How we have travelled for the past five years
There’s a question we get asked a lot when we tell people what we’ve been up to for the past few years. HOW the f**k can you afford to travel so much and go to so many amazing places, all the time?! It’s quite simple for us even if it may sound strange to other people. You don’t have to be rich to travel the world, really! ______________________________
Since we first started travelling in 2014, we have managed to work for just about six months a year and have the rest of the time off. Staying on a strict budget is probably the most important thing for us to be able to have so much freedom, but also being very good at saving. We have kind of become experts in saving money so when we actually do work we save almost everything we make. Although now, FINALLY, we have just started our own online business and are able to earn money from our laptops, anywhere in the world yahooo! If you’re interested in how we do that, how it works or if you have any questions, maybe you want to work online as well. Head back to our website to know more about it :)
Now back to the past five years.
When we lived in Sweden we both had a lot of things we payed for every month, rent, bills, shopping, spending a lot of money going out and so on, but since we started travelling we have found that some of these things aren’t as important to us anymore. We hardly ever go shopping or eat out, we are always out and about so having our own fancy apartment would just be unnecessary (and hellooo have you heard of roommates?? Most fun thing in the world), we have a passion for finding the cheapest supermarkets with the cheapest food (and alcohol of course), when we go out we either pre drink hard or run in and out of the club to buy beers from the shop instead of the bar and we even live without sim cards in our phones most of the time and just really on WiFi. This has in no way been a sacrifice for us but something we actually enjoy doing and it had led us into many fun and unusual situations. Living like this we don’t spend a lot of money at all, but to be able to afford moving around so much, we obviously have to work sometimes as well.
We have worked in a lot of different places over the years, stunning beach clubs in Sydney, a cattle farm (haha) in Adelaide, cafes in Melbourne, hosting at private parties and events, crazy bars in Darwin, backpacker bars in New Zealand, music festivals in Sweden, serving champagne at super yachts in Australia and Spain, driving illegal taxi in Ibiza, folding boxes at a warehouse and our latest one waitressing at the busiest rooftop bar in Dubai. Working in all these places hasn’t been something we’re just doing for money but it has also been so much fun and something we have learned a lot from.
We always try to find the most fun jobs, then we get a place to stay and squeeze in as many people as we can to pay the lowest possible rent. We’re not gonna lie, there have been times when we’ve stayed in friends basements and garages, but it really doesn’t matter to us where we live, we just think it’s fun not to do everything like everyone else. Another thing that we fell in love with a couple of years back, is couch surfing. Couch surfing is this amazing little app where you can meet new friends or locals if you come to a new place, and you can also sleep on their couch, completely for free. It’s always a lot of fun to experience a new place with a local and it of course saves you a lot of money to stay for free. We have actually stayed for free for almost two years in total (!), either through couch surfing or getting free accommodation from work, we always find a way haha. Imagine how much money we would’ve spent on rent in Sweden in our own apartments for two whole years?!
The things we actually do spend our money on and what we’re always saving for is flights, adventures and just being free. Having to wake up at the same time every single morning and go to the same job in the same city is something we’re intensely trying to stay away from, we simply just want to be free to do whatever we want to do, whenever we want to and it has worked out pretty good so far. The point is, you don’t have to have a ton of money to be able to travel, just try and make it as cheap as you can and you might, like us, end up spending less money than you did at home in the first place.
If you are interested in budgeting, read our blog post OUR BEST BUDGET TIPS! :)