How To travel The world For a Year On just $5,000

Back in 2008 when we quit our tasks and started travelling full-time, we saved around $30,000 USD between us because we were able to sell a house, a automobile and our belongings. On top of that, we were able to work overtime and were lucky to have well paid jobs. but not everyone has the high-end of having so many possessions to sell and a good income for saving money.

So, would it be impossible to travel for a year on less than we did? Absolutely!

Since earning a full-time income from this blog, we haven’t had a need to live and travel on a tight budget, but when we were first starting this business we weren’t making much! At one point, we had to live off of $400 / month in Grenada, which is no small accomplishment thinking about Grenada is not a low-cost place to live.

In this post I’m going to show you a few key things you can do to ensure that you can travel for an entire year on $5,000.

Your travel style will be different than ours was, but you don’t have to sleep in dorms and skip meals either. In fact, you can live in high-end sometimes! but you’ll have to expect to travel a bit slower. You may not see as many countries as you’d like and you’ll have to limit the regions you travel based on cost, but what would you rather do… see 10 countries in 3 months before your money runs out… or see 5 countries in 12 months and still have some cashflow left over?

I think for many people who are dreaming of quitting their tasks to travel, the latter is more appealing.

We’ve been getting a lot of emails lately from people who believe that it’s an impossible task to save up a lot of money based on their current income. We want to show that it’s possible to travel on much less than what’s conventionally thought.

If you’ve ever considered starting your own online business (like a blog or teaching English online), but you don’t know how you can travel while you’re starting out without any steady income, or if you just want to leave on a long trip with less cash in the bank, then this post will help you out.

How To save $5,000 in The first Place

We’ve written lots of really useful articles on saving money for travel, but usually we’re speaking about saving larger amounts of money. because this post is written for those who are thinking about travelling more on (much) less… we’ll focus on the tactics that yield the most reward in the least amount of time.

Sell Your Stuff

If you’re trying to get to $5,000 quickly, then selling your stuff is definitely one of your best routes to go. I highly recommend first trying to sell as many of your products on websites like Craigslist and through local Facebook buy and sell communities. To find Facebook communities, simply Google your local town with relevant words – like: “Vancouver buy and sell community Facebook”.

My automobile That I offered To help pay for Travel
The value of products in your house can add up quickly and if you’re going to be gone for a year (and potentially indefinitely), you’ll want to sell them so that you don’t have to store them.

If you have a couch, that’s likely worth at least $200. An LCD TV? probably around $300. I’m going to quickly add up some typical household products that would in shape in a 1-bedroom apartment and what they might go for on Craigslist, just so you can get a very vague idea of what your current possessions may be worth:

Item
Value

Couch
$200

Love Seat
$100

Table & Chairs
$150

LCD TV
$300

Bedroom Set
$350

Stereo System
$200

Barbecue
$100

Dishes
$100

Coffee Table
$50

Old Clothes
$150

Total
$1,700

See how fast that adds up? and that’s actually valuing many of these products quite a bit lower than you may find in a garage sale.

Pick Up a Side Hustle

There are lots of odd tasks you can pick up on the side to earn a bit extra cash. like selling your things, none of them sound very lucrative, but they can add up quickly. Some examples include:

Dog Walking: You can usually get around $10 for an hour of walking a dog. If the owners are okay with it, you can walk 4 dogs at once to earn some pretty good money. To get work, post up flyers in your local neighbourhood, talk to good friends and family or put out an ad on Facebook. once you have 4 clients that want you everyday of the week… you’re golden.

This experience will also help you with getting free lodging while you’re travelling (more on that later in this post). 4 dogs at $10 / walk, 7 days a week is already $280 per week. That’s $1,120 per month, meaning you’ll make your $5,000 in less than 5 months!

Teach English Online: These days, it’s quite easy to teach English online and earn a decent income from it. If you’re from North America, I highly recommend signing up for VIPKid, without a doubt one of the most trusted networks for online teaching work.

You’ll have to fill out an application and go through a relatively easy interview in order to get hired, but once you’re a teacher with VIPKID you can earn as much as $22 / hour online! work 10 hours per week as a side-hustle and you can make as much as $880 / month, meaning you can reach your $5,000 goal in just over 5 months.

Start a Blog: I’m going to say it here as I do many places on this blog, starting a blog is the best way to earn money for travel and it is our favourite travel job by far. The only issue is that you won’t likely make money from it for a while, so this is more of a way to earn extra cash later on down the road.

The sooner you learn how to start a blog the better. So many people ask us what they will possibly write about while they’re working at home not travelling and my answer is always the same. people like to read blogs that they can relate to, and while you’re at home working a normal job and saving for travel, you’re easy to relate to. Every traveller has had to save money for travel and they’re always thinking about these tips, as well as tips on planning a big trip.

Start your blog and write posts that show people how you’ve been able to save, what you’re packing in your bags and how excited you are to travel. These kinds of posts are likely to be your most popular articles moving forward.

If you can grow your audience to 25,000 monthly page views (very doable within a year if you follow our free blogging course), you can sign-up for MediaVine ads (the same ads you see on this website), place them on your site and earn $450 per month from your blog. Not to mention a travel blog can open up countless doors to free hotels, free flights, free tours and more. This blog can currently earn as much as $4,000 per month from these MediaVine ads alone, and we don’t have to do anything to keep them running.

Save Smart

Saving money isn’t always easy. things appear out of nowhere and it becomes difficult to get ahead. but there are a few key tips that I’m going to go over in order to help you save money a lot quicker than you thought possible.

Auto-Save: For some people, the hardest part of saving money is physically putting money into an account. They end up spending it on something they want or need instead of transferring it to their travel cost savings account.

To battle this, simply contact your bank and ask them to set up an auto-withdrawal from your main account into a separate account for travel. any cost savings account will do. When I was working in Canada, I had my bank immediately take out my cost savings from each paycheck the day after Payday. That way I never even noticed it was gone.

Rewards Points: This is one of the most under-utilized travel cost savings techniques because so many people just find it too confusing. Of course there are different cards in every country, so I’m going to explain the cards for the most frequent visitors of this blog below:

Americans: you should get the Chase Sapphire favored card. right away you’ll get a $660 sign-up reward plus you’ll earn 2.5% in points when dining / travelling and 1.25% on everything else. The card normally has a expensive $95 annual fee but it’s waived for the first year.

UK citizens: you’ll want the American express favored benefits Gold, which also waives the annual fee for the first year, offers a $200 sign-up reward and around 1% benefits on most of their purchases, 3X that if you redeem through the AMEX Portal, and you even get 2 lounge passes per year. plus other bonuses for high spending.

Canadians: there’s one card that rules them all. You’ll want to first get the TD All-Inclusive bank Account, which normally costs $29.95 / month, but it’s waived if you keep $5,000 in the account at all times. With this account, you can get the TD first class infinite Visa card for free, without any annual fee (normally $120 / year). This card is amazing. You’ll get a sign-up reward worth around CAD$300, plus 1.5% benefits on all of your purchases. but you can triple the points value if you redeem through the Expedia for TD Portal. seeing as Expedia is our most suggested travel booking site, this works out quite nicely. 4.5% back is a very good deal, even when compared to the best cards in the US, but without any minimum spending and no annual fee (when coupled with the All-Inclusive account), you really can’t beat this card.

RRSP / PPP / 401K cost savings Dump: this is a bit advanced, and you should speak to your financial advisor before committing, but if you plan to travel for an entire fiscal year without earning any money, then there’s a pretty good hack you can do with pre-tax contributions. during your work year, when you’re making a decent taxable income, consider dumping some money into your tax-deductible account. In Canada, this is called an RRSP.

If you contribute $5,000 to an RRSP while you’re earning $50,000 / year, you’ll see an extra tax cost savings of around $1,500 which you’ll be refunded after filing your taxes for the year. Then, when you’re travelling for 1 year and have $0 income, you can take out this money tax-free because you’ll be under the personal minimum amount for the year. This means that the you get that $1,500 tax break in the previous year for free. It’s a win-win. I used this when left Canada and it worked beautifully, just be sure your total income for the taxable year is below the minimum taxable amount, including the RRSP withdrawal.

Okay now you have the knowledge you’ll need to quickly save $5,000. So how can you possibly make this last an entire year on the road? read on…

How To travel For 1 Year on $5,000

Finally we get to the good stuff. how could it be possible to travel for an entire year on $5,000? You’re going to have to travel slow and follow the steps in this article, but it’s 100% possible and I’m going to show you exactly how.

House Sit

You don’t have to house and pet sit for the entire year in order to make it on $5,000, but you’ll definitely need to pick up a few tasks along the way. Don’t worry, with TrustedHouseSitters.com it’s actually really easy to find a job. You just have to pay the annual sign-up fee of $119 (which is nothing when you consider what you’ll save in lodging costs), set up a profile and start applying.

Our house sitting home in The Caribbean

Remember that dog walking I talked about to help you earn the $5,000 in the first place? You can use that as experience in your profile and even get the owners of those dogs to write you a reference on the website.

I recommend applying for some tasks while you’re saving money at home, before you even leave. That way you can line up a few throughout the year you’re travelling. In our experience, most of these tasks also include a free automobile for you to use, and we’ve even been paid by homeowners before.

There are numerous tasks published every month on the site and you can find stunning houses in Europe, South America, Canada, USA, Australia, The Caribbean, Africa, Asia… well, basically the entire world! house sitting literally altered our lives and it’s a terrific way to save a lot of money while travelling.

If you can land a job in a low-cost country (more on this later), you’ll only have to pay for food and experiences. In an budget-friendly place like Thailand and Indonesia, that means that you’ll only spend around $10 / day while pet sitting. That’s only $3,650 per year. try to land pet sitting tasks for a month or two to really see the cost savings add up.

Click here to sign up for TrustedHouseSitters.

Choose low-cost Countries

You won’t be able to survive on $5,000 per year if you’re backpacking around expensive countries like Japan and England, so consider selecting some low-cost countries for travelling instead. Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and central America are three of the most budget-friendly regions for backpackers. While we’ve specified that $50 / day for a couple ($25 – $30 / day for a single traveller) is a decent low-end budget in these regions, you’re going to have to live off of far less in order to stretch $5,000 over an entire year.

That’s why you’ll have to travel slow, consider