How the heck can we afford to travel for a year? Part Two

Oh heeeeeyyyy! We are officially in Greece! The World Tour has begun. Yippeeee! I couldn’t be more thrilled for the journey to finally begin. After all the planning, saving (how? you will now discover) and discussion, we are finally here. Learn more about how we can afford to travel!

Last week in part one, I wrote about five ways we’ve saved for this trip and this week continues with five more. A lot of people have asked how we saved our pennies and I’m pretty much an open book when it comes to it – although when it comes to actually planning the trip, we are very much leaving it up to what happens on the road.

Preferring to pre-book and plan as little as possible, we will see what happens, and let fate and chance take us to wonderful and exciting new places.

But alas, I digress! Read on for five (more) things we did to afford to travel for a year:

Find a High Interest Savings Account

I never gave interest (the kind where I get instead of give) any of my time and WTF was I thinking? Commonwealth bank were giving me 0.2% for something other banks were offering 2.7%. I moved what little savings I had into a high interest account. Moo and I moved our savings into a separate account and before we knew it, we were making a minimum of $100 a month without doing anything. Since doing that, in the last few months we’ve gained over $500 in interest – that’s so much extra time on the road – for doing nothing. 

I Budgeted

Okay, so, I know BI says not to do this, but hey, I play by my own rules. Plus, I needed a budget to understand what money was going where. While I don’t use it now, I did for the last few years and it’s taught me so much about how and where to invest what little spare cash I had. I would budget my weekly spend after transferring everything out to savings and withdraw that weekly spend in cash. This way I could always keep track of what was going out and how little was left. 

We Booked Our Flights With Left Over Frequent Flyer Points 

I made mention above about no longer chasing that frequent flyer game. Buuuuut, I do have to admit, we did use them to book our flights over to Greece. We booked two one-way tickets from Sydney to Athens for $200 each (yeah you read correctly). So I guess you could say the points served their purpose…but it’s a tough game to chase unless you’re seriously travelling frequently. If you’re not, someone is winning and it’s not you.

We Sold a LOT On Gumtree

Given we were moving out of our apartment months before departure, we had plenty of time to slowly part with our possessions.  We sold a lot on Gumtree and to friends over Facebook, thankfully some friends had just moved to a new house and therefore needed a lot of basic things like chairs, tables and kitchenware. Overall, we were able to get rid of a lot all at once thanks to those mates. 

We Booked Two Market Stalls

In fact, there are quite a few people reading this who have probably bought something from me at a market stall in the past few months. The first stall was a community market at the beginning of the year – it was just generally to make a few extra bucks from clothes I never wore. I shared the stall with a friend who was also leaving the country, so we had a lot to move. The second stall was just me and Moo and it was literally everything and anything we no longer wanted. Sure, we could have just donated it all to charity – but – given so many of them are already overburdened (Cheers Kondo) we were happy to barter with buyers for our wares. 

Thanks again for reading – it means the world to me!

So as of now we are somewhere in Greece! Follow me on IG and facebook to see what we’re getting up to!

Until then, sojourn farewell xo

Images via: Unsplash