9 Ways Long Term Travel is Cheaper Than You Think

There’s a flaw in the way that non-long-term travelers calculate the potential cost of long-term travel.

Short-term travelers tend to make an inherent assumption that their two-week vacation is how much it costs to travel for 2 weeks, and then conclude that spending at that level for an entire 3 months/6 months/year/lifetime is obviously impossible, and therefore, long-term travel isn’t possible.

We should know: we used to be those people, back when we thought that our long-term travel dreams would have to wait until wrinkles, gray hair, and ready-to-retire amounts of savings showed up in our lives.

But here’s the thing about traveling full time: you can travel cheaper than you think–without sacrificing quality.

Far from costing as much as however many 2 week vacations strung together, long-term travel is often cheaper than staying home!

And even better?

The longer you do it, the cheaper travel gets–especially if you start working some travel jobs along the way.

I initially published this blog post about the costs (or lack thereof) of traveling long-term when Jeremy and I were closing in on one year of living nomadically.

After writing this post, we went on to spend a total of more than 4 years without a permanent home base, before temporarily settling down in a series of city apartments for 1 to 1.5 years in each Austin, Lisbon, and New York City.

Almost 8 years to the day after we left on our original round-the-world trip, we finally closed on a home that will last much longer than the others–and after all of this time and all of these living circumstances, I can say with absolute certainty that the original thesis of this blog post remains true.

Long term travel is not only possible, but you can travel much cheaper than you think–to the point that if we ever want to cut our expenses in the future, our first instinct will not be to move to a smaller home or change jobs, but to hit the road again.

Here’s why.

How Long-Term Travel Saves You Money

When traveling full-time, you have very few, if any, permanent bills.

On the road, our life/travel budget (because it’s all the same thing at that point) consisted of 4 basic categories: food, shelter, entertainment, and miscellaneous.

During our first year of travel as (theoretically) invincible 20-somethings, we maintained a travel insurance policy and had no other monthly bills.

Eventually, we added US health insurance back into our lives as an extra security blanket, though many American full-time travelers (even those who are retirement age) opt not to.

Here’s a short, incomplete list of all the things that you don’t pay directly for when living nomadically: rent/mortgage, property taxes, HOA fees, utilities, internet, business clothes, some toiletries (toilet paper/soap etc.), gym memberships, car insurance, gas, and car registration.

And, while I won’t go far into the weeds here as everyone’s circumstances are different, if you play your cards right, there can be significant tax benefits to living abroad, too (there can also be significant tax expenses, though–this is definitely an area where you’ll want professional advice).

The actual traveling is what makes travel expensive.

Planes, trains, buses–these are the things that cost the most money when traveling.

If you buy a $500 round-trip plane ticket for a 2-week vacation, that’s a large cost per day of traveling.

If you buy two $300 plane tickets four months apart, and you have significant flexibility in your schedule that allows you to seek out cheap flights?

Suddenly, the cost per day isn’t nearly as high, and your long term travel budget has more breathing room.

With long-term travel, you control how much it costs to live.

If you have a job and a mortgage in one location, your cost of living is inherently tied to that place.

When traveling, though, you have complete control over how much it costs to live: if France is getting pricey, go to Romania.

If you want to cut your budget dramatically, plan on a few months in Thailand or Guatemala.

Even more dramatically? Programs like Workaway can be a great option.

This gets even more interesting when you start making money to travel while you’re already traveling–sustaining yourself on the road indefinitely often isn’t as far away as you think!

You won’t go on excursions every day.

You know all those cliches about wanting to go to Paris and sit in a cafe all afternoon sipping coffee, or wandering the streets of Bangkok aimlessly until you find a favorite street food stall and return there every day, or spending a whole day just staring out at a beautiful sea while reading a book?

Here’s the thing: if you’re anything like our former, short-term traveling selves, or most other short-term travelers we’ve met, those things don’t end up happening on a one or 2-week trip.

(And having taken our fair share of 2-week trips after saying goodbye to digital nomad life, I can confirm that these problems immediately reappear–even for former long-term travelers).

It’s hard to justify flying across the world to essentially enjoy the art of nothingness when excursions and activities are calling from every direction.

You know when those things happen?

On long-term trips, when you get into the groove of slow travel and get tired of going somewhere specific every day.

You know what else those activities are?

A way to travel cheaper.

You find cheaper travel deals.

When booking a one-week trip, the idea of maybe losing 6-8 hours waiting on a slow bus that you can’t find the exact schedule for online would impact your trip dramatically–so you book a private airport transfer in advance and call it good.

It’s a completely justifiable decision… that is almost always exorbitantly expensive to the tune of a possible 500% upcharge, and I’m not remotely exaggerating.

By being on the ground, you’ll not only have a chance to find transportation, lodging, and excursions at deep discounts compared to what you can book in advance.

You’ll also be less stressed about losing a few hours here or there: on a long-term trip, waiting just becomes part of the experience.

And, while waiting in uncomfortable train stations, at bus stops, and even in glitzy cafes where you buy a coffee simply to have a place to sit down for a few hours can be dull, it can also open the path to some memorable travel moments you never would have imagined otherwise!

Souvenir shopping is very limited during long term travel.

On a short-term trip, it’s easy (and fun!) to pick up all kinds of odds and ends to take home.

And, now that we have a home again, I unabashedly love shopping while traveling: picking up a unique vintage piece, artwork, or secondhand book to decorate our home with is truly a joy.

But there’s a time and a place for everything in life, and when traveling long term, the prospect of carrying around wood carvings, musical instruments, glass figurines, and more for months on end makes it very easy to turn down even the most persistent craft sellers, helping keep your travels cheap.

I treasure each and every one of the relatively few souvenirs I collected during our full-time travel years–but keeping the purchases few and far between served to add emotional weight to each item I did choose to carry with me.

(And, to the surprise of no one, it’s worth pointing out that when we occasionally gave in to temptation and purchased a cheap keychain or item of clothing, it almost certainly got lost or destroyed quickly. The more durable art, though? We still have it all.)

You develop a system for traveling cheaper.

When you book a place to stay 3 times a month instead of 3 times a year, it’s easy to develop an efficient system of booking hotels and apartments.

After a few dozen tries, you know what you’re looking for in an accommodation, what you can tolerate not having, and where your priorities lie.

Not only does this end up leaving you more satisfied with where you stay (or rent a car from, or fly with), but it also means that you end up finding places much more efficiently.

For Jeremy and me, our lodging search almost always starts on Booking.com with occasional (rarer each year, to be honest, though we used to use it constantly) perusals of Airbnb.

You can even try out things like house-sitting to save money while traveling long term, which requires more flexibility than an average vacation can provide.

Delaying purchases becomes simple.

When reading about how to save money (on travel or otherwise), a common tip is to delay gratification on your purchases: when you want something, consider sleeping on it for a week, a month, or more before laying out the cash.

During long term travel, this becomes incredibly easy to do!

Good luck having anything impulsively shipped from Amazon to a random town in Spain, Cambodia, or Mexico (all places where we’ve considered having things shipped, but eventually changed our minds without spending a penny due to time and cost).

Your values change during long-term travel.

It sounds trite, but it’s true: your list of “needs” drops dramatically when traveling full-time.

All of the general expenses of maintaining your life at home–such as that long list of bills at the beginning of this post–melt away when living out of a backpack on the road.

You need a place to sleep, some tasty food, and some adventure.

When that’s all you’re looking for in a long-term adventure, it’s amazing how affordably you can find it.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many more remarkable memories and fantastic adventures we have under our belts now as compared to what we would have if we didn’t decide to try our hand at long-term travel almost a decade ago–but money is easier to track.

Full-time travel may be hard on a savings account, on an income, and on a planned pattern of life… but if you haven’t tried it before, I can virtually guarantee that long term travel is cheaper than you think.

Read More About Traveling the World

Thank you so much for being here!

If this is your first post on Our Escape Clause, we are Kate and Jeremy Storm, a travel couple with 50+ countries and more than a decade of travel experience under our belts–including full-time travel, traveling with a home base, living abroad, and even traveling with a dog and a baby/toddler.

You can read more about our story here, sign up for our newsletter here, or check out these blog posts we think you might like:

• How Choosing a Life of Travel Changed Everything
• 13 Minimalist Traveling Tips for Living Out of a Backpack
• 35 Best Cities to Visit in Europe (Bucket List for City Lovers!)
• How to Budget for a Trip: The Easiest Budgeting Method (+ Tips!)
• 50+ Important Travel Tips for Mexico