If you read about travelling on the internet, and specifically about how to do more of it, time and time again you’ll run into people urging you to “just” give up your job and travel the world for a year. Can’t afford it? You can earn enough to fund a year of leisure by simply working in bars or blogging.
You can’t.
There are a few travel bloggers who’ve hit the jackpot but they’re few and far between and bar work doesn’t pay that well. Trips like these are funded by either colossal savings beforehand or by parents or by sponsors. Very few people can take off for a year around the world without already having some source of funding behind them.
Fortunately, you don’t have to give up your job! I mean, if you do want to throw everything aside for a year or two or even longer, go for it, but you need to be realistic about the money and I’m not the one to do it. My form of realistic is smallish trips as often as I can while stretching my small salary and small holiday allowance to breaking point.
I get a 23 day holiday allowance and if I use my weekends judiciously, I can get a lot out of that. I used to have a really good spreadsheet but it’s on a dead/dying hard drive so I can’t consult it but I think in 2012 or 2013, I got a particularly huge amount of time out of it.
I can leave straight after work on a Thursday or Friday, get a late night or overnight flight and be ready to start the next morning, rather than wasting a whole day getting up and getting to the airport. Icelandair do a lovely 9pm flight from Heathrow.
I work Monday to Thursday at the moment and I can juggle that. My manager is fine with me working four Fridays to take a week off, or working one to make a long weekend the next week – we’re pretty flexible but they do like us make up the time before we take it. Not all employers are this generous but they could be and sometimes it doesn’t hurt to suggest it as a one-off.
At the moment, I’m mostly slobbing and writing at weekends but I could do local day trips at weekends – there are plenty of interesting places within easy day reach and it’s easy-peasy to get out a bit further for a couple of days.
As for costs… I’m in the UK so I exclusively travel in Europe. Long-haul is prohibitively expensive and it’s time-expensive too. I use comparison websites to find suitable accommodation (I am too old and too unsociable and too intolerant to share bunkbeds in hostel dorms). I buy my food from supermarkets and I understand that sometimes throwing money at a problem can make it go away (eg the taxi on my very first trip).
And once I’ve saved as many pennies as I can on a plane and a bed, I can use whatever’s left over to do fun things and that’s what it’s all about.
By travel blogger standards, I hardly travel at all. By the standards of my colleagues I’m away all the time and I go to really weird places. It’s a matter of perspective.
Also, you can make a trip feel like it’s lasted much longer by posting a picture or two on Instagram every day until you run out of pictures…