don't absolutely need it, I usually don't buy it. I think to myself, would I rather go out to eat now, or in Rome? Do I want to go see the new movie in the theater, or would I rather spend that money on a night at a hostel in Paris? Once you start framing your spending decisions in this way, in terms of what this money could do for you later, it becomes much easier to determine what you really need and what is unnecessary.


2) Hostels

Once you are on the road, one of the most important decisions is where you will sleep each night. Although I do enjoy staying in hotels because of the comfort and convenience of having your own space, they are killer on the budget, so I avoid them as much as possible. A great alternative is staying in a hostel. Hostels are not common in the United States, but there are tons of them in Europe and other places around the world, and they are a fraction of the cost of hotels. Most have dorm-style rooms, with anywhere from 3-12 beds in a room; some have a bathroom in each room, but most have shared bathrooms for the whole floor. Many even provide breakfast, another money-saving plus. To search for hostels, I typically use sites like HostelBookers or HostelWorld, and then I sort by price, lowest to highest. Usually I book the cheapest one, as long as the reviews are good enough that it sounds like somewhere I would want to stay. If not, I continue down the list until I find a good balance of price and quality. On these sites, most hostels will list several different room options, such as different numbers of beds, all female or all male dorms, or private rooms, with the price for each type. Again, I usually go for the cheapest option, even if it means sharing a room with 10 other people. but you can choose the situation that works the best for you.

Another great thing about hostels is that you meet other travelers from all over the world, which is especially nice for solo travelers like me. Even though I travel alone, I hardly ever feel lonely because I meet great people everywhere I go.


3) Couchsurfing

This is one of my favorite money-saving strategies! Couchsurfing is an online community of travelers and hosts who you can connect with anywhere in the world. The idea is that hosts offer travelers a place to sleep on their couch, a spare room, or even just a space on their floor, for free! In fact, the entire process is completely free, all you have to do is set up a profile on the Couchsurfing site and you can begin searching for hosts in the city you want to visit. Now you might be thinking, isn't it dangerous to stay with a stranger? It's always a good idea to be cautious in a situation like this, but Couchsurfing has a great feedback system. Hosts and travelers can leave reviews of each other telling others about their experience, so when you search for a host you can read the reviews other surfers have left for them. As long as the person has a few good reviews, you can be pretty certain that you will not run into trouble with them. I have had great experiences with Couchsurfing, and I highly recommend it for anyone traveling on a budget. In addition to saving money (by my conservative estimate Couchsurfing saved me at least $1,000 when I traveled in Europe compared to what I would have spent on hostels), I really enjoy staying with locals. You can get to know a place much better staying with someone who lives there who can give you an insider perspective on the city or country. Also, some hosts will even offer to feed you or take you out to eat, provide you with transportation, or let you do your laundry at their house, which is much more than a hostel or hotel will give you. I have stayed with several very generous hosts throughout my Couchsurfing experiences, and they made my time in their city even more amazing than it would have been otherwise. For more information, click here to read my top 8 tips for successful Couchsurfing.

Another similar site is Airbnb. Although it is not free, Airbnb works on a similar idea, that you can search for a local host to stay with, and it is usually cheaper than a hotel, although perhaps about the same as a hostel. I have only used Airbnb once, and it was in the U.S., not overseas, but I met several people on my travels who used it and really liked it. You can find a variety of listings on the site, anything from a place to pitch a tent on someone's property, to renting out an entire apartment or house. As far as I understand it, breakfast is always included. When I used Airbnb, my mom and I stayed with a very nice couple in Raleigh. We rented one room for the two of us to stay in and they let us use the rest of their house as well, including wifi and cable tv, and they even had homemade muffins for us for breakfast. It was a great experience, and I would definitely use Airbnb more if it weren't for Couchsurfing.


4) Volunteering

This is a HUGE money saver! I have done WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) in Norway, Spain and Greece, and I am currently doing WorkAway in Costa Rica. Both WWOOF and WorkAway are online resources to connect hosts in search of help with willing volunteers looking for a non-traditional and inexpensive travel experience. For both of the sites, you have to pay to register, but after that you can contact as many hosts and volunteer in as many different places as you would like. At the very least you will receive a free room in exchange for volunteering about 4-7 hours a day, and most also provide food. Since food and housing are the two biggest expenses while traveling, this has cut down my spending immensely, especially during my current trip in Costa Rica, where I plan to spend most of my time at WorkAway locations. I have been in Costa Rica for almost a month now, and I have only spent $182! There are other sites I have heard of that work on the same idea, but WWOOF and WorkAway are the only ones I've done, so I can't speak to any others. So if you are not afraid to work a little bit during your trip, you can have the opportunity to stay in beautiful places, meet great people, and spend almost zero money while doing it.

Harvesting olives in Saidona, Greece as a WWOOF volunteer 

5) Cook your own food

Going out to eat can be one of the biggest expenses while traveling if you do it everyday. That is why, when I'm not staying somewhere that provides food, I try to shop at regular grocery stores and make my own food as much as possible. When I was in Europe, this lead me to eat mostly bread and cheese because it was cheap and easy to carry around with me while I was sightseeing, but there are better alternatives to that as well. Most hostels will have kitchens that guests can use, and Couchsurfing hosts are usually very accommodating in that regard as well, so unless you are staying in a hotel room with no kitchen, there should be plentiful opportunities for cooking healthy, inexpensive meals for yourself while on the road. Sandwiches or wraps can be a good option for lunch on the go, just try to be more creative than I was and use more than just cheese. You can also pack some leftovers from dinner the night before, or if packing a lunch is not your style, you can often find pre-made salads and sandwiches at grocery stores or convenience stores that won't cost as much as a restaurant.


6) Find free activities, and pick and choose others

It can be tempting to want to do it all in every city you visit, but it can get pricey to pay for admission to many museums or attractions in each place. Normally the first thing I do when I arrive in a new place is to search online for lists of free things to do there. In some places this list will be extensive, in other places, not so much. But regardless, there will always be something to do that will not require spending a dime. For example, the National Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland, is completely free and it's amazing! Many cities I went to in Europe, including London, Barcelona, and Amsterdam, had free walking tours. These were my favorite free activities because they give you a great overview of the city and the tour guides tend to be fantastic. They work for tips (so even though it's "free," be prepared to give a little something at the end), therefore they know that their compensation depends on how knowledgeable, friendly and charismatic they are. Parks and cathedrals were some of my other go-to attractions because those are also most often free.

I always try to focus on free, and then prioritize the things that do have a price tag so I only pay for the attractions that I feel the trip would be incomplete without seeing. For instance, when I was in Paris, I knew that the one thing I couldn't miss was going to the Louvre, so I was willing to add that expense to my budget. By coincidence, we ended up being there on the one day per month that the Louvre has free admission, so that was a win-win. Also in Paris, I decided that it wasn't worth it to me to spend money to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, so my sister and I choose to go to the Arc du Triomphe instead, which had cheaper admission and also has a great view of the city.

At the Louvre on free admission day 

7) Be flexible with dates and locations

If you are not locked into certain dates (like a vacation from work), it's always a good idea to stay flexible. Often, especially with flights, you can save money by flying a few days before or after your target date. Many flight booking sites let you see fares for the whole month, which lets you compare to see if a different date will be less expensive. Also, if you are going on a longer trip and want to see several different countries in the region, be open to exploring a place you hadn't thought about. As strange as it might sound, sometimes flying somewhere else before your desired country can save you money. This has happened to me twice. The first time, I wanted to fly from Dublin to Istanbul, and it turned out that stopping in Bucharest, Romania for a few days was slightly cheaper. In this case, the savings was almost negligible, but since I had the time, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to explore another country. The second time was when I was booking my flight out of Costa Rica. Originally, I was looking up flights to Cuba, but the results were disappointing; all I found were itineraries that were either way more than I wanted to pay, or had two or three layovers in various countries. So with some more searching, I discovered that flying to Cancun, Mexico and staying for 5 days would save me $150 over the next cheapest option, and would mean way less flying time. No way I'm going to pass that up!

Also, a note about flights: it's often good to check multiple sites for the best deals, but don't make yourself crazy trying to check every single site. My favorite flight search sites are Momondo and Skyscanner, and sometimes I'll check others if I want a comparison. Once you have an idea of prices from those, it's a good idea to check the price of the best deal on that airline's own site. That saved me money on my flight to Cuba because the airline was having an additional sale. My favorite feature of Skyscanner is that by inputting "Everywhere" as your destination, it will tell you the cheapest flights out of your departing airport, which is how I found the cheap flight to Cancun and decided to go there.


8) Research different types of transport

After food and lodging, transportation from place to place is probably the biggest expense, depending on how many places you want to go and how far apart they are. I've learned that sometimes what I assume will be the most cost-effective way to travel actually isn't. For example, for travel around Europe I bought a Eurail pass in order to take almost any train in 27 countries with a single ticket. Without doing much more research, I assumed that this would save me money. However, on almost every leg of the journey that my sister traveled with me, she found ways to travel cheaper than me. As I learned, buses are nearly always the cheapest option, and trains are often the most expensive, much to my surprise. Thanks to budget airlines, my sister was even able to find several flights between our destinations that were cheaper than either trains or buses! So if you're looking to save some dough, definitely explore your options before booking anything.


9) Limit souvenir purchases

As memorable as souvenirs may seem, the cost can add up, especially if you are traveling to several cities or countries and want a keepsake from each one. My advice is to forgo the cute little magnets or shot glasses as much as possible, for several reasons. First and foremost, as I said before, is the cost. Even spending just $5 in each place you visit can add up if you're on an extended trip. Also, when you're a backpacker like me, you always want to keep things lightweight and everything you buy you either have to mail home, costing you even more money, or carry around with you on the rest of your trip. For both of those reasons, I decided to only collect postcards from each place I visited, because they are the cheapest souvenir, usually costing about 10-80 cents each, and they weigh very little. Ultimately, you have to decide what you will prioritize, and make wise spending decisions accordingly. Maybe for you that is shot glasses, and that is perfectly fine.


10) Walk more

In a few places I have visited, I took frugality to the extreme and didn't even spend money on public transportation to get around. Some cities, like Edinburgh, are small enough that it is easy to get to all of the major attractions just by walking. But even when things were more spread out or I wasn't staying close to the center of the city, I often decided to walk places instead of paying for the bus. Mostly this was the tightwad in me being too cheap to pay for it, but it also served as a great form of exercise, which is usually hard to come by when traveling, at least for me. When I was in Belfast, I stayed with a couchsurfing host who lived 45 minutes on foot from the center of the city, and I walked back and forth every day that I was there. I'm not sure how much money I saved, and for some people the amount would not be worth it, but for me I didn't mind spending the extra time and I felt good about the exercise. So my advice is, if you want to go somewhere that is a little farther away than you would normally walk, challenge yourself to forego the transportation and walk instead. This is especially money-saving if your only other option is a taxi, which has been the case many times during my trip in Costa Rica. You might even stumble across a hidden gem on the way, like a beautiful building or park, that you wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Thanks to all of these money-savings strategies, I have been able to save up enough money to travel for months at a time, even though I have never had a high-paying job, and I've been able to stay under budget, allowing me to see more countries and also have savings remaining to fall back on when I returned home. During my five months traveling to 15 countries in Europe, I only spent about $6,500. This included everything I had to pay for before I left like my flight, travel insurance, and paying all of my bills ahead by six months so I didn't have to worry about them while I was gone. This time around in Costa Rica, I'm on track to spend way less than that because of volunteering. My budget started at $5,000, and about $1,200 [updated] of that went to pre-trip costs (flights, travel insurance and paying my bills ahead). But like I mentioned, I've spent less than $200 in-country thus far, so I'm well on my way to being under budget for this four-month trip, unless I decide to splurge in either Cancun or Cuba, which I'm considering. [Update: My total expenditures at the end of my trip were $3,100 for three and a half months]. I am living proof that traveling does not have to be expensive, even for extended trips; all it requires is some frugality, discipline, and a bit more time spent planning (it takes longer to find a Couchsurfing or volunteer host then it does to book a hostel or hotel). It's possible for anyone, as long as you make it your priority, and there's a whole world out there waiting to be explored! I hope you found these tips helpful, or at least enjoyed this look into my traveling process. Thanks for reading and following along on my journey!