If you've watched many of our previous videos, you already know that we live a geographically independent lifestyle and travel the world internationally for up to six months at a time each year. Today we're going to share with you some of our best tips on traveling the world on a budget. If you get value from what we're talking about on this channel, press the like and subscribe buttons and leave a comment, add yourself to the conversation. And thank you for watching. Anytime you're traveling the world, usually the biggest and most significant expense you're going to come across is transportation. And your largest transportation cost is usually going to be your flights. So we'll begin discussing how to save money traveling in the area of airline and flight costs. What we usually do is utilize a discount airline company. They're usually regionally specific. We fly out of Canada and so the one we use is called Chippo Air. But look in the region that you're watching from and there may be others for you to use. A few tips for you to use discount airlines like these. When you're searching for fares of the destination you're interested in, try to use an incognito window so that the airline sites cannot track you through cookies and whatever. Because if you've ever been on one of these sites and you see a really excellent fare that you're interested in and you're like, I'll come back to that in a little while. You come back and it's a higher price. It's because if you're not using an incognito window, they're tracking you. They already know you're interested. When you come back, they inflate the price. If you use an incognito window and in conjunction even better of VPN, you'll be able to search more anonymously and when you come back, your prices should remain the same. If possible, the further out you can book your trip from the date you actually want to leave, generally, that will translate into better pricing for you. On the extreme flip side of that, if you're able to go spontaneously and even just jump on a standby line, oftentimes you can get good deals flying standby. All right, once you've got the best possible deal you can obtain on a flight, you're usually going to be dealing with regional travel once you get to the country that you're looking to travel to. Regional travel might include flights from one part of the country to another or trains, buses, vans, vehicles, ubers, taxis, all of the above. What you want to do when it comes to regional transportation is you want to have a look around and see which transportation within your standards of comfort will be the most economical for you to choose. So usually if you have the ability to grab a train over a regional flight, a train is usually going to be a better price. Having that thought process further, generally speaking, a bus will be even better price than a train. So you need to search out which transportation still fits within your parameters of comfort and match that with the best economical alternative for you. The final tip on transportation costs that we've found extremely helpful over the years is if you're slow traveling like we generally do, staying in a place for upwards of three to six months, you definitely want to add to your toolbox the consideration of buying your own transportation while you're there. You have to look into the rules and regulations of the country you're looking to go to or that you're already in. And for us, buying our own vehicle has saved us tons of money over the years. We've done it, I think, in four different countries that we've lived in now. We've purchased vehicles in Honduras, Curacao, Aruba, and Panama. I might be forgetting some, but what generally happens here is that we choose a vehicle that's within our price range of comfortability that if the worst case scenario happened and we had to walk away from the entire purchase that it wouldn't devastate us financially. So for us, generally speaking, that's been a purchase in around five to six thousand U.S. What generally happens is we'll buy it privately and then at the end of our stay, we've been able to sell it back for most or all of our purchase price. So in essence, we boiled down to simplicity. We've ended up having almost free or very inexpensive private transportation access the entire time we lived in these countries. So definitely add that to your toolbox if you're staying somewhere for a good chunk of time. And that will save you significant money on your transportation costs while you're away. The next largest expense that you'll generally encounter while you're traveling internationally or living in another country is accommodations. For the years in our experience, we've come to find out that booking your accommodations online oftentimes doesn't give you access to the best deals that are available. So what we've learned to do and try to do is yes, we'll book online before we arrive to a country because oftentimes that's your only option. But we'll try to book that initial stay for as short as possible. So for example, if we're living abroad for six months, we'll book an online accommodation for one or two weeks. And then what our goal is once we arrive is to put the word out locally or look at local advertisements for accommodations. And what we find time and time again is that in some of these places that we end up are kind of smaller, the remote. And the people renting these spaces just don't have the ability to take advantage of all the online services. But once you arrive and you start putting the word out, you'll uncover accommodation gems that you never would have seen online. And then once you find something that's more suitable and maybe even more economical for you, you can book at that longer term. And on the subject of booking longer term and slow travel, very frequently you'll get a better rate from the landlord or whoever's renting the space. When you say to them, would you be willing to offer me a better rental rate in exchange for a longer term rental? So let's say for example, you're booking five or six months, usually longer term rental security will mean a lot to a landlord. And so oftentimes they will discount their monthly rate in exchange for a multi-month rental. The overall idea with accommodations here is to move away from the typical holiday-style accommodations like hotels and resorts and move into more local type of accommodations, which is where the savings is at. So that will mean things like apartments, houses, guest suites, extra rooms, casitas, that sort of thing. And that's where you'll really start to reap the savings is when you're living like a local, with and beside the locals. The third area of major and ongoing expense that you will encounter when you're traveling for a longer period of time or living abroad will be food and eating costs. The first recommendation I can share with you through experience is that you're going to miss the food from your home country, your comfort food, the stuff that you grew up eating. Generally when you're traveling internationally, this stuff will be harder to come by, the locals don't eat this way. And so you'll be paying a lot of money to eat like you do at home. What I'd recommend here is use this type of food as an infrequent treat that you enjoy sparingly because you will be spending multiples dollars wise on this type of food than you would on what the locals eat. So that leads me to the recommendation, which is when you're living abroad, eat like a local and eat where the locals eat. Local cuisine is almost always the best value for you and the best price. So that's going to mean exploring things like street food and locally popular restaurants or food checks. What have you? Also it's going to mean frequenting the local grocery stores, which ties into one of the recommendations I gave earlier when you're searching for accommodations, seek out accommodations that have kitchens, fridges, the ability to cook and store your own food, which will save you big money when you're slow traveling or living in another country. It's been our experience that exploring local food and street food is some of the funnest times and memories that we've been able to create in our traveling experiences. Couple of miscellaneous tips that may save you money over time is look for the cheapest ways to access your money internationally. And frequently over time for us, that's been to wait until we get to the country of origin and then access our money through ATMs. We've found that the fees here are sometimes lower than exchanging our money in our home country and traveling with it. If you out there have some tips of what you've been doing to access your money in a low-cost manner while you're either slow traveling or living abroad, please share with us in the comments what you've been doing successfully. The last tip I'm going to share with you is one that will help you increase the amount of time that you can travel or stay in countries that you're enjoying. And that is to, I encourage you to create even a nominal income that is geographically independent that you can create from anywhere, maybe online or what have you. What this does is it just gives you some inflow of money and it creates options for you to stay longer if you wish. If you liked this video and what we're talking about on this channel, press the like button and subscribe. Leave a comment below and add yourself to the conversation. My name's Aaron and this is Plan Free. We'll see you again soon. Bye for now.