How to Save Money for Travel—and Fast

In the past, I’ve written about how I travel for cheap or for free, but I’ve never written about how I actually save money for travel.

Here’s a full (but not entirely shocking) disclosure; as a freelance journalist, I don’t exactly make a lot of money. And yet I always seem to have enough money to travel. So how do I do it?

I know a lot of digital nomads advocate for selling your stuff and giving up a home base in order to explore the globe. But I kind of like my bed and my dog and my apartment, so I’ve figured out that there’s another way.

While I'm far from a financial guru, here are my six foolproof steps for saving enough money to make travel—or any other financial goal, really—a reality:

Top 5 Tips for Visiting the Galapagos

When my cousin and I booked a holiday for our respective birthdays to the Galapagos last year, I knew that the trip would be somewhat outside of my comfort zone—but not for the obvious reasons. As the longest tour I’d ever taken, it would mean being on someone else’s schedule for 10 days straight, all while stuck on a boat with a dozen strangers. 

I can’t say it was my ideal mode of travel, but it was definitely the trip of a lifetime. However, there were a couple of things that I was totally unprepared for.

Here are five things Katherine and I wish we had known before leaving for the Galapagos:

My International Long-Distance Relationship

This Valentine’s Day, for the first time in years, I’m in a relationship. It should be cause for celebration, I suppose, but there’s just one problem—he lives in Sydney, Australia.

I didn’t mean for this to happen. I wasn’t looking for a relationship, much less an international long-distance relationship. (Or, as I like to think of it, a “longest distance” relationship.)

We met on a press trip in South Australia during the Best Jobs in the World competition. Although he initially dismissed me as “another loud Canadian” (fair enough), we quickly became friends, bonding over our mutual interest in travel and working abroad. Okay, and we may have also bonded over our mutual interest in whisky.

Read more on Verge Magazine »