 This is a message that I received back in June of 2021 and the message goes, I wish I could travel like you. I love it so much, but when I plan to travel with my boyfriend, it makes a hole in the pocket. Can you please share how to plan trips? How do we manage it financially? We both are new couple trying to make ends meet. I also like to save some money for the future. I think this is a great question. We all agree on the fact that it takes money to travel and see new places around the world. But at the same time, it's sometimes a challenge for a lot of people to strike a balance between wanting to travel and explore and then also focusing on other priorities in life. It could be saving up to buy a house or saving for retirement or just investing in general. So hopefully with these tips that I'm going to share with you today, you will be able to travel more for less. And if you find these tips to be valuable, please give this video a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel. So the first one I have for you is house and pet sitting. There are so many platforms out there that connect home and pet owners with house sitters from all around the world. So you will be traveling to a destination to take care of someone's pet. And in exchange, you are getting free accommodation, which is incredible. And it works really well for people who have some flexibility. Let's say for example, you are able to work from home. So you can travel to this new destination for an extended amount of time, free accommodation in exchange of you caring for someone's pet. The platform that I'm familiar with is called trusted house sitters. And actually, as we speak right now, I am on a house sit with three beautiful poppers. And this view in front of me of the mountains is just so incredible. It's definitely a wonderful way to see new places around the world on trusted house sitters. There are so many opportunities and so many houses here in the US, Europe, Asia, Australia, you name it. Now, the only thing that you will have to pay for with trusted house sitters, for example, is a membership fee and the basic one that they have an annual fee of $129 US dollars. But I do have a link for you guys in the description box and in the first comment. And if you use it, you will get 25% off, which is a great deal. So if you think that you're going to go on at least a house sit or two during the year, that is already going to pay for itself, because you can compare that to how much money you would be spending in a hotel or an Airbnb. Obviously, with trusted house sitters, with house and pets sitting in general, you have to keep in mind that your priority alongside with traveling and exploring new culture or new destination is to care for the pet. So that should be priority number one. You have to be someone who enjoys being around pets because you are there to give them attention on love as well. You may not have all of the flexibility to go outside and spend as much time as you want outside, but you can still go and explore a couple of hours every day. You can take the pets with you if it's dogs, for example, and it will still make for a wonderful experience. So that's idea number one. Idea number two are working holidays. So with working holidays, you are traveling to a new destination to stay with a host. You're getting free accommodation. You're getting free food most of the time in exchange of helping with a project. So project can be helping to build a school in a community in the middle of nowhere in Africa or it could be helping to teach English in a small community school. It could be helping hotels or hostels. It could be helping a travel agency to build their presence on social media or websites. So it really depends on your skills, what you have to offer and what the hosts are interested in. The two platforms that I'm familiar with when it comes to working holidays are Workaway and Workpackers. There are so many incredible opportunities all over the world. Now there is an expectation for you to spend between five to six hours every day and then the rest of the day it's up to you whether you want to spend it to get to know your host, hang out with your host, go outside and explore the area with them or just go about doing whatever it is that you are interested in. You're not going to be paid for the work that you're providing, but I actually saw some opportunities on Workaway where you do get paid on top of getting free food and free accommodation, but they are very rare. But generally speaking you are getting accommodation and you are getting food in exchange of working for a few hours every day. Next idea is Home Swaps. I think it's self-explanatory. With Home Swaps you are traveling to a destination to stay at someone's house and then they are traveling to stay in your house. So if you are for example in Texas and I'm in Arizona I'm going to be traveling to stay in your house in Texas and you're going to travel to Arizona to stay in my house. The platform that I'm familiar with is called Home Exchange. With Home Exchange you can go in, create an account and list your property and then people who are interested in your destination will reach out to you to express interest and then vice versa. If there is any destination around the word that you are interested in you can reach out to the host, introduce yourself and coordinate with them. It's pretty straightforward and what I love about Home Exchange is that you get to have that experience as a local. You have all the time to do whatever it is that you want. You have free accommodation. If you work from home like I mentioned earlier you are very flexible. You can go about your workday and then the rest of the weekend or afterward you can go and explore. Next up is leveraging points from travel credit cards. So if it's not something that you are doing already it's really worth looking into having travel credit cards. So with travel credit cards the concept is very simple. You open a travel credit card and you are going to get a sign up bonus. So usually most of these travel credit card companies they expect you to spend a certain amount of money before you get that initial bonus. So it could be for example spending $3,000 in the first three months or six months and with that initial bonus you can use it towards travel. So with some of the popular travel cards it could be easily equivalent to $700 it could cover for a round trip to Asia or Europe which is incredible. Not only that but as you continue to use that travel cards for purchases like for your groceries for example or if you are going to eat out you keep accumulating points and at the end of the year you will have a significant amount of points that you can redeem towards travel. Over the past three years we use travel credit cards to get a lot of free flights locally here in the United States or internationally which was super helpful. We even redeemed some of our points to get free stays in hotels although usually it's more valuable when you redeem it for flights but when we were traveling in Tanzania for example we stayed for seven days in this beautiful hotel in Zanzibar and we didn't have to pay any of it thanks to travel credit cards. Three of our favorite travel credit cards the first one is the Chase Sapphire Preferred. This is good if you're just getting into travel credit cards. They do have an annual membership fee of $90 but if you look at all of the perks that you get it's absolutely worth it. I love the Chase Sapphire Preferred and then the second one is the American Express Goal and then the third one I convinced Alex to get this one that is the Chase Sapphire Reserve. With the Chase Sapphire Reserve the annual membership fee is a bit higher it's a couple hundred dollars but the perks are so incredible and then you get travel credit at the end of the year that you can use. It gives you access to a lot of lounges in many airports around the world which is just so incredible. So all of these credit cards I'm going to link them in the description box and in the first comment and if you decide to open a travel credit card and use the link that I have it's going to be free for you but I will get some bonus points from their referral program so I will very much appreciate it if you can use the links below. The next idea is to start a travel brand. It could be a website or it could be a YouTube channel but that can be really helpful to create an additional income. Now when I talk about creating a website or a YouTube channel it's going to take some time to be able to monetize it. With my YouTube channel for example I started back in August of 2019 on YouTube and it took me a year and a half to become monetized but it's absolutely worth it. You have to be very patient and you have to put time and effort into it but you can easily start making a couple thousand dollars a year and a couple thousand dollars a year is going to be helpful to fund a trip or two every other year. So I talk in details about this in a playlist that I'm going to link up here. I share with you how you can start a YouTube channel and some of the tricks to grow your YouTube channel faster and I also share how much money I made last year in 2021 from YouTube alongside with other income streams. Next one is to use your skills to get free accommodation or to even get paid. So you don't really have to have a large following or even presence on social media. If you have a skill that you can monetize and I'm going to give you a few examples right here. If you are good at photography or videography it's something that you can easily offer to hotels in exchange of free accommodation and the process is very simple. You could reach out to a hotel. Let's say there is this lodge in the middle of nowhere. You go to their website and social media and they don't have the best photos to represent their hotel and if you are a photographer you could put together a portfolio to showcase some of the work that you've done in the past. Reach out to the hotel and say hey I'm interested in visiting this area and I'm interested in staying in this hotel I can generate or make photos for you in exchange of free accommodation for three nights for example you send your portfolio and you send and explain how you are going to add value to this hotel and a lot of hotels are going to be willing to do that and it doesn't have to be just photography. It could be even if you are traveling internationally to destinations that get a lot of tourists who are English speakers and let's say the staff is not great when it comes to speaking in English you can even offer to teach the staff for a week or for two weeks if it's something that they're open to. If you happen to be very well versed with social media or Instagram and Facebook you could teach the staff of the hotel or the hotel management for example how to use social media to drive more traffic to their website. If you have experience with processing improvements for example that's something that I do with my full-time job could reach out to a hotel or travel agency and say you give me free accommodation for example and I'm going to spend this week teaching you and the staff how to become efficient in the workplace and how to improve your processes. There are so many different ways that you can bring value to the hotel. If you spend a good amount of time doing research and understanding where the gaps are and how you can really help them it is going to work. Like I said you're not going to have all of the time to do whatever that you want because you are going to be technically working but that's what you get if you want to save up on money something will have to budge and then finally you can consider leading group trips and again you don't have to have a large following. I don't have a large following on social media but I had so many people reach out to me saying if I am willing to lead group trips or lead hikes or backpacking trips because sometimes people just love the convenience that comes from not having to coordinate with hotels or travel agencies or come up with an itinerary and they rather just pay and show up. So if you feel like you are the type of person who likes to coordinate and put itineraries together you can reach out to hotels and try to get group discounts and of course for the people who are going to be joining this group trip you are going to be charging a small fee because you put a lot of time and effort into putting that trip together. There are a few things however that you should be paying attention to like having legal documentation to make sure that there is no liability should anything go wrong and things like that but it's absolutely worth it if it's a trip that you are going to be joining you can probably end up paying half of the cost or it can cover for the whole trip for you to lead this group trip or even in the future if it's something that you keep doing on a consistent basis it can start even generating revenue for you which will eventually allow you to travel more. That is everything that I have for you guys today. I hope that you found value in this and if you did please give this video a thumbs up it's going to help me tremendously to grow my youtube channel. My name is Hariba this is Trekking Pals and I will see you soon on a new adventure.