Hi everyone and welcome to my second edition of my “Gap Year
Guide” which will be focused all about how I actually financed my trip.
Feel free to check out my Instagram @izzyk1998 for more travel pics ;)
If you guys missed my first post (which you can catch up
with here) you will know that I traveled around mainly Eastern Europe for a
month with my best friend. Now, obviously, for that time period you do have to
budget and make the money last for the whole trip. This is how I achieved that.
…
The first thing I’ll talk about is my actual saving goal for
the holiday. Ideally I wanted to save £3000 to spend on anything related to
travelling this year. I knew that I wanted to travel in May, so in September I
got a job in a retailer. Since I got paid weekly, I got roughly between
£156-180 a week depending on the hours I worked. It’s unrealistic to assume
that I wouldn’t need money during the week, so I always made sure I had a bit
of money in my current account, just to cover things like buying birthday
presents, going out and a cheeky bit of shopping. But I never wanted to have
more than £150 in my current account so I wouldn’t go on a crazy shopping spree
and blow all my money at once. So every week that I got paid I transferred any
money that I had over £150 into my savings account with the intention to spend
it on travelling. Needless to say my savings soon built up.
Now I didn’t spend all my savings for travelling at once. We
found a good deal on Interrail tickets if we brought them by the end of January
(I believe it was January) and got 15% off for booking it at that time. And
another way I was able to make the money last was by looking for cheaper
alternatives to everything. I’ll be doing a specific post about accommodation,
but an example of a cheaper alternative was booking AirBnB’s instead of hotels
because then half our savings would be gone on accommodation alone.
Another thing me and my friend did before we went travelling
was budgeting our money between different accounts. I kept some of my money in
my current account with my ordinary debit card since it was linked to my PayPal
which is what I used to book AirBnB’s. And then the majority of my savings was
transferred to my FX card. I’m so lucky that my friend advised me to get one of
these cards, because they have less of a charge when you use them
internationally compared to ordinary credit/debit cards. So that’s another way
to save money whilst travelling between different countries.
And since it was probably a good idea to have some cash on
us when we arrived to each country, we got some exchanged at our local M&S
shop. We did this because there’s no minimum money that you have to exchange
there. So we went halves on the currency and for the two of us took out:
- £100 Bulgarian Lev
- £150 Romainan Lei
- £100 Hungarian Forint
- £100 Croatian Kuna
- £150 Euros
So there we are, that’s how I budgeted my travelling for my
gap year. The song of the day is It Aint Me by Selena Gomez. I tried to go into
as much detail as possible for my gap year guide, but if you have any further
questions please don’t hesitate to ask me. Thank you very much for reading,
Izzy K xxx
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