Key Takeaways
- One of the things that keeps people from traveling is money. They either don’t have enough, don’t think they can save enough, or fret about coming hom
- I taught English while living in Bangkok to fund my travels and keep myself on the road. Last month, we met Arielle who worked on yachts to travel the
- Nomadic Matt: Tell everyone about yourself! Jessica: I’ve been traveling through Europe and Asia with my boyfriend Brent since September 2011. Our ori
Updated: 12/05/19 | December 5th, 2019
One of the things that keeps people from traveling is money. They either don’t have enough, don’t think they can save enough, or fret about coming home with not enough. It’s easy to think “I can’t travel, I don’t have money,” but there are a lot of ways to travel without leaving with a small fortune.
A writer for Route for Less taught English while living in Bangkok to fund their travels and stay on the road. Last month, we featured Arielle, who worked on yachts to travel the world; this month we meet Jessica and her boyfriend Brent (no relation to the Jessica in this post) and learn how they funded extended travel through odd jobs, volunteering, and remote work overseas.
Route for Less: Tell everyone about yourself!
Jessica: I’ve been traveling through Europe and Asia with my boyfriend Brent since September 2011. Our original plan was to spend 15 months on the road and then move back to Canada.
Within the first few months, however, it became clear to both of us that this trip wasn’t going to be a one-off experience with a set end date. Traveling changed our goals, values, and expectations in ways that we never anticipated.
Now, we travel slowly, finding volunteer and work opportunities as we go, and spend several months in each country we visit.
What inspired you two to take your trip?
We had graduated university, started our first “real” jobs, and basically settled into lives as responsible adults. But we realized that we were at a point where we could suddenly lose 10 years in this routine: coasting along, working the same jobs every day, and drinking at the same bars every weekend.
Or, we could jump off the traditional track toward promotions, babies, and a mortgage, and instead live our lives the way we had always wanted to.
How did you go about planning your trip? Was your original intention to work and volunteer overseas? If so, how did you go about finding opportunities to do so?
We heard about WWOOFing through a friend of Brent’s, and this helped us to discover other work exchange programs, like Workaway, Helpx, and Worldpackers.
We ended up preferring these exchanges over WWOOFing because they offered a more diverse range of places to volunteer, including B&Bs, hostels, and homestays. We contacted dozens of hosts and tried to arrange longer-term stays of a month or more. We reasoned that the less often we moved from host to host, the lower our overall costs would be.
So volunteering was always part of our plan, but the countries we visited arose spontaneously. We emailed hosts in countries that interested us and then went wherever we found families that were open to having us live and work with them.
Where did you go on your trip?
So far we’ve been to France, Spain, England, Ireland, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan.
Next, who knows? I’d really like to branch out to South America or even Australia.
How did you save for your trip?
We spent five months saving for our trip and ended up with around $6,000 between the two of us. Through our Workaway and Helpx arrangements, we knew our host families would be providing us with three meals a day and a place to sleep. This strategy significantly reduced how much we needed to save before leaving.
During the months we spent saving in Canada, we were able to move and sublet a smaller apartment, which allowed us to save a few hundred dollars in rent each month. I started taking on extra projects through websites like Upwork to supplement the income from my full-time job.
Through Upwork, I was hired on for a one-year contract editing documents for an osteopathic training school. This job helped with our pre-trip savings, and I was able to carry on with the project when we started traveling.
This wasn’t part of the plan initially, but it ended up providing a small income for the first six months of our trip. Just before leaving, we also sold all of our furniture on Craigslist because it wasn’t practical to store it for an indefinite period of time anyway.
Did you find it hard to scrimp and save?
It was surprisingly easy. It didn’t feel like we were scrimping and saving because most of the changes we made were quite small. Again, we had set a much lower financial target than I think most long-term travelers do, because we always planned to volunteer and work throughout our trip to help manage our costs.
How long did your savings last? Was the what sort of forced you to look for higher-paying work?
Our savings lasted for a little under a year in Europe, and then we were left with a choice: go home or find jobs.
Working overseas also appealed to us, because it was an opportunity to continue traveling slowly. I feel like a week or two isn’t enough time to fully experience a country. It’s awesome to have a temporary home base from which you can spend months really diving into a country’s food, culture, and language.
What did you do for work?
We taught English in Thailand and now we teach in Japan.
How did you find that job?
A few of my friends had taught in South Korea, and they recommended searching for jobs on Dave’s ESL Cafe. We found dozens of teaching jobs all over the world posted on these job boards every day.
Not every job was a gem, of course — we had a few interviews with shifty recruiting agencies and unsettlingly desperate schools. But within
