Farris Family's Day Off

Something I get asked every once in a while is, how can you afford to travel so much?

I wanted to share my tips and tricks in hopes that you might be able to take at least one and apply it to your day-to-day so you can go on that dream vacation you thought you never could.

Motivation

I think this is the simplest, but hardest one at the same time.

Motivation is free, it is not labor intensive, but focusing on it is the hard part. If you remain motivated to go to a destination, find out about how much it costs, including the average airfare, hotel accommodations, meals, excursions, and transportation. Set a price and put money aside you would normally spend on take-out, new shiny electronics, cars, and things that aren't a necessity in your life.

Start a budget for your future trip, setting goals is the best way to accomplish your dream vacation.

If you don't have the resources to put away, there are other ways to make extra money.

Side jobs

Get a side job. This doesn't mean get another job on top of your primary job. There are plenty of service industry type jobs you can do from home.

• Pet sitting
  • Pet sitting is a pretty easy job if you have the ability to have pets at your home. This means you don't have to travel to the pets house, but the pet is brought to you.
  • A lot of people in populous areas need a pet sitter for when they are away from home.
  • Pet sitters can make anywhere between $1,000 up to $25,000+ extra a year depending on how many pets you have at one time and the length of stay.
  • Pet sitters typically charge between $25 to $100 a night. If you had a Boston Terrier stay with you for 5 days, that could easily be an additional $500.
• Dog Walking
  • You can make about $10-20 a dog walk. If you focus on this on the weekend and do 2-3 a day that's potentially $1,400 a year.
  • Put that dog walking money away and watch it grow
• Become a travel agent
  • This requires a little more work as you have to be on the phone, email, text with your client and destination.
  • It can make hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars a year. This all depends on your time you put into it.
  • Start by joining a reputable travel agency that will pay you based on commission and doesn't charge you to start with them.
• Are you crafty? Start an Etsy shop or sell your product on places like Facebook Market place
  • I have a cousin that makes custom t-shirts, mugs, tumblers, pins, and so many other things and sells them on Facebook Marketplace. She is always busy making something.
  • Put your specialized products on Etsy. There is a small fee to post it, but if you can focus some attention on your product description, keywords, and photos, you could make a lot of money on Etsy.
• Photographer
  • Have a camera? Offer to take family photos of people
  • Takes photos of for different local events
  • Pet photography
  • Depending on the gig, you can make hundreds to thousands of dollars.
• Web design
  • design a web site for someone and sell them your designs.
  • This takes a little bit of time and understanding the clients wants and needs, but you can make $500-$10,000 on a web site design depending on the complexities and how many pages they need

Passive income

Some things you can do make money all by themselves. The start up may take some time, but once it's up and running, you are good to go.

Some examples of passive income are

• Fitbit watch faces
  • This requires technical knowledge and some design ability
  • Watch faces on the Fitbit store usually sell for $1-$2, but if you have one that people like, it adds up fast. I designed a "Magic Castle" watch face that changes the time of day based on the time and sold it for $1.75. It's been on the market for a few years and over the years it's made a couple thousand dollars.
  • Sell watch faces that are seasonal and have them up before the current season
    • People are always looking to decorate their Fitbits and believe me, they are willing to spend $1 for it.
• Sell your designs online.
  • You can use services like Spring that will take your design and print it on a shirt for you and sell it to your customers. You won't have to do the printing or shipping.
  • Zazzle is another site that will print your design on almost anything, saving you the time and money. You just upload your design and decide what it should be on and collect a percentage of the profit without the headache.

Additional Income

Consider the following for making money to put away.

• Garage Sale
  • Everyone usually has stuff they don't need, but hold on to. See if your junk is someone else's treasure. We had a garage sale not too long ago and brought in about $300 from stuff that was sitting in our house and garage. That's plenty of meals worth of money.

That's how we do it

So if you wanted to know how we can travel as much or to places that seem out of reach to most, it's not that we make a lot of money from our primary jobs, it's that we use some of the resources listed above to offset the cost of our trips.

For example, we traveled to Tanzania, Africa in 2005, we were young and definitely were not making a great money, but we saved money for a year+ and were able to make the $12,000 trip work. We use the same mindset today that we did 18 years ago that allow us to do what you see in these blog posts.

More ways to save long-term

These are a few things you can do that will cost up front or take longer to accomplish, but in the long run will save you money.

• Timeshare
  • I know ugly word for a lot of people, but consider this:
    We bought into Disney Vacation Club (DVC) in 2007. DVC is a points based timeshare. We bought 160 points back then for $15,000. We paid it off over time and now we use those points towards places like a 2 bedroom suite in Hawaii at Disney's Aulani Resort and Spa and we only pay the taxes. The 2-bedroom suite is $1,400/night.
  • There are other points based timeshares out there you may consider.
• Sign up for airline miles
  • This will potentially save you on airfare if you travel enough throughout the year.
  • The downside is most, if not all, airlines will reset your points annually, so if you don't fly often, lets say for work, this may not be the best option