Once you’ve decided that you’re going travelling, even if you are planning on working remotely or going freelance, you will need £7-8 thousand pounds to start your journey. Many countries won’t let you in if you can’t prove you’ve got £5K in your bank account as they need to guarantee you will leave when you’re meant to and can pay your own way. On top of the large lump sum, flights, equipment, and insurance don’t come cheaply, plus the little things all add up!
The amount of money you need to start your travels is no laughing matter. It’s harder than ever to save money in the current economy, bills and food don’t pay for themselves. Here are some money-saving travel tips to get started that helped us to achieve our goals.
Standing orders
This may sound simple, but the easiest tip to start saving for travel is to set up a standing order the day you get paid. This way the money is out of the account, as soon as you receive it, which means you never really miss it.
At the start of our savings journey, we started with a £100 standing order each which was easy to live without. However, starting with this little also means you have to save for a longer time. We soon increased this to £200 monthly and moved any money we had left at the end of my month over to our savings. Seeing this grow faster helped us stay motivated.
Using Budget Pots In Saving Accounts
There are many reasons you might be with your bank account, maybe it’s your family bank account and you’ve never thought to change it, or maybe you still have the first one you ever signed up for, but for us, our main bank account wasn’t enough.
We first started using Monzo to get the £5 referral bonus from a friend who suggested it. But we stayed for the savings pots feature and no charges for using the bank card abroad!
This account became our go to. We would send all money after bills over to our Monzo account and could divide it for each of our goals. We have savings pots for date night, clothes, car insurance, holidays, friends weddings and most importantly travelling.
Breaking savings down into small pots of money not only helped us understand where the money was going, but also helped us stay committed to our travel savings. This resulted in us not having to chip away at other pots when it came to covering our friend’s wedding and accommodation costs, as we already had money saved in its own dedicated pot. Not only does this help keep you organised, but also helps you to evaluate spontaneous purchases and learn the true cost of things you want. The added bonus with Monzo is when you are travelling, there are no fees attached to withdrawals or spending, saving you money on your next adventure.
Budgeting
Another saving for travel tips is budgeting. Budgeting and using money pots go hand-in-hand, it’s pointless setting up saving pots if you’re going to have to pull money out of them for your bills and food at the end of the month because you failed to give yourself enough of a budget or failed to stick to your budget.
There’s many different ways to budget, getting used to following a budget and finding what works for you might take some time. For us, we have all our monthly spending broken down in separate savings pots and our direct debits coming out of our separate main bank accounts. This way we never have any unexpected expenses that will have to come out of our savings.
Keeping to a budget can take a lot of self restraint, however if you follow the rest of our savings for travel tips it should become a little easier.
Using High Interest Rates, Easy Access Accounts
Over the last few years the UK has experienced high interest rates, which is good news for savers like us, but bad news for people with mortgages.
It’s always advised to do your own further research for the highest interest saving accounts, using websites like moneysavingexpert for the best rates at the time you’re looking, but we can tell you the ones we used when we started saving for travel.
We first started with a Marcus easy-access savings account with an interest rate of 4.66% monthly which has recently decreased to 4.55%. We were able to set this account up online and operate it completely using the app.
The next account we set up was with Chase, again this setup was all online, but we also have a debit card with this account and can use the app. However, what really interested me in this account was the saving pots, like Monzo you can split out your saving pots allowing you up to 10, but these account’s pots also get 4.1%, which is a nice little top-up every month.
Cashback on everyday purchases with Chase
Sorry to keep going on about Chase, but we are big fans of this bank account, which is why we mention it twice in our savings for travel tips. But cashback is such an amazing feature, you are able to get 1% cashback on all your purchases, including on your purchases abroad, which we were not expecting.
This is included as a feature for your first 12 months as an account holder, however, you can extend this by adding £500 to your account each month to qualify for this reward.
This feature is an excellent benefit to have with a bank account as it means we get a small amount of cashback on every purchase, it’s literally free money for making purchases we were going to make anyway. It is the definition of the little things all add up. Every few months we withdraw our earnings and add it to one of our savings pots to earn interest from our free money.
Topcashback On All Purchases
With Chase, we can get cash back on all our purchases anyway, but we can also increase this further by using cashback sites like TopCashback. Whenever we go to make a purchase online, even Amazon, we check Topcashback first to make sure we don’t miss out on free money.
This is a big one for us, especially during Christmas where we make a lot of frequent purchases as there is a huge range of retailers there. This site is not just great to help you add to your travel savings, but is also a money-saving travel tip as you can get cashback on accommodation from the likes of booking.com, looking at flights, travel insurance and organising activities. They have an extensive range of cashback options from suppliers. They even have their own travel section on-site to help you find what you’re looking for.
Not only can you earn cashback from this site, but you can also earn money from referral codes, earning £30 for every person using your code once they’ve earned £10 on their account. If this has convinced you to try Topcashback to help with your travel savings click on our referral link here and start saving.
Groupon dates
Going out with friends or on dates has always been one of our largest expenses, we love food and we love spending money on experiences rather than things, so cutting down was not something we were willing to sacrifice, however, we were still able to cut down on expenses by getting deals on Groupon helping us save money for travel.
You might not think of it straight away, but the next time you want to go out for food, drinks, or want to organise something with friends, it’s worth checking what is available in your area.
We’ve been on lots of dates using Groupon to save money, sometimes you will have a smaller group on the menu or set choices, however, it’s definitely been worth it for us. With a range of choices in every city. We’ve even tried places we never thought we would, which are now some of our favourites.
Side hustles
When looking at money-saving tips for travel, everyone always talks about side hustles as this is a great way to earn extra money to put away. Finding a side hustle that suits your abilities can be tricky.
We have tried almost every side hustle, but haven’t been able to stick to them, but here are the side hustles we have actually been able to make money from:
User Research and Focus groups
Although we have never been paid in actual money, you do get your choice of gift cards for many retailers, which can save you money in the long run. We normally get Amazon vouchers and use them for our regular expenses, gifts for friends or family and our travel equipment.
Here are the referrals to the sites we use to find opportunities:
Moving out of our rented flat
Independents and our own personal space has been a huge priority in our adult life. We sacrificed a large part of our salary each month to rent accommodation since we finished university, whilst many friends moved home and saved money. We moved cities and chose to rent and pay bills.
However, with new ambitions to go travelling, we put away our need for our own space and ended the tenancy at our rented apartment. This resulted in us opting to stay with parents while working remotely, and staying with friends when we needed to go into the office.
Although moving about and sleeping on a range of beds wasn’t the most comfortable, it allowed us to save over £1,500 each month, which really accelerated our savings for travel.
Selling Old Belongings And Clothes
Our final money-saving travel tip, also helps you declutter in preparation. We used second-hand selling sites like Vinted to list our old clothes and items from around our house to earn a bit of extra money to put away for travelling.
This was also a big help when we were preparing to move out of the apartment, as we found things long forgotten about and that we never thought of selling online, like perfume and slippers.
When we moved out, we also had very little storage at our parents’ houses which also forced us to sell some of our furniture. Luckily we had very active local Facebook groups where we were able to post our furniture for £5-20 which people bought and picked up that day. We were able to put away the additional money into our travel savings.
Overall there are many different ways to save for travel, but following some of our saving-for-travel tips should help you reach your goals so you can start travelling soon too.
If you would like some more tips, contact us and we can gladly help you out. Any travel-saving tips to share with the community? leave a comment below. Think this could help someone else, please share!