Welcome back to the Ameropean at Heart podcast, where we dive deep into sharing everything,
crazy travel stories, dating adventures, culture, fusions, and plenty of takeaways to entertain
and feed your inner curiosity and travel bug.
As I always say these days to open up good morning, afternoon or evening, wherever you
are as you're listening to this.
Thank you so much for tuning in on another beautiful day.
In case you're new here, my name is Mary Grace and I am the host of this show.
I spent the majority of my twenties and then some living abroad predominantly in Europe
and Turkey and have traveled to now 45 countries.
I'm really excited to get into speaking more details today about this big money question
that I have personally gotten throughout my twenties.
How do you travel so much, Mary Grace?
I'll go ahead and tell you off the bat in 2024 as I record this, I'm not in the same
kind of flexible, fortunate position that I was a few years ago to be able to travel
as much as I'm sure some of you have seen through my Instagram pictures, podcast, travel
story reels and more.
There's a whole other story and background behind how I gradually got more and more away
from the digital nomad lifestyle and being abroad all the time.
But we'll save that for another episode.
I will say, however, that even though I'm not as flexible as I used to be, I still plan
accordingly and make the most of the travel plans that I can.
And I'll be sharing with you today how I do that.
Before I get too deep into other rabbit holes, let's go ahead and shift gears and talk about
how traveling so much is absolutely possible for all of us with the right mindset, planning
and priorities.
I hope that you can take away some new ideas today from this very detailed, comprehensive
episode and apply them to your own life and travels.
Starting from the time that I was about 17 or 18 years old, right at the end of high
school, I knew already that I wanted to spend my time after university somewhere abroad
and for a longer period of time.
I had even chosen my university, the University of Georgia, not only for the academic credentials,
but also because of the number of study abroad programs that it offered.
Therefore, the opportunity to go abroad.
I wanted to find whatever chance I could to go to Europe.
I went on a trip to Europe for the very first time in my life in summer of 2014 with my
dad as a high school graduation present.
I had the incredible and really fun opportunity to visit and stay with one of my online pen
pals at her beautiful house in Provence, France.
Also, in addition to that, meet a couple of my Belgian pen pal friends in Belgium when
we were in Antwerp.
That trip changed my life.
My mindset from this younger age and experience set the motivation and plan for me to find
some sort of means to get abroad and stay there.
And I was going to make that happen.
Fast forward a couple of years to 2016 and I had my first opportunity to live abroad
on a study abroad exchange for a semester in Southern France.
That time to this day is still one of the most bittersweet and most memorable times
of my whole life and I often miss it.
I made it a priority to travel a lot that semester.
Like almost every single weekend I was going somewhere.
Now, I know you must be thinking as you hear this, but Mary Grace, how did you do it?
How did you have the money to be able to travel every single weekend like that?
You were a student and you know, students are pretty broke.
Here's the first little deeper dive into those questions you've probably got circling around
and around in your head right now.
Yes, I was a student and no, I was not rich by any stretch of the imagination.
What I did to be able to travel almost every single weekend during that time I studied
in France was I used my savings that I had accumulated from working as a waitress at
a pancake breakfast restaurant the summer prior to going to France and also even months
before that.
I can't even tell you how little savings I probably really had.
Only a few thousand US dollars at most at the time.
So all of the money that I used for traveling outside of France on weekends was my own.
My parents didn't pay for it.
My grandparents didn't pay for it.
No one in my family paid for it.
That travel money was very much my own money, albeit very little.
What I will say and be transparent about though is that I did indirectly have financial help
from two different sources for other bigger expenses during my student time that did make
it possible and easier for me to travel as a student.
The first of those two sources was student debt and loans for my study abroad program
and staying in a homestay.
If you're American and listening to this, you get me.
And the second source was my parents and grandparents for helping me continue to cover my small
apartment rent back in Georgia at the time, which was about 400 US dollars a month.
Unthinkable for Americans and most Europeans, I believe, in this day and age.
I also didn't have a car payment or car insurance because my parents had gotten me a used car
to use at school and were paying the insurance on that.
Another luxury that I really understand many people as students don't just have.
In that sense, being completely transparent again, I did cut corners indirectly like this
by having my family and student debt chip in a good bit to make it possible for me to
go somewhere every weekend.
But even then, I bet some of you are still thinking, but Mary Grace, even with just a
few thousand dollars, you can blow through that so quickly as a student.
How do you still make traveling that frequently happen?
Cost add up.
Unlike in the US, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but this is what I understand.
In Europe, I think the traveling on a budget is much easier and more organized than it
is in America.
It is much easier to keep your costs down and cut corners by taking cheap Flix buses,
Ryanair flights, blah blah cars, trains, a bigger quantity of hostels being available
and taking free city tours around.
The US is getting a little bit better as time goes on about these things, but I think it
still has a long way to go before it comes even remotely close to having a similar sort
of travel infrastructure that European countries have simply because of the vast size of the
American continent.
Europe's budget travel infrastructure and having cheaper means of transportation and
options made half of the expense struggle bus easier for me to navigate around as a
student.
But I also will say that I was fortunate in another sense that I don't think many people
necessarily had at the time that I was a student.
And that was having made online pen pal friends in different European countries before actually
traveling there.
I often would cut costs by making plans with a friend I met virtually from another country
and a lot of the time they had a place that I could crash at and we would see their city
or take day trips together.
Now I know some of you, especially if you're a little older than I am, may be thinking
that this seems so sketchy and unsafe.
How do you know that this isn't like a serial killer behind the screen before you take the
chance and travel all the way to another country and stay with them?
I know there are horror stories out there of catfishers and that sort of thing online.
And with all the crazy travel stories that I have, I luckily have never had a catfish
unfortunate experience before.
I always met who I saw and believed in online.
With the beauty of Snapchat, FaceTime, social media, WhatsApp, and other apps, it's easier
for us younger people to more easily discern and validate, so to speak, people.
And I always had a good gut instinct about who I was talking to.
Clearly that instinct served me well in this case and I capitalized on connecting and essentially
networking with these online friends in other countries.
Navigating their cities and countries together with them also saved on costs because they
would take the local routes and we wouldn't be paying an arm and a leg for tourist food
traps or attractions.
That helps a ton.
The main website I used to find these people, if you're wondering, is called InterPals.
I think it's interpals.com or it may be interpals.net.
You can Google that to find what it really is and it was free for me to use.
I would personally recommend it as a starting source in befriending locals in other countries
if you're interested.
Or if you don't want to do that, then you should consider using Couchsurfing, another
website or Meetup, the social meeting up with people app.
I think there's also Facebook groups too that you can join.
So that was how I finagled my way through travel in my student days.
I would use my savings that I would get from my part-time job as a waitress.
My family helped pay for big expenses like my apartment, car and car insurance, and I
accumulated student debt to pay for huge school expenses.
In addition, I would use my online virtual friend connections to my advantage by visiting
them in their countries in Europe, staying with them and choosing the cheaper transportation
options, like 15 euro one-way flights with Ryanair or 20 euro Flixbus rides that took
like half a day to get somewhere.
But it worked perfectly for that chapter of my life as a student.
Now we're transitioning and we're going to get into the more prolonged chapter of my
post-university and majority of my 20s traveling time, which I'm sure you may also be curious
about since this doesn't involve school.
Mary Grace, how did you travel so much after school and for as long as you did?
So here's the next deeper dive into how I was able to do travel so much and live abroad
as someone in their early and up to mid 20s.
The first leg of this involved me getting a temporary eight month work program opportunity
and visa in the north of France as an English as a second language teacher, which I jumped
on and made the most of right after I graduated from the University of Georgia.
I lived in this semi dorm semi apartment set up at a boarding school with one other American
girl on my floor who was also in this same program as me.
We both made about 750 euros per month at the time after tax and that fun stuff, which
I can't remember what the exact US dollar conversion was back then, but I'm guesstimating
that it was about 860 US dollars a month.
Doesn't sound like a whole lot, right?
Here we are kind of on a student salary again, but this was actually a really manageable
salary to work with at the time.
Given that we paid so little to stay in our little boarding school hall, which I swear,
I think it was like 50 euros a month or something like that to stay there.
It was dirt cheap and pretty decent quality for having our own rooms and sharing the shower
and bathroom with just this one other girl.
Like my time as an exchange student in the south of France, where I traveled almost every
weekend, I did the same exact thing for my time doing this teaching program in northern
France.
I was fortunate in the regard that my rent was like nothing and I almost always had three
day long weekends throughout that entire program's run.
On top of that, schools in France had a lot of one week breaks.
I think about four of them, a couple in the fall, one or two around Christmas and another
in spring.
So the beauty of time was there in abundance and I took full advantage of it, used my same
cheaper ways of traveling by doing a lot of research beforehand, staying in hostels, going
on free walking tours, befriending people in other countries, either on my trips or
time in the hostels or online, taking cheaper buses and cheaper flights when I could and
eating local food or sometimes food my friends would make me at their homes.
During that teaching program time, I went to London a couple of times, Ireland, the
Netherlands, Germany, Belgium many, many, many times since I live so close to the border,
Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Spain, Ukraine, Morocco and some others that I may be drawing
a blank on at this moment, but you get the point.
It was quite a handful of places.
It's also easy to travel to many countries fairly quickly when you're in Europe since
transportation again is well connected and countries are pretty close to each other,
just like US states, but with better connected infrastructure for tourists.
The second leg of how I traveled so much after finishing university and then after finishing
my teaching time in France was finding an online teaching opportunity that allowed me
to be completely my own boss and decide how much or how little I wanted to work.
And this wasn't a temporary position.
I could keep it for as long as I wanted.
Now, of course, there are strings attached here.
I made very little money and had to work very hard to even make a thousand US dollars a
month.
I averaged probably between that 1000 and on the high end, 1500 US dollars over the
course of the next few years.
In the US, you simply cannot live on this type of salary without assistance.
But in a lot of Europe, this salary is actually pretty okay.
Given you're not paying your ass out of taxes, which I was in a sense excluded from doing
that since I wasn't a European citizen.
I also didn't have any insurance of any sort through this job.
No paid days off, no sick days off, no coworkers, really.
It was just me, me and my students.
That's it.
But for the circumstances during this chapter of my life, this was good enough to me and
allowed three of the most important aspects when it comes to being able to travel so much.
And that was time, a little bit of money and flexibility from being location independent.
Anyway, I found this online teaching opportunity and had that for several years.
I would travel so much by making my money go farther.
And I did that by spending the majority of my time living out of Airbnb's predominantly
in Eastern Europe, where the cost of living was quite a bit lower than in many countries
in Western Europe.
I spent quite a bit of time circulating Airbnb's in the Balkans.
So in countries like Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Bosnia, I was able to get pretty nice and
spacious Airbnb's with great wifi for my online job for about 700 euros a month or less.
And 700 euros was the higher end and considered me splurging.
It was really nice.
I would take free walking tours in just about every big city I ever visited in Europe.
I would recommend that you do this too when you travel and can find a free walking tour.
Granted, you haven't done that already before listening to this.
The first hack, if we can call it that, as to how I traveled so much is maybe a little
different than you'd expect.
Would it surprise you to learn that I spent probably only 20 to 30% of my time in a given
place actually traveling and the other 70 or 80% was spent doing my online work?
I did mention a little earlier that I had to work really hard just for a little bit
of money, right?
Be sure not to overlook this detail as I lay this out here.
Maybe on social media, for some of you who have followed me and my travels for a long
time, you might think I didn't work so much or didn't spend many hours alone in my Airbnb's
working, but I did.
The majority of my travel content that you see was done in a short time window of my
actual full time in a given country.
I wasn't an influencer or a travel blogger, someone who could spend all day, every day
out and about in a country exploring every little depth of it.
Unfortunately, that was not me.
I just planned really well and capitalized on covering a big amount of ground in short
periods of time, ate mostly grocery store food and cooked my own meals at home and worked
the rest of it to be able to afford the majority of what I was even seeing and doing.
What you see isn't exactly what you get.
And I'll do a whole separate episode later on this subject, but I do want to emphasize
this one point to you.
This bulk traveling in a short window of time concept is a hack that I still apply to my
traveling even in present day and you can too.
You just need to focus on creating time opportunities by taking a day trip on a holiday weekend
where people are off on Mondays or on Fridays or take one or two of those days off from
work and have at it.
I did this, for example, for my solo four day Columbia trip back at the beginning of
twenty twenty three and that went over the American holiday of Martin Luther King Day in January.
I took two of my own off days from work, used that one Martin Luther King Day holiday and
the weekend and boom, I had a trip.
I planned and prioritized and made it happen.
If you've seen my Columbia pictures, maybe it looks like I did a ton and I was there
for a long time.
I did do a ton and I slept very little, but I still had to work with the small amount
of time I had and I did.
Those Mondays and Fridays are so valuable and need to be given more credit when it comes
to bridging the weekend gap for a trip to become possible.
The second little hack that I applied back in my earlier twenties and that I also still
apply to present day is the beauty of planning and paying for big expenses in advance.
I didn't make a whole lot at all back then, as you already have heard in this episode,
but I got by in the sense that I would research flights, oftentimes months in advance, and
buy flight tickets and also book Airbnbs far in advance.
Paying in this sort of installment method definitely made affording bigger travel and
the actual activities of a trip much easier.
Since by the time I'd actually take the trip, I will have already gotten the biggest expenses
out of the way months prior or I would have already paid off the installments.
I didn't use any special flight search engines like some people would recommend like Scott's
Cheap Flights or Skyscanner.
And the reason I don't use those is because I personally had a kind of near scare scam
experience where I was really stressed out because I thought that I was going to lose
all my money by booking through a third party.
But anyway, more on that in another episode do.
I simply just use Google Flights, the most trustworthy source to booking direct airline
tickets.
I took flights with often a lot of layovers or inconvenient times since they were cheaper
and they still got me to my destination since I had the time.
The third and final little hack that made it possible for me to travel so much abroad
in my earlier 20s was essentially having no ties to obligatory expenses in the US that
had to be paid off in a short period of time.
I didn't own a car for a few years, which is wild to any American listening to this.
But yeah, no car for a few years.
And I went at least two years without ever driving any sort of car at all.
I therefore didn't have car insurance with no car.
I didn't have an apartment that I was renting.
So no rent back home.
My rent was through whatever I was booking in Eastern Europe and elsewhere for Airbnbs.
I wasn't paying taxes every year because of how little I made by American standards.
I didn't need to start paying off my student loans right away.
I was able to keep postponing them.
I didn't have doctors or dentist appointments for at least three years.
And the latter of which later really bit me in the ass when I came back here to the US.
But I won't get into that now since this is already really long.
Essentially no huge obligations, no huge mandatory expenses at home made traveling
and living abroad much more sustainable and easier for me to do.
So to sum up everything we've just covered here, I was able to travel so much by having
the time and flexibility through my small paying but doable online English teaching
job, spending the majority of my time in cheaper cost of living countries in Eastern Europe,
Turkey, and a small bit of Asia before the pandemic, taking free walking tours, planning
as much as I could in advance, finding flights I liked on Google flights and paying for those
flights months in advance, often in installments and the same goes for accommodations with
Airbnb and hotels.
And occasionally I couch surfed for free for short term accommodations and I would bulk
travel all of my activities and energy in 20 or 30% of the time that I was actually
in another country and work online the other 70 or 80% of the time.
And finally, having no ties to obligations or expenses to worry about back in the US
as I was traveling during this time.
Now that I'm living a fairly mundane, regular nine to five life here in the US, like the
majority of people in this world, so to speak, and given the fact that I'm no longer single
and can't just get up and travel on a whim to wherever I can and when I want my perspective
and ability on how to travel so much looks a little bit different than a lot of what
you've just listened to in today's episode.
I don't have the same power of flexibility and I get an average of 15 paid time off days
per year from my job, but I do still believe in the power of planning, making travel a
priority, bulk traveling in short periods of time, like over long weekends and holiday
weekends, accumulating and using credit card points for travel.
Side note, I personally use Capital One Venture X credit card for points and credit and it's
awesome cutting corners here and there with choosing to cook meals instead of eat out
or choose a cheaper cafe option compared to a five star restaurant.
The beauty of travel at the end of the day will lie in the memories you make with the
people you either meet in another city or country or with the people or person you're
traveling with.
I hope that you found this very in depth episode of my traveling so much throughout the years
to be helpful, interesting and beneficial to go about your own future travel plans,
whether you're a solo traveler or traveling with other people or a significant other.
If you enjoyed this episode and would like more of this type of content or have a specific
suggestion you'd like to hear on the podcast, please give the show a five star review and
let me know your feedback and beyond on Instagram at AmeriPian at heart or send me a message
on my host account at Mary Grace Crawford.
Thank you once again for tuning in and I look forward to being back here next Tuesday with
you for another fun episode.
Much love from the Ameropean at heart.