When it comes to making travel affordable, making a budget and sticking to it (relatively, anyways) is going to be your best offense for making all your travel dreams a reality. You may not be able to stay in a posh hotel on Hyde Park with a down duvet, but that really shouldn’t matter if your main objective is to see the most of the cities you’re travelling in. Save the posh rooms for the business trips where they’ll be all you see of your destination.

Figuring Out Your Limit
The limit is how much you can reasonably save in the amount of time between when you decide you want to go on vacation and when you actually leave. The formula for this is pretty simple, add your necessary expenses (rent, utilities, cable/internet, transportation, groceries, student loan repayments) and your not really necessary but let’s be real here expenses (your daily coffee, biweekly Seamless orders, and weekly happy hour expenses) and subtract them from your take home pay (Paycheck-(necessary expenses+inevitable expenses)). The number you’re left with is your monthly saving limit. If you multiply this number by the number of months between now and your anticipated departure date, you will have your budgeting limit. Use this as your starting point, the “I can spend absolutely no more than this” amount.

Dividing Up Your Budget
This is often the hardest part of budgeting. At this point in the process, I tend to look up the exchange rate for the local currency and the standard of living. This helps me develop a realistic budget for my incidentals (for example on my last trip knowing that my Euro was going to stretch further in Brussels than it was in Paris), which are almost always the most flexible part of a travel budget. I usually allot about 30% of my budget to overseas flights, 15% to lodging (I stay in hostels or use my credit card points to keep this cost down), 15% to transportation between cities and the other 40% to incidentals (meals, entertainment, souvenirs, and most importantly, coffee). Obviously you can adjust this based on your wants and needs, but I find that this gives me a good balance and leads to more spending on experiences during the trip rather than little used luxuries around the trip.

How to Save on Expenses
Besides the flexibility in your incidentals, also try to find deals on your two biggest ticket items: Transportation and Lodging. If you can save more by flying into or via another country/region and travelling to your desired destination, most of the time it’s worth the extra time associated with it. I use the following formula for my determination: (Where savings equal original cost minus budget cost) Savings>(additional travel time x hourly wage) + added expense. I measure the worth of my time by my current hourly wage simply because it is the most consistent way to measure it. So for my Paris trip, I flew JFK to Brussels. The added train time to JFK and to Paris was only 5 hours and my hourly wage now is approximately $21/hr. So my savings flying via JFK and Brussels had to be more than $105 plus extra expenses (train tickets and transfer costs from the train to the airport). Lodging is also an easy way to save if you don’t need many amenities. Stay in hostels and in dorm rooms. Yes, you have to share with other people, but it’s a great way to meet fellow travellers and how much time are you actually going to spend in your room? If the answer is the hour before I go to bed and the hour when I wake up, is it really necessary to have your own space?

I hope you find this helpful in achieving your travel dreams! For the record, I’m usually able to save ~$400-500 a month for 3-4 months before setting out on my journey, but I factor in the paycheck I get while I’m abroad into my savings. If it’s going to other things (bills, ugh), I have to save more in advance. While it may seem like a lot at first, putting that money away is going to make you so much happier in the long run. Trust me, the experiences you have travelling will far outweigh any instant gratification of an extra meal out or a designer handbag.

Happy Travelling!