Travel to Save Money

Monday, January 7, 2008
Bangor

With the new year and the horrible economy in both the U.S. and in Britain, the newspapers have been talking a lot about reining in personal spending. For instance, in the Times last weekend I read a feature written by three brothers who simply agreed not to spend any money for a week. They were allowed to stock their refrigerators before they started and to take public transportation to work. Of course they saved hundreds of pounds by bringing their own lunches and not buying coffees or putting gas in their cars and all kinds of things they normally do without thinking about it.

It got me thinking about our own finances. Many people assume that to live abroad requires great personal wealth – but we’re an example that this ain’t necessarily so. By living in other people’s houses (sometimes wonderful, sometimes difficult), not owning a car, using the library for our reading material, and limiting our spending to our food and personal toiletries, the occasional item of used clothing, and public transportation, we are able to live fairly cheaply – it would be even cheaper if the dollar wasn’t doing so badly. The key is knowing that whatever we buy we’ll most likely have to carry on our backs when we move on! That is a major strategy in the battle not to accumulate junk.

And, by spending a year in other people’s houses we’ve taken a year off from spending money for improvements for our own home and car– except for major repairs, like sewer pipes, which require attention no matter what side of the world we’re on. No paint, no tile, no power tools, no gas, no furniture, no books to put on the shelves, no newspaper subscriptions… you can read all kinds of books about simplifying your life but there’s nothing that will accomplish this faster than traveling the world with a backpack.

You’d think I’d miss having all my cookbooks and my normally huge stack of reading material in the bedroom. But know what? I’ve been able to find every recipe I’ve needed online. And having a single book on my nightstand is relaxing in a way that an entire shelf of unread material, waiting and waiting for me to get to, is not. By the way, right now I’m reading The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt, about Venice. He wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestseller about Savannah, and this one is great too.