Credit Card Reward Programs

Believe it or not, credit cards are not entirely evil! If you have a credit card, it’s possible that you could have travel benefits you aren’t aware of. Travel rewards cards offer free flights or discounted car rentals and hotel stays based on rewards earned through using your credit card. Even if you don’t have a credit card with a travel rewards program, there is a good chance that your card may offer complimentary travel accident insurance, car rental insurance coverage and even emergency roadside assistance? These extra travel benefits are offered at no extra cost to you and can save you considerably over purchasing similar coverage on your own – and they offer protection if you run into problems that would normally cost you quite a bit of money to recover from.

Travel in the Off-Season

Many people choose to travel around a major holiday, to spend the holidays with family or friends they don’t get to see very often. Prices for all travel related expenses tend to increase around every holiday, which means you’re paying more than you need to to travel during these times. Instead of celebrating Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Day, consider celebrating a week early or a week late. You might be surprised to find the same plane ticket costs several hundred dollars less when it’s purchased for a week that doesn’t include the Thanksgiving Day travel crowd.

Save Money on Food while Traveling

If you’re traveling and don’t want to spend a lot of money on food, try to choose a hotel that offers free breakfast in the price of the room. You may be able to bring a piece of fruit with you when you finish (which is great for a snack or lunch time). Restaurants are cheaper if you go during breakfast or lunch – so why not eat a later lunch and either skip dinner or make sandwiches later in the evening?

Other ways to save money on food expenses while traveling is to order an appetizer as your main meal, or to share an entree with your travel partner.

Being flexible is the key to saving money when traveling. Even when you’re watching your spending, it can be possible to take inexpensive trips.

Frugality Can Be Lame

Most of my friends and acquaintances would accuse me of being unnecessarily frugal i.e. cheap.  I see things differently:  it’s not that I’m cheap, it’s just that I derive no pleasure from many of the material things in life, or at least a lot less than average.  That said, there are a few things I enjoy enough to splurge on.  Travel is among them.

Why travel?  I tend to value experiences over things.  Buying a new Porsche would probably be cool for a week or so, but I would eventually get bored of it.  After all, it’s only a car and there are only so many times you can drive 120 mph before having your license taken away.  Travel, on the other hand, is always an adventure.  I could go the same place a hundred times and never have the exact same experience.

But Can’t You Have Just As Much Fund On A Budget?

The frugalistas amongst you will likely argue, “but Kyle, you can have just as much fun without spending a ton of money.”  Perhaps you can, but I can’t.  Having to stop and worry whether or not I’m spending too much money is enough  to ruin a vacation for me.  I go on vacation to enjoy myself, and money, while perhaps not necessary in the strictest sense, certainly helps.  I could certainly take the bus to the other side of town if I wanted, and I did that on occasion, but taking a taxi is usually much faster and much less of a hassle.

Similarly, I could eat at Taco Bell every night and save some money, but isn’t at least half the fun of travel trying new foods?  Last I checked, Taco Bell has pretty much the same menu everywhere.  I didn’t fly 3000 miles to do something I could just as easily do at home.

What Do You Splurge On?

Practically everybody has something they refuse to compromise on, be it their morning coffee, automobile, home entertainment system, of craft beer.  What do you regularly splurge on even though you know it’s wasteful?

I’m far from the first one to think this way.  In the last few centuries leading up to the establishment of railroads, young European men of means were expected to undertake a Grand Tour of the continent, which was considered an educational rite-of-passage and gateway to adulthood.  The benefits of international educational and work experience were widely understood in early-modern Europe, but sadly overlooked in contemporary American culture.  Fewer than 20% of Americans even possess a passport.

The Benefits Of Working Abroad

The benefits of working abroad, especially when you’re young, are numerous.

• You learn to deal with people of vastly different backgrounds
• You learn to assimilate to foreign cultures, which can be especially helpful in many corporate environments
• You learn a new language (unless you’re working in an English-speaking country, of course)
• You learn a new way of doing everyday tasks:  ways that are potentially superior to how things are done at home
• It shows ambition, determination, courage, and a willingness to try new things/learn which are all very attractive traits to employers

While I haven’t had the opportunity to work abroad thus far, it’s near the top of my 10 year job, which is one of the reasons I’m so interested in building up passive streams of income since many (non-corporate) foreign jobs tend not to pay so well.  Want more info on possible job opportunities?  Check out this article at MainStreet.com entitled 12 jobs for young wanderers.

Pros Of The New Job

• Higher pay than my previous job
• More responsibility:  this one is closer to a senior than junior position
• Work directly with senior developers, which should increase my skills dramatically in a short period of time
• Small, laid-back company atmosphere
• I can wear flip flops
• Room for advancement
• Fills a few very important holes in my resume

Cons Of The New Job

• An extra 15 minutes in the car each way
• Far from my friends, so it will make meeting them for lunch/dinner/whatever more difficult
• Earlier hours:  I can’t go in at 10 am anymore
• More structure than what I’m used to, but that’s not necessarily a con per say

Overall, the pros far outweigh the cons, especially when you take the sizable raise into consideration.

The best part is, I don’t start for another 2-and-a-half weeks, so I’m going to have a fun vacation until then!  Any suggestions on where I should go?  I’m thinking

• Caribbean cruise
• Puerto Rico
• U.S. Virgin Islands
• Costa Rica
• Florida Keys
• Charleston
• New Orleans
• Vegas!

Someplace warm is required, so places like New York are out.  Suggestions welcome!

1. Check local publications for days when local museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Natural History, Museum of Modern Art, etc have free or reduced-rate fares. Posted “suggested donation” signs mean just that: it’s the suggested donation. You are free to donate as much or as little as you like, or nothing at all. That said, please try to donate at least something. These places aren’t cheap to keep open.

2. Consider purchasing a New York Pass if you plan on visiting more than two or three of the popular tourist attractions such as the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Guggenheim Museum, etc during your trip. One-day passes start as low as $69.00 and contain over $600 worth of entry coupons, though of course you’d be hard-pressed to use them all in just one day.  Luckily, 7-day passes go for just $135, a real bargain, and children’s passes are even cheaper.  The New York Pass can easily pay for itself after just four or five uses depending on what you’re most interested in doing.

3. Walk. Manhattan from Central Park all the way south to the financial district and battery is imminently walkable and covers less distance than you probably think. Save on subway trips ($2 one-way) by planning your day’s activities ahead of time and then do them in geographical order from north to south (or vice versa). Not only will you save money, you’ll get plenty of exercise to help burn off all those delicious street snacks you’ll be eating along the way. Besides, New York is a city that must be experienced on the ground to be truly appreciated. You’ll miss most of what the city has to offer if you’re busy hopping from site to site via taxi or subway the entire time. Take a stroll. Do some window shopping along the way. Take in the sights. Getting there is half the fun.

4. Since most of you will probably have to ride the subway anyway despite all the walking you’ll be doing, it might pay to purchase a multi-day pass. Passes come in 1, 7, 14, and 30 day periods and allow for unlimited subway and bus trips until expiration. If you ride a lot (maybe the weather isn’t conducive to walking), you could save a significant amount of money buying your trips in bulk.

5. People watch in Times Square or Rockefeller Center. Most of the people you’ll see in these areas are probably tourists from all over the world. New York is home to an astonishing variety of people from every nation or culture you could think of.  You could spend hours taking it all in. If you’re lucky, you might even see a naked cowboy.

6. Picnic in Central Park.  Pick up some cheap sandwich ingredients and head to Central Park where you can sit in the sun, people watch, and maybe even rent a row boat or two.

7. Go to the site of the former World Trade Center. While the lot itself is currently under development for the new Freedom Tower, the city has erected a moving tribute to those who died on 9/11 near the Port Authority Terminal. It’s free and is a must-see for every American.

Be Flexible

The number one secret to vacationing on the cheap is to not care where you end up.  Literally.  In today’s competitive environment, airlines are tripping all over themselves to offer often-astounding last-minute deals in a desperate bid to squeeze every last bit of revenue from each and every flight.  Paris is expensive this time of year, but how about the Caribbean?  Just a few days ago I snagged a $240 round-trip ticket from Atlanta to San Juan, Puerto Rico and back.  Even better, even rooms in luxury hotels right on the beach are currently going for $130-150 per night.  Slum it a bit and you can stay much cheaper.  Paying twice that would be considered a steal in Europe, especially with the value of the dollar being what it is.  Also, feel free to pack 6 people into a two-bed hotel room.  It’s not gay if you sleep head-to-foot.  George Bush said so.

You should start looking for deals about a month out.  Every airline website has a “specials” or “last-minute bargains” page where they tout empty seats on flights to and from almost every city imaginable.   Here’s the Airtran specials page, for instance.  Delta, Southwest, US Airways, and every other major airline have something similar.  Once you get there, click on your city and browse down the page looking for a city you might like to visit.  On Airtran, I can currently fly to almost anywhere worth going in the US from Atlanta for less than $100 one way.  European readers might want to try Ryanair, which is the cheapest airline I’ve ever found.  In fact, it’s not uncommon to find FREE flights on Ryanair.  Currently, you can fly from London to Oslo, Norway, Frankfurt, Germany, and Valladolid, Spaim completely free.  Can’t beat that.  Also, check out this list of the top 10 discount airlines worldwide.

Another way to get good airfare deals is to try some of the larger travel sites.  While Expedia and Orbitz can sometimes work well, I tend to have much better luck on Travelocity, Hotwire, and my favorite, Kayak. 

Book A Room

While you can sometimes save money buying packaged flight+hotel deals on the large travel sites, that’s usually not the case.  Since you’re going to off-season locations, you’ll probably do much better waiting to secure a room after landing.  You won’t have to worry about everything being booked up, either, because again, you’re only going to off-season locations.  Once you land, you can take one of two tacts:  either find a computer and log onto Ratestogo.com (which specializes in last-minute hotel accomodations) or just find the local tourism office and ask them for the cheapest accomodations available.  Since there won’t be many tourists around, there are likely to be a lot of empty rooms and hotels, especially smaller ones, are going to go to surprising lengths to get your business.  For them, renting a room at 1/3 normal price is still better than an empty room.  I have used both these methods to great success all over the world.

Act Quickly

When you happen to come across an exciting bargain (sometimes it can take some searching), you need to be able to make a decision quickly because some of these deals last a matter of days if not hours.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a steal disappear before my eyes because I took a day to make up my mind.  That’s why this sort of travelling is suitable only for the more adventurous amongst you.  Just think of all the crazy places you could end up you’d likely never travel to otherwise.  Would you ever think to travel to Port Of Spain, Trindad or Panama City, Panama?  You can get to both for less than $200 right now from almost anywhere in North America.