Category Archives: Travel Planning

How We Saved 75% of Our Income to Travel

by | Published:
65
Photo by Rachdian
Photo by Rachdian

We saved £30,000 for our first RTW trip and it was hard. Like titanium alloy hard. Titanium alloy edged with diamonds hard. We swore that we’d never be that frugal again – what possible reason could anyone have for putting themselves through such an ordeal TWICE?

Six months after the end of our last amazing trip we were at it again.

There’s a travel bug going around and we got a bad case of it. We wanted more – we wanted to do it forever and we wanted to start immediately. So we reduced our living expenses right down and managed to live off just 25% of our combined salaries, sending the other seventy-five percent straight to our savings accounts.

This time, we managed to save over £23,000 in just 9 months and it really wasn’t that bad. Having had a taste of what’s out there, owning an iPod Touch suddenly doesn’t seem as important as getting to the party capital of Brazil.

We aren’t rich by any stretch. We both earned below average salaries for the UK, but we chose to prioritise travel over buying ‘stuff’ and spending money on big nights out. Many people say they want to travel but they can’t afford it. We think everyone can if they want it enough. It may take some people longer than others, and you’ll have to make sacrifices, but the trick is simple – start saving now!

Continue reading →

What Do You Pack When You Are Leaving Forever? Our Packing List

by | Published:
86
Simon with his fully packed 40 litre backpack
Simon with his fully packed 40 litre backpack

So what do you pack when you are leaving with no plans to return?

Well, as little as possible. Although we have no idea how long we’ll be on the road, we shouldn’t need to pack more than we would for a one month trip. Travelling light makes things a lot easier – you can walk around trying to find a place to stay, you can squeeze on a crowded bus and you can run to catch a train. For this trip we are aiming to travel with small enough backpacks that we can fit them on planes as hand luggage to save time at airports, and hopefully be able to take them inside South American buses rather than put them on the roof.

We admire ultralight packers like Tim Ferris and Karol Gajda from Ridiculously Extraordinary, but unfortunately we haven’t managed to do quite as well ourselves. Still, we haven’t done too badly as our backpacks are half the size of most travellers’.

Check out our very first video to see us packing our stuff!

Continue reading →

Our Travel Priorities

by | Published:
2
Simon jamming in the Laos jungle
Simon jamming in the Laos jungle

The world is full of places that you absolutely must see or things that you should definitely go and do. They are hyped up like a Hollywood Blockbuster but the reality is that they are never going to be able to live up to the carefully crafted photographs and tourist brochure sales pitch. When you do go, they are often filled with bus loads of other tourists together with touts, tacky souvenir sellers and tawdry, over-priced bars and restaurants.

Often, between the little plastic models and camera flashes, you get a glimpse of why these places are popular – they are stunning examples of natural beauty or testaments to the abilities of humanity. Walking around to the far side of Uluru, away from the crowds and surrounded by flat desert for miles around, we began to get a sense of the natural majesty of this huge rock. Unfortunately, unless it is a large rock surrounded by flat plains, it’s often difficult to get this sense of place.

We found that the magical experiences that made our last trip came when we least expected them, in places not renowned for their stunning natural beauty or impressive neo-classical architecture. Being given sweets and nuts by a lavish wedding party as we wandered through a random Indian town; serenaded by our homestay host on a starlit canoe ride home after a night at a local bar; or weaving our own textiles in Laos, our favourite memories are of places that you’ve never heard of before doing things that we’ve never done before.

For our new nomadic lifestyle we’ll be seeking amazing experiences rather than just sight-seeing. Yes, we want to visit Machu Picchu and Iguazu Falls, but we know there is more to South America than the famous attractions, and if we miss them then that’s OK.

We haven’t planned our Latin America trip – not knowing where we will end up is part of the fun – but we do have a list of things that we would like to try and experience:

Continue reading →

How To Sell All Of Your Stuff – Part 3

by | Published:
6
Photo by flat-black 66
Photo by flat-black 66

In Part 1 of How To Sell All Of Your Stuff we gave our top tips for getting started, and in Part 2 we shared two of our favourite methods for selling – setting up a blog and ebay. In this third and final post here are some more ways we used to sell our possessions, and how much we earned from each of them.

Amazon Marketplace

Ebay isn’t a great place to sell books and I had much more luck on Amazon Marketplace.  It is also much quicker to list items on Amazon than on Ebay as you don’t need to upload photos or descriptions.

Continue reading →

How To Sell All Of Your Stuff – Part 2

by | Published:
0
Photo by Ben Fredericson
Photo by Ben Fredericson

In Part 1 of How To Sell All Of Your Stuff we gave our top tips for getting started. Now in Part 2 we share our favourite selling methods.

METHODS FOR SELLING YOUR STUFF

Set Up A Stuff Blog

This is my biggest tip for selling your stuff – utilise your networks. After selling things for months on ebay, I advertised some of the bulky items to my friends. I decided the easiest way was to set up a blog. We used a subdomain of Simon’s website but it is very easy to set up a free blog on Blogger or WordPress . It doesn’t need to look fancy, just list each item you want to sell with a detailed description, photo and price (include the original price too to show them how much they are saving). I then emailed the link to the website along with a list of the things for sale to my friends and colleagues, and encouraged them to forward it on to their networks. We also posted it on facebook.

It worked amazingly well! Continue reading →