Travel Support Thursday

Okay, so

Every time

Welcome back to the quit your job travel the world podcast

Thursday, so between the two of us we have quit our jobs to travel the world five total times

And it's the thing that we're like we don't pretty good at I don't know

I don't personally know anyone who's done it more than that. It's probably an unhealthy number. I would say at this point

and

The whole point of this podcast is to go through all the nitty-gritty every single thing from top to bottom

That you would need to do to be able to quit your job to go and travel the world

No matter if it's just like a month or two here

Just to go two weeks or maybe travel for a whole year around the entire world going to like five or seven continents

To be able to to free up the time and get enough money together to be able to make a big dream like that happen

That's all we're talking about on this podcast

So last week we talked about how much it cost us to take a one year around the world trip

We went to Europe to Southeast Asia parts of East Asia

Australia, so how much and if you haven't checked out that last podcast check it out

We spent TLDR

$40,000 between the two of us. Yeah, yeah, and updated to today

2025 like we just ran these numbers. It's about

$47,000 for two people to be able to travel the world to five different continents changing

Like cities every like five or six days for an entire year for 365 days

But today what we wanted to talk about is the real nitty-gritty like the actual work that we did to get to that

Number to save up for that entire trip

Which yeah, there are a lot of different ways as it turns out to make money

But there are a lot of even more ways to spend it. Yeah, which we had to shut that off was so hard

I don't even know where to begin

But this is one of my favorite topics to talk about because when we started selling things when we started to

Streamline our purchases when we started cancelling subscriptions. It felt so good like yes

We had a mission. We had a quest. We had one goal

But it also just felt like spring cleaning. Yeah, but with our whole lives everything in our whole lives

So I think I want to give you like a picture first of where we were when we made the decision, right? Yeah

Neither of us had any money saved up

We were spending effectively as much money as we had coming in we had stuff in retirement

Like from our jobs, but that was like something that we were like no can't touch. Yeah cannot be used for this

So we had no savings

We're starting at zero which is is a great position to be in a position that yes most people that we know are not in

That's true right now most people that we know are paying off student loans, which we've had friends who have come along on

Trips who have

You know big student loans and it does weigh on them, but it is still possible or they had like a mortgage or they had like

They had to take care of their parents or a car loan or all these other things

We were at zero absolute zero. That's true. No debt which you're at a place where we were able to we had already at that point

Paid off a lot of our student loans all of our student loans. We paid off our car. Yep

Yeah, yeah, and we both had jobs. We had one super cheap little blue car called Beeman

that was like $4,000 that got us to and from work and

Uh, we were living in the Bay Area. We just had a roommate. Yeah, we had a roommate

It was just enough for us to be able to like, you know live in San Francisco at this time when everything was very expensive

and

We decided at that point in time. We're gonna save up about

$35,000 $40,000 to be able to buy ourselves a year worth of Saturdays

And that was a really exciting and terrifying

commitment to make and

Most to all of our friends were both cheering us on and expected us to fail

and

Just no one really had a clear concept of what that would look like. Yeah, and I will say

We were already pretty thrifty to begin with that's always been true about us

I think it's one of our love languages for sure a good deal a good deal

But I think I don't think in the same way that we couldn't really comprehend it for the first time like

What does that mean? You know, what does it mean to save up $35,000 for this one year trip?

Yeah, so let's start off with like what we had to do what we had to get rid of

Well, the first thing we had to do was just stop the financial bleeding

We didn't even know where all of our money was going and maybe you're in the same boat right now

where like

Paycheck comes in and then somehow

It's all gone and you don't really know how you don't know. Yeah, it's true

you really just have to understand how much is going to and because

You know when why don't they teach this more in school or just anywhere?

But when you get your first real job, you really don't no one tells you how much goes to social security

How much goes to your health insurance? How much goes to taxes?

So when you hear that big salary number, you're like, yeah, I'm doing good. Yeah, I'm doing well and then

Suddenly half of it's gone poof gone. So yeah, that was the first step truly just knowing

Where your money was going and how much it was your actual take home pay. Yeah, so the thing that we did first and this was like

Medium awkward I would say at this point in time is we like

Is we set up at the time this was called mint.com and it's kind of like a dashboard for all your finances

This is gone now. It's been replaced by co-pilot is our current favorite. We still use a tool to do this

not like the microsoft

coding platform but like the co-pilot app

That tracks all your finances. There's going to be a link down in the description

um

and

We use that and then we together like we sat next to each other and we just added in all of our accounts

Every single thing we could think of even unearthing some accounts and some credit cards that we have forgotten about like the nana republic

Well that I opened somehow and express the fashion company. I don't know if they still exist

these like random

Things that we had and we just took all of our finances and put them under one big dashboard

So that way we could both see because we were both trying to like save up for this goal

And it was a way to keep each other honest about what we were spending

It was and then we both had logins to this one thing and we could both see

Oh, should jash be spending 200 dollars on a nintendo switch or whatever. I mean it wasn't like

We weren't we weren't like unkind to each other about it, but we just literally needed to know where the money

We just wanted to be aware. I think that was the first I mean I generally think that's the first step to anything is being aware

Yeah, and I think we need to be aware of where our money was going. I mean we all know

We have something that we signed up for some subscription some credit card that you signed up for that you're paying some annual fee to

You just don't even use it. You don't even know that you have it. Yeah, that was part of it like what what do we have?

And where is our money going?

Yeah, so we took like an hour to sign up for this thing and what it what it does is it literally live sinks

With all of your bank accounts all your credit cards all your investments, which at the time we didn't have that much and all these other things

Uh in your world your car mortgage or your mortgage or your like car insurance payment or anything else that you can find

It'll live sink and pull all these transactions into one

Big spreadsheet basically a pretty looking spreadsheet

That keeps updating every single day to tell you where all your money's going and we just paid attention to that

And every week on Sunday, we would sit down for an hour and we would just go over

What we spend on what we had spent out for the past week and we made a rule

I think we made a rule that said and we still do this to this day anytime we spend over x amount of money

We just we wanted to talk about it first. Yeah, exactly for us. It's like a hundred dollars

I think that's the current rule so anything over a hundred dollars. We discuss it with each other

and I think just having that rule in place prevented any of those financial related

Disagreements that can come very frequently when you are when you're like discussing anything monetary related with your partner

Yeah, and we I think the most important thing for us was that we were both

Fully on board with making this thing happen whatever the goal was we were both on board

It's like we're gonna do it as hard as we can

You know, we're both gonna both gonna make it and we both kind of have the same outlook

Of money is that like we don't really value the fancy stuff

We don't really have a what we do value is experiences and being able to buy time back and being with people

Versus like things buying things. Yes, so I think that was our first step is like seeing where our money went

so we wrote down everything not just our accounts, but like

Where was our money actually like going what things were we spending on on a daily basis?

so like one of the things that I had to unfortunately cut out but like

Share was that? Yeah, every time I went to Trader Joe's I was buying three or five cards

The greeting cards because they're great greeting cards. They're really cute. They're 99 cents. So in my head, that's like

Awesome. They're so affordable and I just had stacks of greeting cards the building up in my drawer

Yeah, but that was a thing I had to say listen. I know this is a thing that I do

Yeah, I got to cut it. Yeah, and we'd have these conversations and they would all lead to like whenever one of us would like

Be like, why are you buying that?

It would always come the conversations would always come to the same ahead of like when you're sitting on a beach in Thailand

Sipping like a you know, like a coconut whatever

Are you really going to be thinking about your postcards? Are you really going to be thinking about your air fryer?

Are you really going to be thinking, you know, and we kept

Every single time and the answer was basically always no. It was always no. We would never

think about

Any of that stuff we'd never worry about it

And with each hundred more dollars that we could save up that was another Saturday that we bought ourselves away and

Breaking it down into that little chunk

Oh, that made it just so satisfying every time we'd like kind of say no to somebody who invited us out to dinner

The money up. Yeah, people would invite us out for dinner and we'd say no and it would save us a hundred dollars

Because going out to eat is I'm sure all of you know is like holy and expensive

And that was another day in Thailand another day in Bali or a flight to japan or what were like

What were the biggest things that we cut out? I think in our lives

That helped us reach this goal subscriptions

I had subscriptions to so much stuff that I had forgotten about

Yeah, that I just totally cut out biggest example. This was I was overpaying for my cell phone bill

I downgraded to like the cheapest possible cell phone bill by like this

Weird company that I I'd still I don't even know if they exist anymore

But you also may not have had service for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, there was some that was purposeful

There was some no no it was not but I went from paying like 70 dollars a month for my like unlimited everything to 10 dollars a month

Which was totally plenty that was a huge win

We took on a roommate was for sure the biggest win where all of a sudden our rent went from like 3000 a month

Down to a thousand a month split across the smaller craze. It was amazing. Yeah, also the roommate that we got was the coolest

Um, that was a huge win for us once we've really like took a look

at how much we were spending on rent and

If we could save like 1500 or 2000 dollars per month, which was the case for us

That would mean just if that's the only thing we changed

We would be able to travel for six months. We would have saved up 24 000 dollars just doing that in a year. Yeah, and

That was such a that was a huge shift for us

I mean this and this is this was a little bit hard, but we also cut out a lot of the

The experiences and the lifestyle things that we were doing on the regular with friends in the Bay Area, which meant

Going out for drinks going out for happy hour going out for

You know meals instead. We just started inviting people over for dinner. We'd cook and make big fancy meals at home

We'd have more parties at home

We cooked way more

We basically only shopped at Costco in bulk and meal prepped

Yep, so we would eat

Eat like our own meals versus, you know going out to eat that was a big deal. I think we saved a lot of money there

Yeah, five dollar rotisserie chickens goes a long way

Because we were bleeding out like 500 a month on just eating out with friends easily

It was all these little things. It was like death by a thousand cuts

It was the best way I can describe it is that we just didn't know we genuinely did not know

How much we were spending on all these little things all the time

And so we really took inventory of it and really just decided what was important and what wasn't

So after taking a hard look at every single purchase that we were making and making adjustments there

Right getting rid of the subscriptions getting rid of the excess

The things that we just absolutely didn't need and making adjustments there

Then we also started thinking about okay. How do we make more money? Yes

So one of the things that I think during this time I actually

Transitioned to a new job which paid more which was awesome. It was also much closer to home

So I didn't have to pay for transportation back and forth like uber's lift and you know going into the city in and out

Um, I think you asked for a raise which I think you were able to secure

Yeah, so I I like built this case of like why should

Like basically why should the company that I was working for give me a raise and just

Asked my boss basically like what would I need to do to be able to make x amount of money

Which was more money than I was making at the time and we just came to a plan together of like

Here's the new responsibilities. You're gonna need to have and here's the

Higher output you're gonna need to have and the more things you're gonna need to know and the higher skill set

You're gonna need I'm like, okay

I spent a couple of months just doing all of that as hard as I possibly could and then about like

I think it was like six months after I came up with that plan

I had done all of and I just asked for the raise and that definitely got us there a lot quicker

Yeah, we started selling a lot of things. I mean, there are so many ways to make money out there

I'm sure you guys all know but I mean Facebook marketplace. I don't think it existed at that time

It was something else. It was like offer up offer up was the thing that we were using a lot of

And we were just selling all of the excess that we had things that we didn't need

And then we started selling stuff

We had and then we got the idea that we could buy stuff at a cheaper price

Slip it and then sell it and make more money because people were so bad at taking pictures

So what we do is we'd like buy an old kitchen aid because kitchen aids like for some reason keep their value indefinitely

Yeah, and we bought an old kitchen aid that had bad pictures and we would clean it right there

We wipe it down sell it for like $50 more than we bought it for two days later and

I would guess that somewhere between like

Three and $5,000 of our trip was just us buying and selling stuff. You know like a good

Man a good like one eighth of our total trip fund was just doing that

It's this combination right like the most important thing that you have to do is just understanding like

We just needed to know where all of our money was going

That was the first big problem

And then we needed to decide what was actually important to us and cut out ruthlessly

Everything else had we had a car payment basically no matter what at that point

We would have sold it even if we were underwater

Because that monthly payment and the fact that that asset is just losing value over time

Just holding on to that car makes no sense and we would have used that money

Let's say that we had I don't know like we had bought a Toyota Corolla and we were paying like $500 a month on it

Or whatever, which is a pretty normal car payment for a pretty normal car

Even if we were $5,000 under on it and we lost that I would have sold that that day

Bought us like a $4,000 beater of like a 10 year old Toyota Corolla that's still running just fine

And just use the rest of that money

Instead of slowly bleeding out over time that like $300, $500 plus the really expensive car insurance and

Oh, the fact that the assets devaluating over time

I drove me crazy. So I would have sold that car immediately bought a much cheaper car

And then just save the rest and put it into some sort of investment that was safe and would have grown over time

Instead of holding on to this like safe car. I hate the idea. I think the thing that we're trying to say is that

We had to decide what was worth it for us. Yes, and how fast we wanted what was valuable

What was not valuable and cut the things that weren't valuable. It's going to be different for so many people

Yes, right like our friends would not understand why we wouldn't come out to happy hour

Or they didn't probably I don't know

I'd like to think that we threw some fun parties and we had some really nice fancy meals at our home

And we just preferred that then going out and paying, you know $20 for a dish and then an extra $10 for tip afterwards

Yeah, you are trying to do something like exceptional in your life. So you have to be the exception

The goal in this entire process was to just truly see for us

What was more valuable and what was less valuable and for us

It was more valuable for us to get rid of the things that we weren't using

To try to make more money to try to save more money

All for the larger and most valuable thing at the time, which was to save enough to take this trip. Yep

It's going to look different for so many people cars

Some people like my mom

Likes shiny white cars for some reason and for some reason white cars are more expensive than they are the blue

And the red and the orange cars that we looked at. Yeah, they're like 20 more just for that color, right? And it's

Everybody values things differently at that point in time the thing that we valued the most was buying our time back

Yeah, and we were willing to do just about anything to make that happen as fast as we possibly could and that involved

Like we talked about before asking for a raise but also involved moving in with somebody else

but also we did it

As hard as we possibly could because we were in a hurry and maybe you're not you know

Maybe you're not in as much of a hurry and you're okay with like ramping it back five or ten percent

From what we were talking about from like the the thing that we're describing which was we were also just excited

Yeah, we were also really I think we love a good quest and a love a good goal and that was like a really fun

Like way to reach it just anything you could think of. How do we save more money?

Okay, so thinking back to it. I think

The three biggest unlocks that we had was one roommate that saved us like $2,000 a month right away number two

Cutting out basically everything that we didn't need

Yeah, well, it was number two. That was the biggest thing and then I think number three is

setting up an automatic

Savings for the amount of money that we wanted to save each month. So it never even hit our bank accounts

Yeah, we made this like little savings account. Just call it like round the world trip fund

The dream is what we called it. So all that we did is we like told our work

Hey, like I want you when you give me a paycheck to send

Let's say 40% of it here to this like round the world trip fund and the other 60% to go into my normal bank account

where I'm going to pay off stuff and

changing that to where that money

Didn't even really make it into our like mindset didn't even make it into our normal like checking accounts

It we automated it. So that way we never really had to think about we just decided as soon as our paycheck came

A chunk of money would go into our our long-term savings a chunk of money would go into our dream account

And then a chunk of money would go into our regular accounts where we were spending on our everyday life things

And I think the important thing was like knowing that we didn't have it like knowing that we didn't have access to it

And that a certain amount would just like transparent me

Move into there and no matter what was going on that month

We couldn't spend it and that was like that was that was such a huge unlock and I think

For us made it a lot easier because our mindset over time changed from like

We're the type of people that spend this amount per month to all of a sudden now

We're the type of people that spend 40% less than that

Yeah, because we just don't have that much money and it was it was more the automation that made it a lot easier

For me because then I never had to think about the like. Oh, here's the thing that I have to

Physically manually do now. Okay. Take this amount calculate it put it into this account

You know, it's just it was just automatic. So we didn't even have to think about it

And then when you pop in and check your accounts, it was so much fun to see that number just rise. Yes

Uh, so I think those were the biggest three things and then I think the fourth one like right underneath that was the little side hustles

That we came up with and it was actually really fun to get rid of stuff and really fun to start up this like little

eBay craigslist business

Of the side of the thing at one point. I grabbed this old road bike from home that I hadn't used

I mean at that point I had it used for 10 years

And I was like, oh, this is just sitting here. My parents my parents garage. I should grab it

And I remember just seeing just seeing what it would cost on eBay

I think I sold it for

$500. Yeah, which was a huge deal like to me

Anyway, it was fun. It was fun to like take old things that people weren't using anymore

Like going through my mom's garage is just a treasure trove

So many things that she stores and keeps that she doesn't use. So I was just like, can I sell it for you?

Yeah, so I think like the three steps to this are one

Figure out where all of your money's going and then cut out everything

That's still part of number one cut out everything that you don't need once you actually have good visibility into your money

And then number two is start figuring out ways for yourself to make more money

And you can use any of the examples that we just used which is like those little side hustles that we started up and

Asking for a raise or maybe moving to a different job

If you've been waiting to do that or the other like

Ten gajillion other ideas that I'm going to put down in the description below for little side hustles that you can start

basically tomorrow

Number three is making sure that the money that you're putting away to save for this round the world trip

You never see it. You never see it. It just transparently goes from

Your job into a bank account that you just totally forget about until it reaches that amount

And I think another thing that we will talk about in next week's episode, which I think was super valuable and helpful to our trip

was

Credit card turning. Oh, yeah, because that helped offset a ton a ton

Of cost for our trip and that was another whole savings game that we were playing on the side

Yes, we know that credit card turning and and saving up miles is not a thing in every single country

We've heard that and we we appreciate that but that I think is a very valuable tool

When you're planning a big trip like this

It saved us tens of thousands of dollars over the past couple years

And I think to not talk about it would be not giving you guys the full story of exactly how we made this thing happen

So that is it for today's episode

That's all the stuff that we can think of that we did to be able to like cut back and start adding more money

And we're going to go way way more in depth into each of these

Individual topics as we're going we're just kind of starting with this like broader overview

So if there's anything in this that you feel like you missed or that you want us to go in more depth on

Please write that down

In the comments below ask those questions and we'll answer them once from as soon as we can

And if you have other side hustle ideas feel free to leave them in the comments below because I love a good side hustle

Yeah, I'm currently getting into furniture flipping. Yes. Has uh, has anybody ever started up like a successful fiverr business

I'd love to hear about fiverr upward. I'd love to hear about those sort of things you can do from anywhere

Anyway, lots of fun ideas. Uh, we'll see you guys next week toodles. Bye