The Cost of Traveling

A new article up on GoNOMAD, written by Kelly Westhoff, shows just how to spend money while traveling around the world. Westhoff traveled the globe for six months and kept a log of what she spent and how she could have saved money. Take some notes! This could help you for years to come. Here’s a piece from the article.

Because we tried to pay for most things with cash, we didn’t worry about big credit card bills coming due while we were away. The bills we knew we had to pay were accumulating back home (mortgage, heating, home owners insurance).

We set up every account we could on automatic withdrawal. This eliminated paper bills coming through the mail in exchange for email notices we could access anywhere with an Internet connection. It took a few months to work all kinks out of the system, so my suggestion is to start on this task four months ahead of any departure date.

For random bills that would come due while we were away, we left a trusted family member back home with blank checks.

Since coming home, people have asked if we ever worried that the computers we were using in Internet cafes were tracking our key strokes and stealing user names and account passwords. Honestly, the thought never crossed our minds. Perhaps it was naïve of us to blindly trust all those communal Internet café computers, but we have never had any problems.

Yes. We often felt our biggest cost were those monthly mortgage bills we were paying back home. We could have used that money on the road, but where would we live when we came home? We briefly looked into renting our home while we were away, but didn’t do it. There were, however, some ways we could have cut costs along the way.

Read the rest of Westhoff’s story at GoNOMAD.com