Today I have a guest post from a couple who is working to pay off over half a million dollars of student loan debt. Amber from RedTwoGreen.com is sharing how she and her husband were able to travel internationally for free when they were newlyweds!
The hardest part about buckling down and tackling our $590k of student loans is the fear that our life will never be fun again. There is not room in our budget for fancy traveling, fancy date nights, or really anything fancy at all. We do not have discretionary income. We live off of a carefully planned budget of $3000/month. Everything else we earn goes straight into our student loans.
We LOVE to travel. We have been really lucky to have lived in lots of different places– the volcanoes of Chile and Hawaii, rural China, the beaches of Miami, the mountains of Salt Lake City. The thing is, we have never really been able to afford traveling.
Fortunately, we have been able to find creative ways to get it done. Our most lucrative venture without question was living in China for six months.
After we finished our undergraduate degrees, we wanted to spend some time traveling before we started law school (Amber) and dental school (Danny). We were newlyweds and had no money to our names. We started researching a few ideas, and it quickly became apparent that traveling was not going to happen given our lack of cash.
We talked to a couple of people who had taught English while they were traveling and made a little bit of money doing it. We started researching different countries and companies that pair you with a school to teach English. A couple of weeks later, we were signed up to teach English in western China for 6 months!
4 Things we did to travel for free:
1. We did our own research
First things first, we started asking around and searching for a country and company we could work for. We had friends go to several different places and each one was fairly opinionated about the place they went and who they worked for. They were each convinced that they had received the most bang for their buck when it comes to traveling.
We could have easily just taken their word for it, but we would have spent quite a bit of cash instead of earning money on our travels. Luckily we did our own research, and found a really great deal.
2. We negotiated our salaries
We negotiated our salaries and stipends like mad people. We ended up getting our flight paid for, meals provided on each day that we worked, free rent, (side note: they also chose the apartment for us. It was nice and spacious and it was heaven not having to hunt for an apartment).
In addition, we received a small monthly salary which converted to about $500 USD each. While our salary was low by US standards, our expenses were also very low so it made it doable. By the way, even if you aren’t trying to travel, don’t be shy about negotiating a fair salary for yourself before you accept a job.
3. We chose a country that was inexpensive to live in and travel around
Another thing we considered was the fact that China is remarkably cheap to get around. We could take overnight trains to different parts of the country for less than $10 USD (just a heads up, these are not the nice bullet trains. We are talking like, you might get bed bugs kind of trains).
Food was also really cheap. You could find street food for 50 cents, hot and ready to go. To be fair, China could also have been really expensive. There are lots of western restaurants chains out there as well (Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, we even saw a Dunkin Donuts one time!) So you have to be careful.
We worked four days a week. We used our three days off for traveling. Often it meant leaving on an overnight train or bus right after work and returning on one right before work started the following week.
4. We traveled on a budget
We were careful with the money that we earned there. We didn’t spend it on fancy dining or hotels, ever. We always stayed in hostels, which we loved. I will admit that it is a little unnerving to share a room with a group of strangers, but hostels attract a similar type of traveler. They were so informative– you meet great people who can tell you the best places to go and help you find cool local spots. If we had stayed in hotels, it would have been WAY more expensive.
It was tempting to buy fancy food and trinkets that we knew we wouldn’t be able to find back in the States. Occasionally we gave into that, but we always carefully budgeted for it. If we flew anywhere, we took the cheapest flights which usually meant they were terribly inconvenient. We ended up spending 24 hours in the Shanghai airport at some point.
Because we were so careful with out budget, we had a small stack of extra cash after our teaching commitment was over, and after we had seen most of what there is to see in China. We used that cash to fly to Thailand and explored it for about a month. We chose Thailand for similar reasons, you can get around and eat for dirt cheap. We took inconvenient flights. But we were able to do all of that and somehow come home with $1000 USD.
How about you?
- What hacks have you found for traveling on the cheap?
Danny and Amber are a husband and wife team tackling more than $590,000 in student loans. Danny is a dentist and Amber is an attorney, both practicing in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They are debt haters and travel lovers. They share their debt journey at www.redtwogreen.com.
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I traveled cheaply by teaching at a UNESCO English language camp for teenagers in Poland for four summers over 5 years. I did this in my 40’s when our four children were grown (finished with college or in college) I had my husband’s blessing and support, by the way! It was THE best experience. The camps were for three weeks for 110 Polish teens, age 15-18. The kids came from all over Poland and boarded at the camp. We lived right with them in the dorms (teachers did have their own dorm room), shared the communal baths and showers, and ate together in the dining hall.
Mornings were spent teaching, and the rest of the days, evenings, and weekends were devoted to keeping our students busy with fun outings and activities, all the while practicing English. Our days were 15 hours long, and I always lost about 10 pounds. We were busy! It was a wonderful way to get up and close to the people and culture of a foreign country. The Polish people are amazing and resilient. The kids were so fun and respectful. After the camp ended, the American teachers spent a week traveling around Poland with our Polish director and his wife on a bus provided for us. Our meals and low-cost hotels were paid by UNESCO as a kind of thank you. I always stayed in Europe for a couple extra weeks, visiting my daughter In Germany, who was an army officer, former exchange students, and Polish friends.
The cost of this trip was the flight over and materials and supplies I bought for teaching, as well as gifts for students and staff. (Each teacher had a “homeroom”, and we got very close to those kids.) Our room and board was provided. (Simple, wholesome food.) I budgeted a modest amount for my extra couple weeks in Europe–train fare to Germany and other destinations and misc. spending. I would say that all-in-all, My total cost, including airfare and teaching supplies, for my six weeks in Poland and Europe was about $2,000 each time I went.
That sounds amazing Isabella! I think getting to teach in another country is such a great way to not only save money, but really experience the culture of the country you are visiting. You just get so many experiences you wouldn’t get just passing through. I agree with you, its so nice getting to know people so well. And Europe for $2000 for the summer? That is a win in my book! Thanks for sharing your experience!
Those are great ideas! I’m curious. Have any of your approaches to cheap travel changed now that you have children?
Hey Sarah! Overall, not too much has changed. We are definitely more careful about where we choose to stay. We do cheap hotels or if we do a hostel we will get a private room mostly for the sake of other people if our babe is awake crying at night for example. Otherwise, we still eat cheap and use cheap transportation/flights.
My husband’s an absolute pro at travelling cheap. He spent 8 years backpacking around the world, and he taught me quite a few tricks, none of which I’d recommend for travelling with kids. We go overseas at least once a year with our kids, and for the past few years we’ve also done at least one domestic trip; and none of them break the bank. Here are my top tips:
1) Don’t be picky. If you find cheap airfares to Timbuktu, take them. So what if you don’t know what there is to do in Timbuktu? You’ll figure it out. (We spent 10 days in Japan earlier this year because the fares were on sale for $250. We never had a desire to go to Japan. We loved every minute of it.)
2) Look for free attractions. No matter where you go, anywhere in the world, you can almost always get into parks, government buildings, markets, religious buildings, and beaches for free. There are exceptions (like when we had to pay $5 to walk half-way around a park in Yangon) but they are free more often than not. We usually do one big-ticket item per trip, and then focus on the free or almost-free stuff for the rest of it. (And it pays to ask about membership – when we were in Honolulu a one-week membership to the zoo was cheaper than what it would’ve cost for us to visit for one day.)
3) Unless you’re a foodie, eat on the cheap. This can mean street food. It might mean self-catering. (Even in a hotel room you can usually self-cater one or two meals a day.) It might mean stuffing yourself at the hotel breakfast buffet so that you can get through until dinner without eating. It might mean taking a picnic lunch. My kids have had picnic lunches on three palace grounds on three different continents.
4) After airfares, accommodation will be your biggest expense. So it pays to do your homework there. In Australia, if it’s a place that is popular with tourists, you can usually get a 2 bedroom apartment for about the same price as a room in a hotel. In Japan, AirBnB is a great option; in the UK, try caravan parks. In SE Asia, accommodation is generally very affordable, so we sometimes splurge and stay in 4 star places there, since they cost the same as a 1 star place in Australia.
5) This isn’t really a tip for travelling cheap (although it can be!), but I like planning holidays well in advance. It’s really nice to have something to look forward to. Anticipation is sweet.
6) Don’t let the fact that you have kids put you off international travel! It’s actually really easy to travel with kids once they’re no longer toddlers. (My #1 tip for travelling with babies and toddlers – pack an inflatable beach ball. It takes up no space in the suitcase and gives you hours of fun in the hotel room.) We only have two kids so it’s not too expensive; obviously the more kids you have, the more it costs. But kids aren’t demanding travel partners. And kids will give you the best, most rewarding cultural experiences. Plus, travel is good for them – it opens them up, makes them understand there is more to life than Minecraft, and is great for building math skills (calculating those exchange rates), literacy and grammar (correcting poorly-written signs), etc.
This is an amazing story! Have you guys traveled anywhere else besides China and Thailand since?
Hi Lindsey! Thanks! We have been back to Hawaii, the Dominican, the Bahamas,and Mexico. We are planning on Puerto Rico for our next trip where Danny will do some dental work while we are there. We always try to do some work while we travel to help cut costs 🙂 teaching English or otherwise