6 Ways to Travel When You are Broke

Traveling is a lot of fun—not to mention an extremely rewarding experience—but there are plenty of things about it that can be expensive. The costs of travel can be a great deterrent for many people to actually explore this beautiful world, but there are still ways to travel even if you are broke.

Here are a few of them.

1. Work abroad

If you think that you are not making enough at your job—not even enough to make ends meet, what more to travel?—then you can explore the option of working overseas. There are a lot of job opportunities abroad for people who are hardworking and not picky about what they want to do. This is not a serious career option—chances are, you will only use these jobs to fund your travels. You can work as an au pair, a part of the hostel staff, as a bartender, waitress, or waiter in a cruise line, a farm worker, a certified dive instructor, a casino worker, a seasonal worker at a ski resort, or as a tour guide. Or you could explore other types of work away programs.

2. Be an English teacher

More and more people from different parts of the world want to learn English (mostly as a second or third language). If you are a native English speaker or have an English degree from a renowned university (or even a TOEFL certification), you can make a lot of money by teaching English in countries like Japan, South Korea, and Thailand.

3. Accumulate points for free flights

If you have maintained excellent (okay, “good” is good enough) credit over the years, you can apply for travel credit cards that will award you bonus miles just buy signing up. You can use these miles to get free flights to the destinations of your dreams. Often, plane tickets are the most expensive part of traveling, and once you have built up a cache of miles or points, you can fly, for free, to your dream destinations.

4. Be a couch surfer

Couchsurfing.org is a travel service that allows people who have limited travel budgets to stay in local houses for free. Once you have built a good reputation in this site (by being an excellent host or guest), you will find it easy to find people who are willing to host you for free. There are a lot of travellers who have gone around the world, relying on the kindness of strangers for their accommodation.

5. Hitchhike when safe to do so

Slasher movies have warned us of the dangers of hitchhiking, but in fact, this is one of the best ways to get to different places without spending a lot of money for transportation. Hitchhiking is a popular practice in different parts of the world, including Australia, Central America, Eastern Europe, and New Zealand.

6. Join free walking tours

If you want to learn more about the city you are visiting but cannot afford even the cheapest tour options, you can always join a walking tour. These tours can be found in a majority of European cities, as well as some urban destinations in the United States, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.