We often get the question: are you millionaires since you travel so much? But you do not have to be rich to travel, just be good at finding cheap holiday deals. It is a matter of time, patience and not having too expensive habits.

The answer is: we live so much cheaper than most of the people asking that question. When we travel, we do not spend as much money as many others do, we do it budget style. We rather do a lot of budget travel than only a few luxury trips.

We can afford our travel because we live cheap at home:

• No luxury meals or going out
• We cook our meals ourselves from the ground
• Grocery shop at cheap stores (thousands to save!)
• Compact living in 50 m² low rent apartment
• We have no loans what so ever
• No bills except electricity & mobile broadband
• We only have cell phones & use them very sparingly
• We sold lots of our things earlier – empty basement
• Driving as seldom as possible to save on petrol cost
• No smoking & only occasional drinking
• Thinking twice before buying ANYTHING

There are many ways of savings, both when you are at home and away. If you start to think about how to save, you probably will come up with a lot of things you could change. Why not try it just for fun…?

If you halve your use of some things, you also halve your costs for it – simple math right?

It could be anything. Make it a sport to be as sparingly as you can and live so frugal that is acceptable for you. Sacrifying is worth it, if you want to reach the goal.

When it comes to finding cheap prices, there are a lot of sites that offer great deals that we will come back to in another post. It varies which ones we use, we simply go with the ones that suits us best at the time being.

It can take us a very long time to plan a trip, many, many hours searching for the cheapest flights, hotels or hostels and so on. Very often we can not go to the place we would want to go to because it is too expensive, so we have to choose the ones we can find cheap rates at right now.

In Europe we often fly with Ryanair, since we are based in Stockholm and can fly with Ryanair from Skavsta. Several of our flights has cost us zero (!) for the tickets, just the tax cost. Search for a date to a destination and then change the date back or forward to get different prices on the flights.

We have stayed at hostels too, since they are cheap and often as good as many hotels. The past years the standard at the hostels has increased tremendously. Besides that: it is only for sleeping, so who needs luxury when sleeping? We are out all day exploring.

We are members in a Swedish hostel chain and it even got us 10% discount at some international hostels, like the hostel in Bratislava when we were there.

Bed & Breakfasts, guesthouses and motels are often cheap. There is homeswapping, petsitting and other free ways to accommodations like couchsurfing.org if you like to meet locals and get local tips of the destination. Be creative!

The first questions to ask yourself is what travel balance you are willing to be satisfied with? You must set your goals at a realistic level. Do not aim for luxury trips if not being rich, lower your demands to match your wallet.

I also think that it is a question of how interested you are to travel: we are burning passionately for it, so for us, the choices are simple. We have no problem to live simple lives to be able to travel and we make it happen just because of it.

I believe that if I want something, it is only I myself that can make it happen. I have to work on it to make it happen, no one is going to serve me a trip on a silver plate. If I am interested enough, I can make it, sooner or later.

Behind every trip, lays hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes years of planning efforts. Sometimes I have to have very much patience though – like that Australia trip I have always wanted and probably not will get until I am retired…

If everything else fails, there is always last minute trip offers, we have booked that a couple of times too. We seldom book trips when it is high season, more off season since it is much cheaper then.

Another thing you should consider is to get cheap phone cards in the different destinations you get to. To call by phone cards is generally a much better solution than using your own phone or cell phone, since the phone calls rates abroad can be very expensive.

When we were going on that 4620 km roadtrip to Spain, it was because my friend moved back there again and we could stay with her in her rented house for about a month, so we have been lucky sometimes. (She always used a phone card when calling from there).

We have also been to US one time, kinda paid work trip for hubby combined with visiting relatives, but that turned out being not what we expected. We learned our lesson: always plan ourselves! Such is life, you will never know what you are going to experience, but everything you learn from.

The only trips that has been expensive was our honeymoon to Crete 2004 and the trip to South America 2005, special trips made for money we got from selling our apartments when we split up from earlier relationships. We rent our current apartment.

You might have a much more difficult situation, but we do have a lot of ailments and sickness to drag around and that is also why we can not travel as much as we would like to. We have a lot of recovery to do all the time, every day is a struggle, but we are determent to do the best we can of it.

If you really, really, want to travel, it can be done in some way, even if not in so big way as you would wish. Maybe just a road trip? Make it step by step!

There is no easy one way of finding the deals you are searching for, you have to make an effort yourself. Searching and comparing is the key to success.

Start planning, it is half of the fun – to dream away when searching and planning. One day you might be able to go ahead with the plans…

We love to travel, despite some travel curses we have had earlier – and always remember: you are never too old to travel!

Lifecruiser ♥ Travel