One Year of Luxury Travel, While Living In Poverty

Agree with my philosophy on travel, or not, it doesn’t matter, I think most people can appreciate openness. Plus, there’s a lot to learn when someone puts themselves out there, or at least I hope so.

My wife and I are trying something new. We’re splitting into two blogs. Hers will be thetravelventure.com and we’ll obviously still work together but have different styles and themes.

For one year, we are publishing all our expenses. Points and cash, travel and not travel. It will all be made public.

We actually started the project August 1st with a site to keep track of all our expenses. If you didn’t know, I and my wife Carrie travel full time. We don’t have a home to pay rent for. We don’t have a car or car payments. We live on the road, out of hotels and rely on public transport and our own feet.

All these expenses will be found on the “stats” tab on The Travel Venture.

For less than $20,000 (the income required to get food stamps), we’ll travel the world in luxury.

If you want to debate whether or not travel is free, do that on my last post: What Is Travel? And Is Travel Free?

But aside from that debate the simple thing is this- we are going to travel the world for less than we would spend not traveling, and we’re going to share all the expenses for anyone who might wonder how.

This is where the miles and points comes in. We can live in hotels cheaper than we can live in a stationary house and we’re going to share that process with you. Our rent in downtown Charlottesville [annualized] would be over $16,000 alone. Not including transport, food, etc… Now we’re without that home and without that expense.

Yet, we’ve spent most of our nights while traveling in 4 or 5 star hotels and I’m convinced others could do it too. Although the point is not full time travel, that’s our experiment, but the point is that anyone can get great deals on hotels. Anyone can use miles and points for a two week vacation.

Ya know what’s funny… Recently we were in Caroline’s hometown for a wedding and some doctor guy (I think) came up to us to talk about our travel. He said, “Man, I could never do what you guys do!”

I said, “Couldn’t travel for that long?” which is what I commonly hear.

He said, “No! I could do that, but I’d have to stay somewhere a lot nicer!”

And right now I’m sitting in a room that’s 512 to 640 Euros a night ($692 to $865). So I don’t know where this guy stays, but you can’t blame him. We don’t look… like Doctors (no offense Carrie). We look like mid-twenty-something backpackers. And admittedly, we have stayed in some holes.

Truth be told, we have stayed in some holes in the past (and we probably will again), but if you’re curious what kind of places we stay at, check the stats page. We’ll include the star rating of the hotel.

According to my google docs list, in the last year or so we’ve stayed at 70 some different hotels and the “average” is 4.42 stars. Take that for what it’s worth. But again, you can just look for yourself.

Start by going to the stats page, then it’s pretty easy to figure out from there.  Search “hotel” to filter the stats to hotels only or “Food & Bev” to see what we’re spending there, or search by location to filter the stats that way.

How this game has changed our travel

Seriously though, when we first started traveling, we slept in many $5 hotels, beaches, a banana boat (don’t ask), in many airports, trains and buses. We’ve hitche-hiked (still do sometimes) and walked insane amounts of miles to avoid paying money.

Actually we’ve slept in hotels cheaper than $5.

I remember in Bangkok, we saw that a single room was $3 at a decent place (relative of course) so we shared the single bed. The Thai owner of the hotel would tell his friends about the American couple that shared the single room with the single bed. And they couldn’t believe it. It was more comical than I can retell for whatever reason.

Anyways, that reminds me of what I was actually trying to say.

You know we’ve been to Bangkok like 7 times and have never been to the Royal Palace. Why? Because we’re cheap. Well, because we were poor.

But now, we’ve figured out how to lower our travel costs so much, that we have much more money to do things we want to do. In the last couple months we’ve gone on multiple motorcycle rides, we ate fondue in the alps, we went on a boat ride on a Greek island, and then we ate fresh octopus.

Our life has changed so much because of our hobby. And truthfully, it’s part of my work now, and thus I have to have internet and such. So this has changed us a bit too.

But we’re not just paying for travel and we’re not just paying living expenses. Like everyone we have other hobbies. Many extreme sports and nature related things (like hiking or snorkeling) are best done traveling. And we are totally willing to pay for our hobbies. And that’s all included in our $20k goal.

I want to share how we do what we do.

Even if you aren’t going to become a full-time traveler, our “case study” of sorts shows not they hypotheticals of this hobby, and not the trip reports highlighting one trip and one area, it shows every single spend in points and dollars and that’s got to be helpful to someone. It also shows how we earn points and at what price.

Now I realize that some months we’ll go way over, maybe a month with great sales or points earning opportunities. And some months we’ll be really far below. Asia is obviously cheaper, but hey, that’s fine. We’re traveling the globe visiting many places, many countries, many continents (not more than 6 though) and it will all work out.

Part accountability and part sharing

So perhaps this new project will be good for us. We do want to stick to a budget. But also, it might be good for you. You can see what deals we find worth it, how we use our points, what are we doing to get all these stays, etc…

I’ve thought about adding a few more features that maybe we’ll also get around to depending on the feedback (although perhaps we should launch one thing at a time). It seems like a cool idea to me to have a section where it posts in real time what deals we take advantage of. You know, instead of a month later. I also, thought it would be interesting to show stats from our site publicly. Like how much money we make from the site and all that jazz. Although, this might not go over well with a few related folks, our goal is transparency. But again, we’ll see if the Travel Venture gets a following of it’s own or not and take it from there.

You can do it

You don’t have to travel year round, that’s not what I mean. We’ll publish all the deals we jump on, all our redemptions, how much we spend on food, and annual fees (thus which cards we keep). All of it.

The difference between owning a home and not

And I actually believe you can do a two week vacation for absolutely free. Or at the very least everything but the food. I guarantee I could book you two weeks in Bali and the flights to and from with the amount of miles I earn in a year from the easy things. It’s true.

“Taxes! Fuel surcharges! Spa!”

Dude chill. If you do one two-weeker a year, you can surely cover the fuel surcharges on your Barclay World Arrival card or something. I don’t book flights with fuel surcharges (as you’ll see) and I’ve never been to a spa (unless it was complimentary (like the Renaissance Bangkok or Thai Airways premium cabin)).

But here’s the thing; if I did two weeks in Bali like that, I’d blow half of my points. I can’t afford to do that. It takes a different strategy. So I need more points and have to be a bit more intentional about my redemptions.

In case you didn’t know, we are all about stretching our points! We chase big deals, we book mistake fares and we really make use of stopovers.

That is the premise of The Travel Venture

The stats page not only posts where we stay and what we do, but how we do it. If we stay at an InterContinental on BRG, we’ll link to articles on the BRG. If we pay for a room, we’ll say how many points we earned and how.

Carrie will do monthly updates and such on The Travel Venture. Similarly I will do quarterly updates in a different style but still posting all our spends. Have debated doing the same thing except posting income from the site. Maybe a 2014 project…

Anyways, as always I’d love to hear your thoughts. And really, we are just grateful for the chance to give it a try. Hopefully we will prove this valuable to you and that it’s something that works.

Thanks so much to the readers of this blog for allowing us to do these crazy things and for still sticking around. You guys are awesome.