Travel Tip: Millennial Traveling
As a 25 year old, I often get asked by a lot of people my age, “how do you afford to go on all these big trips?”
A lot of millennials believe that traveling is an expense that is out of reach for them. I’m here to dispel that myth.
1. Check out skyscanner.com On Sky Scanner, you can select where you’re traveling from (in my case Boston, MA) and choose to look up the cheapest tickets all year round to every destination in the world.
2. Set a budget Once you decide where you wanna go, it’s time to start deciding how much money you’re going to need. Let’s say you want to go to Madrid. Using Sky Scanner, you can look up the cheapest time to fly to Madrid and give yourself enough time to save up for it. Luckily it looks like November, which is 8 months away, has some pretty good prices.
After a brief search, I find that I can fly from Boston to Madrid in November for $321.
Now that you have a date tentatively set for your trip, you can look for hotels. There are countless numbers of hotel websites from Priceline to Expedia, but my favorite one is Booking.com (click on the link to get $20 off your first stay).
After putting in the check-in and check out dates, one quickly finds one of booking.com’s daily value deals:
One of my favorite things about booking.com is that you usually don’t have to pay for the room until you actually check in.
3. Open a separate savings account It is important to open a savings account for money that you will ONLY touch to pay for airfare and travel expenses. There are plenty of online banks that charge you no monthly fee for having them, have no minimum to open AND have pretty good interest rates. I personally use Ally Bank but feel free to look up others.
4. Set up your budget So your trip is in November, which at the time of writing this is almost exactly eight months away. Taking into account about $100 a day in expenses while in Madrid, you’re going to need $1400 for this trip. I know this sounds like a daunting number but let’s break it down:
$320 is needed for airfare, so by setting aside $50 a week, you will have enough to cover the plane tickets in just under two months.
Once the ticket is booked, you can now reserve the hotel in Madrid for $450 since you don’t have to pay for it until checking in.
Now you start saving for the hotel and your daily expenses. Continuing to set aside $50 per week, you will reach your goal of $1050 with three weeks to spare before your flight.
4. Other things to take into account If you don’t live in a state that mandates paid time off like Massachusetts does, you may want to save up a little extra to make up for any lost income while you are on vacation.
5. Have fun There’s a lot to explore. It’s never too late to start