Always the Adventure: Backpacking is the best way to learn how to balance a budget

Bigfork graduate Amber McDaniel shares her adventures from a semester abroad at Oxford University and four months of backpacking across Europe.

One of the biggest questions I get post-travel is, “How did you afford to do all that?” I think back on the four part time jobs I hold while at school and the many summers when I have worked two full time jobs to save up money for this trip. My answer: hard work.

Yet travel is also deceptively affordable when it comes right down to it, provided you know some insider secrets and aren’t afraid to rough it a little bit. When people think of travel, they think luxury hotels, lounging on the beach, guided tours, and gourmet platters of exotic food. While it can be like that, backpacking sure isn’t. It is not luxurious because it is not a vacation. Though the words are often used synonymously, there is a huge gap between traveling and vacationing.

As a backpacker, I learned a lot about saving money and balancing a budget. Rather than succumb to the ease and flexibility of a Eurail pass, an all inclusive rail pass that works on most trains across Europe, I booked every single leg of transportation individually. Whereas four months of travel via Eurail would have cost me upwards of $2,000, I spent approximately a quarter of that on transportation itself.

For housing, I stayed in the cheapest possible hostels, even if it meant being roomed with eleven other snoring, smelly guys. Toward the end of my travels, I became a huge proponent of couch surfing, or connecting with locals and staying in their homes for free. As scary as that sounds, it was actually just a great way to save money and meet interesting people.  

Food was probably the most difficult area to cut expense in, quite simply because I love eating. Instead of eating out every day, I took advantage of any free food offered in hostels, and usually stretched free hostel breakfast to mean free lunch as well by shoving slices of bread and cheese into my bag. I shopped for fresh produce in cheap outdoor markets and supplemented that diet with cheap rice and pasta that I kept on hand in my pack at all times. Eating out was a way to treat myself, and even then I never ate at expensive restaurants but opted for inexpensive street food instead.

While transportation, housing, and food, make up the triad of major travel expenses, I saved little bits in other ways as well. Instead of buying souvenirs, I collected things, like free maps and rocks or bits of tile on which I would write the name of the city from which it came. The only actual souvenir I bought was a bullet keychain in Bosnia with the word Sarajevo engraved on it because of what these bullets souvenirs symbolized. As the shopkeeper told me, “They show how something beautiful can be made form something terrible.”

Cost also heavily depends on where you go. In eastern Europe, for instance, I could survive on less than €10 a day, accounting for all food and housing. In western Europe, that amount would get me a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

All in all, traveling on a budget is completely possible, but it takes discipline and learning to say “no” to a lot of things from museums that charge steep entrance fees to that delicious smelling food vendor.  

That sense of control, however, must also balance with saying “yes” so you do not deny yourself once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. That was honestly harder for me than anything. I frequently had to remind myself that sometimes it’s okay to splurge rather than suffer. In the long run, having a quiet, private room in a hostel is more than worth the cost of a couple extra euros.