Traveling On A Shoestring Budget

Traveling,especially traveling abroad,can be expensive.And when you are focused on being frugal, building savings or growing capital,you might tend to see taking trips abroad as a needless expense or a luxury to be indulged in at a later date when your financial situation is better.

But this might not be the best line of thought.Aside from the fact that later you might not enjoy the health to travel widely,you may have too many responsibilities that prevent you from taking breaks at will.The most important point however is that traveling broadens your horizons,changes your thinking and builds your ability to deal with people and unexpected situations.It also helps you spot business and investment opportunities.So the earlier you start ,the better it is.

S0 the only option for the not-yet-wealthy, is to travel on a shoestring budget and invest time and effort, instead of money, to acquire the advantages of being well traveled.And here are some basic ideas to work around put together by Vahishta Mistry. He managed a  six-month trip in the US on an average of $70 per week.

Trade time for money: Usually, what we spend money on is the convenience of saving time. Taking a flight instead of a bus is a classic example. This can be expanded into other areas as well. Walking instead of taking a rickshaw, or using a website like www.couchsurfing.org to find people willing to host you (which can be time consuming) instead of a hotel are other ways in which you can save money by spending time.

Trade convenience for money: If you look around, you’ll see that easy-to-get things are expensive. Meals at restaurants, being driven around in taxis, even shopping online involves costs for the convenience of being able to do it from home. Convenience, is of course, a relative term. When you’re on the road, if you want to save money, you can easily trade convenience for cash. Cooking your own food and being hosted for free are top savers here. The other, less material advantages are being able to eat healthier and share your food, thus making you a more responsible guest/fellow traveler to your hosts/companions. This is exactly how I managed to get an extended stay at Boston – by cooking yummy Indian food for my hosts.

Trade inflexibility for money: This is perhaps the most important thing to learn, which I realized only toward the end of the trip. The real cash killer is actually committing to a plan and wanting to stick to it. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I forgot that the best-laid plans do indeed tend to come unstuck. Usually, when that happens, we tend to throw money at the problem – Buses are unreliable? Take a plane. Not sure if we will be able to get all the ingredients for a pizza at the supermarket? Let’s order in. The thing is to be able to deal with the randomness and flexibility of the world and adapt – to treat that four-day bus ride as part of the adventure, not an inconvenience to be disposed, or to come up with your own pizza recipe if you can’t find all the ingredients you need. I’d only realized that I had finally accepted this when it became natural for me to spend the remainder of the night at a bus station in Utah, rather than try to find a more expensive hotel. I had just arrived in the middle of the night and the natural thing to do would have been to just pony up the cash for a hotel.