Ah Millennials, we're a unique generation. Rather than spending our paychecks on a mortgage or a
new china set, we'd rather spend big money on experiences. Things like travel or restaurants
or experiencing a new culture. But many of us are stuck with student loan debt payments
and car payments and credit card debt that it can make it really tricky to travel.
Hey, hey, it's Justine with Debt Free Millennials, the channel for all things
millennial and money. I love traveling. I love spending my money on getting on an airplane,
jet setting across the country, and experiencing new places, especially with my boo. Love ya.
So new places, new food, new culture, experiencing all of that is what I really like to spend money
on and I feel like most millennials do too. So if you are in debt or you're living the debt-free
millennial lifestyle, you can afford to travel this year and I'm going to show you in three
different ways. Alright, so the first way is to make a travel wish list. I literally spent one
afternoon and wrote down every single place, every location that I wanted to visit in a year,
regardless of cost. So I'm going to show you exactly what my piece of paper looks like.
This is it. I don't know if you can see the fine print, but I literally wrote down all the locations
that I wanted to visit and then I wrote down what I thought the associated costs for each trip would
be. So for example, I had Vegas in here. I calculated what the plane ticket would be,
how much food and fun would be, and then got an estimate of what those costs look like.
Then I narrowed down this massive list. I literally had 12 different places, but I narrowed down that
list to my top five. Now for you, that could be maybe your top two places you want to visit this
year, your top three places that you really want to visit this year, and focus on those five. If
you meet the entire list and you can make it to all locations in one year, fantastic. If you can
make the entire list and do all of the trips in one year, that's awesome. If not, know that you
focused all of your efforts and energy on those top three places and that's really going to
motivate you to continue saving for travel. Then what I did is after I put together all of the
estimated costs, I literally added up all of the vacations together, how much that estimated cost
would be. So I have one lump sum and then I divided it into 12 monthly payments over the course of a
year and then I transferred that into a separate travel fund so that I had the cash ready to go
and ready to purchase my next plane ticket. So the second way is to pay yourself a travel allowance
each month. Once you get paid, when you get a paycheck, you're going to allocate a travel
allowance each month inside of your budget so that you are consistently saving towards vacation. When
you do this in the beginning, when you transfer that money into a vacation account, you don't
accidentally spend it. Warren Buffett puts it nicely, don't save what is left after spending,
spend what is left after saving. All right, my third way that you can afford to travel this year
is utilize your friends. You guys, I know you have friends in low places.
That is my awful awful Garth Brooks impression, but I know you have friends all across the country
that you can stay with and cut down on hotel costs. Hotel costs aside from the plane ticket
is one of the most expensive categories when it comes to traveling. So in the past seven months,
I've traveled four different times in which those four times I was able to stay with friends or
family. Now, this included even a time where I went to New York City and I stayed with some of
our really good friends and we just split the cost of a hotel room. Literally, we were getting
the cost of the hotel at 50% off simply by sharing it with some friends. In those four trips, I was
able to go to New York City, Montana, San Francisco, and Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha. But I was able to stay
with a friend and it significantly cut down on hotel costs. I'd love to know what are some of
your best methods for budgeting for travel and paying off debt at the same time. I think traveling
can be affordable if we know what resources to use and really planning ahead to make sure that
we're making the most out of our year. Leave a comment below, let me know, and consider liking
and subscribing to the Debt Free Millennials channel and we'll catch you guys in another video.
Get that travel in yo, just that.
