The Bum Traveler’s Blog

What to bring is a rather big question and relates a lot to where you are going. I’m not going to point out the obvious to you, you found my blog so you have some smarts about you for what to bring and not bring, but what’s not obvious?

One thing is that if you are going somewhere like SE Asia, India or a “developing” state, then you really don’t need to bring much at all. I pretty much brought a backpack last time and few other things the reason behind not bringing much is A) you will bring home all kinds of extra souvenirs and trinkets B) you can buy most everything you need there! Major cities all have the basic necessities of what you really need INCLUDING MEDICATION. In Bangkok I got a prescription of dioxycycline (the drug for preventing malaria) for only a 1$ a week, verse the like 10$ per week as one would pay in the US. You can also pick up plenty of cheap clothes that you can trash over you trip as well as pretty much everything else. Just remember that pretty much anywhere you go you can get what you need. The only thing is if you want a particular brand of some type or want something a bit more expensive or technical (like a laptop or camera) best to get it at home.

A few other tips are to check the CDC for what vaccines you need, the State dept. for what visas you CANNOT get on arrival and any particular medication that isn’t widely needed. This will get updated a bit more later, but those are the most important for now

Travel well!
The Bum Traveler

Finding a cheap ticket can be a real pain if you don’t know what you’re doing, but don’t worry there is a way around this. One of the most useful things that you can do to help drastically lower you ticket price is to have flexible dates that you can travel. Many different travel companies have searches that you can do where you can enter in flexible dates and you can get specific flight deals because your dates are flexible. A few good sites for this are priceline and Travelocity.

The next thing is be aware of what the high and low seasons are for where you are going to travel. In Southeast Asia the low season is during the summer, also known as the wet season and the high season is during the winter, like between November and February. If you can arrange for your flight to be during the low season that can save you a pretty penny.

Another way to save some money is look at the destination that you wish to go to and see where are the major hubs in the area (Like Paris and Frankfurt for Europe, and Bangkok and Hong Kong for Asia). Flying in to a major hub is going to save you money as opposed to flying to a smaller, out of the way location. Also look for the major airlines that fly between where you are and your destination. Sometime you will get lucky and they will have special deals for booking your flight directly through them.

Last thing that you can do to find a cheap flight is you can look in to courier services. I’ve never done this, but apparently you can have a free flight if you agree to take a package for a company and deliver it to them at the location of their choice. This can save you uber $$$ if you can find someone who wants to take something from your location to where you want to go, but this could also be more of a hassle then it may be worth. If you’re interested click on the following link and sign up.

Cool, now you’re on your way to ACTULLY traveling!

Next we’ll start to get more specific with what to bring and how to prepare for leaving.

The Bum Traveler

Good for you! You want to travel around the world and you want to do it on the cheap, so where do we start? Well, lets start with your life as it is now. You probably have some debts, a job, rent to pay, other bills and a few other things that call for your responsibility, right? Well get rid of them.

One way that I have found how to make travel cheap is by doing it for an extended period of time makes that plane ticket A LOT cheaper. A $1000 plane ticket for just 3 weeks of travel is quite painful, especially when you consider all of the expenses that you still have back home. But when you stretch that ticket over 10 months and there are NO expensive back home, traveling becomes cheap, DIRT CHEAP, just how we like it

So how to go about this? Well, first you need to get rid of all of those nasty bills back home. Got debt? Pay it off or set up a payment plan that will pay for some of it while you’re away. Phone bill? Cancel the contract or wait for the contract to expire and get a new phone when you get home. Rent? Forget about it! don’t resign your lease and put all of your stuff in storage,
OR EVEN BETTER!
Is sublet/ rent out your place as FURNISHED and charge a higher amount then you pay now! That can give you the extra bit of $$$ to get you by when you get abroad.

The basic idea is to make your expense be 0 for back here at home, while you still have money in the bank OR EVEN BETTER is that you make money off your place while you are gone. If you can apply for a leave of absence or a sabbatical at you job, great! If not, then be prepared to quit your job… Trust me, you can always get a new, and usually better job when you get home.

Now you want to start thinking about where it is exactly that you would like to go and why. Get to thinking about that and we’ll talk later about how to actually get there for cheap.

The Bum Traveler

Hello and welcome to my blog! Thanks for visiting, here you will be able to find all of my tips and tricks that allow for you to live like a rock star, but on the budget of a bum.
I am the Bum Traveler, but you may call me Bummy. I’m just a poor student who has a passion for traveling and despite the fact that I have no money, I don’t let it set me back from doing the one thing in life that I love to do, and that is traveling. I’ve traveled all over the likes of Europe, Asia and North America all for just dollars a day! I’ll tell you the best ways to save money, how to get there for cheap, how to travel around for cheap and how to do everything along your travels for CHEAP! My next update I’ll tell you the first steps that you need to take to get yourself started on the adventure of a lifetime for cheap!

Love,
Bummy