People I meet often ask me how I can afford to travel so much, so I thought I’d write out what I do. It isn’t easy to save like I do, but it does get me to my goal fast. Personally, I’d rather make some sacrifices for a year (no going out, etc) and then have a full block of uninterrupted time to travel.

How I Think About Money

If time is money, then the reverse is true: Money is time. I generally think this way, but I rarely see evidence of other people doing so. For me, if I save $10,000 to $15,000, I think of that money as a year’s worth of vacation. That means I don’t have to work for a year and get to travel and have incredible experiences. Really think about this – no work for a year. It’s pretty amazing once you experience it. Our work-centric culture would have us believe that this is somehow wrong, immature or selfish. That’s fine by me.

My current goal, working here in Japan is $22,000 by the end of 2011. My average in the last few months is about $1,750 out of a monthly payday of $2,800 — a monthly savings of about 62% of my income.  Not bad considering it’s Japan.

10 things I do to save money:

1. Limit monthly expenses. Have a cell phone and a land line? Axe the land line. Downgrade to the lowest possible mobile plan and only use SMS. Any other service (cable, Netflix, etc) that you pay monthly for, ask yourself: How much do I really need this? Can I get this (internet, etc) somewhere else without paying? (ie. Library)

2. Stop going to bars. They don’t call it drinking away your money for nothing. Instead, try hosting a potluck at your apartment. You’ll probably end up with leftovers and if you’re lucky, a spare bottle of wine for the week.

3. Analyze your spending habits. If I find my money is going too quickly, I write down every penny I spent for a week. $5 a day for that Starbucks latte doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up to almost $2000 over the course of a year.

4. Pay yourself first. The day you get paid, separate your money into two piles: monthly budget, and savings for X trip. I put my trip savings in an account that I don’t touch, even if I spend my monthly budget money too fast.

5. Find a job situation that covers some of your necessary expenses. If you haven’t started working yet to save, look for jobs that include arrangements that cover some expenses, such as rent or food. I decided on my past job because, although the salary was relatively low ($27,000 a year), the job included room and board, allowing me to pocket 100% of my after-tax salary. (I used half the money to finish paying back student loans and the other half to travel)

6. Don’t buy anything new. Again, you should be asking yourself: how much do I really need this (shirt, guitar, etc). It amazes me when people ask me how I can save so much money, especially people who make double what I do, and spend their hard-earned money on Plasma TVs in every room and new silver plated rims on their Honda Civics. (Okay, I made the last one up – I don’t know anybody with a Civic).

7. Have a yard sale. If you’re planning a long trip, a few months before you leave, take everything you don’t need anymore that’s worth more than $30 and list it on Ebay. Take everything that didn’t sell and the cheaper items and have a yard sale – Craig’s list works wonders for getting rid of junk!

8. Take advantage of smart offers. i.e. Credit cards with cash back. I got a Citi Mastercard that gave me 2% cash back on every dollar I spent. I used it for everything and received a check for $600 after the second year. A quick google search for “best (insert your country here) credit cards with cashback” will tell you what’s best at the moment. Caveat: it just occurred to me that not everybody pays their balance in full every month – this one will only make you money if you clear your balance every month. Otherwise, skip it.

9. Get a roommate. Whatever you’re paying in rent right now, imagine paying half of that. Have lots of space? Imagine paying just a third of that. Short term sacrifice (lack of privacy, dirty dishes) for long-term gain (a year off work!). Plus, there’s a lot to be said for shared living.

10. Parent’s house for the transition. Once you’ve amassed most of your nest-egg, there’s no shame in heading to the parent’s house for that period of time between working and setting off. Okay, there’s a little shame, but suck it up. You’ll save money, get home-cooked meals, and the parents will love it.

Opinions Please!

(Click here for the original post with explanations of each goal)

Three months into 2011, here are some updates on my goals.

1) Accumulate $22,000 in savings. On payday this coming Friday (and after paying my bills and withdrawing food money for the month) I will be up to almost $8000 in savings. Getting there. Slow and steady. I’ve also picked up a few private lessons on the hush-hush, for about $40 an hour. This should help, but makes my week pretty busy.

2) Write and record a 5-song EP. Pretty much on track with this one. See #4.

3) Revive my blog, Project Hitchhiker. I had mentioned adding a post every Sunday, and so far I’m on track. To be honest though, I’m not really impressed with what I’ve been writing. The last post about stress, for instance, felt like a cop-out because I didn’t feel like writing. Working on a few bigger posts at the moment that should make up for it.

4) Write and record rough demos of at least 2 songs per month. In March I finished writing 2 songs, but haven’t recorded them yet. I’m waiting on buying some new music gear – a new travel guitar w/ pickup (the intonation on the Martin backpacker is driving me crazy — looking at a new Baby Taylor or similar), a new microphone (I’m currently using the built-in mic on my Zoom H4N), and a new Audio Interface for my laptop (as I write this, I’m thinking “Ouch, that’s really going to hurt my bankbook…”)

5) Exercise regularly. I’ve slacklined a few times, and my diet has gotten much healthier since I’ve last written (I’ve cut out added sugar and processed foods almost completely), but as far as exercise goes, I’ve been falling behind. My new apartment location, however, has forced me to bicycle to work and back every day (about 15-20mins each way) which is good.

6) Become a better teacher. A lot of my classes have just ended and I have some time to look at using new textbooks, which will be good for the new semester. I’ve been focusing on giving my students more fluency exercises rather than grammar.

7) Start a songwriting lodge in Hamamatsu. I arranged two songwriters meetings with two other guitar players here in Hamamatsu, but for various reasons they canceled. I’m finding it easy to sell the idea of a songwriter’s lodge, but in practice, people don’t want to spend a whole 12 hours on a songwriting session. I’ll go it alone if I have to…

8) Learn Live Looping with Ableton Live. Have to say I’ve only opened this program 3 times since I wrote about this goal. Fail.

9) Do a long walking trip during my summer vacation. No ideas yet. I’m thinking I might hitchhike instead and camp along the way. Would be good for my Japanese.

10) Write and publish an ebook or self-publish a book in print. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. I’m contemplating something along the lines of Tynan’s Life Nomadic book, about independent travel. Still in the brainstorming stage.

Overall, I give myself a 7 out of 10. Meaning, at this rate, I won’t achieve everything, but I’m pretty happy with my results.

New Goal:

Improve my Japanese. Since coming to Japan, I haven’t really spent a lot of time on Japanese study. It’s so easy as an English teacher to just live in an English Bubble that I neglected it.

After the recent earthquake and tsunami, it occurred me that my Japanese really sucked. I could only understand about 60% of the news on TV and 40% of the news on the radio. Not so useful for an emergency. After that experience I read a book on language learning (Language Learning Hacks – some good info, however overall not recommended) and decided to at the very least try for 2-kyu (level 2) on the Japanese Proficiency Test by next December. Right now my Kanji reading is about 3-ku, so I need to crank it up a bit. This means I’ll be using free time on the train, between classes, etc. to study Kanji and grammar.

At my friend Derek’s suggestion (thanks Derek!), I’ve been watching a lot of anime (Bakuman is pretty great and inspiring, despite being aimed at teens; Kino no Tabi was a great story – it helped that it was about motorcycles and travel) and Japanese soap operas (Orange Days isn’t too bad) to improve my listening. I’ll also be trying to speak to the office staff more in Japanese – they’ve been very helpful with correcting my Japanese in the last week. Pretty excited about this goal.

Thanks for reading and keeping me accountable! Cheers.

Some great things I’ve found recently:

-This inspirational post on Seth Godin’s blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/are-you-making-something.html

-New episode of Radiolab talks about extreme ways of quitting smoking and more: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/

This weekend has been a bit hectic, with all the earthquake and tsunami-related stuff going on not too far away. To be clear, I wasn’t directly affected here in Shizuoka (aside from feeling the earthquake), but it was enough to seriously change my weekend plans. On that note, my thoughts are with all the people affected by the tsunamis.

I decided to take a break from writing this week and introduce a monthly series, Unconventional Interviews: conversations with people who are living interesting, outside-the-box lives.

This month’s interview is with Tanissa. In the last ten years, she’s taught English in Korea and China, worked as a divemaster in Thailand, for an NGO in Azerbaijan, as a bike guide in eastern Canada, and even as a volunteer coordinator for the Olympics in Vancouver. She’s traveled all over the world, and she’s just an all-round awesome person. Here’s her interview:

Where are you and what are you doing now?

I am currently in Cape Town, South Africa, doing a three month term placement for my Masters degree.

Of all the places you’ve been, which is your favorite?

It’s hard to pinpoint just one, as every place is steeped with it’s own memories, relationships and experiences specific to the time and reason I was there, so every place has left a lasting impression on me.  I would have to say that I have really fallen in love with the East Coast of Canada and that the Caribbean will always hold a piece of my heart, likely because Jamaica was the first place I ever lived/worked in for an extended period of time.

Was there a place that was your least favorite, most disappointing, or most challenging?

Undoubtedly, my time in Azerbaijan was one of the most challenging and frustrating years of my life. The combination of crusty, old-school (Soviet) mentalities, heated tempers and difficult development work was much to endure, which I credit to the support and companionship of my colleagues and good friends there. Visits from family and friends, as well as holidays outside the country, also made a big difference. Despite the challenges and the grief it caused, I still value this time in such a unique part of the world and often find myself longing for a bowl of delicious lentil soup and the random, absurd encounters only found in this part of the world!

What are the rewards of your nomadic lifestyle?

Being stretched outside my comfort zone and growing in new ways. Continously learning more about myself and others. Meeting wonderful and interesting people I might not otherwise associate with, and experiencing the kindness of strangers.  A life where nothing is ordinary and every day is an unexpected adventure.

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How much does it cost to travel? I get asked this question a lot.

The answer: Half a million dollars. Read on.

Last time I was in Halifax, while scanning the Globe and Mail’s lifestyle section, a headline caught my eye:  Couple cost out a life of travel.

The article profiled a 40-ish couple who were looking to retire early (at 60 rather than 65) and then spend each year living in a new country: France, Morroco, Egypt — yeah, this was a little while ago…

The article examined the couple’s finances and incomes and calculated how much money the couple would need to save before saying goodbye to their jobs to live their dream life. The number the financial analyst came up with? $50,000 for each year they were on the road. Ten years of travel would mean $500,000. Count those zeroes, that is not a typo. The happy couple estimated they would reach their goal in a mere 15-20 years. Just in time for their first hip-replacement surgery.

So, if I want to see the world, all I need is to wait twenty years until I’ve saved up half a million dollars. Awesome. Inspirational.

The article demonstrates two assumptions that I disdain about mainstream financial culture: the deferred lifestyle plan and the idea that travel needs to be expensive.

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2010. The year of half-baked plans, false-start projects, and half-finished songs. It was not a good year for me and productivity. We had arguments. We threatened each other (“But you need me! You’ll see!”). And for a long time we didn’t speak.

My passion and hobby of writing songs (something I started in 2009) fell by the wayside to watching downloaded episodes of Top Gear and late nights immersed in Japanese animation series.  My promises on the blog homepage to restart writing were continually extended – “I’ll write again when I start traveling” became “I’ll start writing when I’m working again”. Any regular readers I may have had are long gone, I’m sure.

But I let it happen. And sometimes it takes reaching a certain level of dissatisfaction to be able to make a drastic change in your life. In the past, writing on this blog has helped keep me motivated and accountable for my goals, something I sincerely miss. So, I hereby reclaim Project Hitchhiker, and commit to writing one post per week for the next year. To be clear, this is a promise to myself, and to any readers willing to trust me again: I will post every Sunday, for the next year.

What did I actually do last year? 2010 in Review

Despite hardly accomplishing anything of note, I did have a great year. I had fun and traveled a lot – and there were certainly periodic intervals of awesomeness.

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What would you do with your time if you didn’t need to work? This is really an interesting question. Because that’s the situation I’m in at the moment.
 

It’s no secret that I have a lot of free time. Last year I saved enough money to take an extended vacation (a Mini-retirement) of at least six months. Six months, if I were extremely reckless with my money, that is. So here I am with a huge amount of time on my hands.
 

One thing that I’ve learned from traveling in the past is that having too much time and nothing to do can actually be bad for you. A quick glance at the long-term traveler scene and you’ll see the same people at the same bars 6 of 7 nights a week. In some backpacker areas, it’s not uncommon to see people drinking beer on the street or in front of their bungalow at 8am, 10am, 3pm. Which is fine if all you’ve got is a week or two. But a good number of the people I’ve met have been traveling and partying hard for a full six months to a year. One guy I met in Vang Vieng, Laos was 320 consecutive days into a river tubing bender, going for a full 365 days (I’m not sure that Guiness will share his enthusiasm about his “record”). They party for two reasons: because it’s fun; and because they’ve got nothing better to do.
 

Sure, not all backpackers party. Some fend off their boredom by traveling frantically from place to place, visiting all the museums and seeing all the sights. Because when you finally get away from that busy job for a few months, you’re left with an abundance of time that you haven’t had since summer holidays in grade school.  I’m not claiming any moral high ground here. I’m not against partying or museum tours (although I don’t think I’ve ever voluntarily gone to a museum), I just think that there’s another way to spend that gap year than getting trashed every other night interspersed with frantic sightseeing.
 

The other option: The Learning Sabbatical.
 

What would you want to learn if you could learn anything — if you had a few months off work and had nothing but time and ambition? Vietnamese cooking? Spanish? Classical piano?
 

Wouldn’t it be more effective to study Vietnamese cuisine one-on-one with a private teacher in Hoi An? Or learning Spanish while staying with a local family in Guatemala? Or classical Piano from a Chinese master in Bejing? It would not only be more effective, it would also be cheaper.
 

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UPDATE: I have discontinued wearing these shoes until I figure out a way to make them NOT smell.
 

“I’m not being seen in public with you if you’re wearing those – things.”
– A friend’s girlfriend to her boyfriend about his Vibram Five Finger Shoes.
 

So why would you wear them? My five favorite reasons:
 

1) They will make you run faster than Kenyans. Or at least, faster than you already run.
 
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