8 Ways to Pay for Your Travel
How to Fund Your Travel!
How to Pay for your Travel without Loans
Most of us want to travel but sometimes, getting started is a barrier. It could be the flakey group chat, lack of money, or even fear of the unknown. If it is money, this is the post for you! This post is to help you find ways that work for you to fund your travel so that you can travel more or even start. If you know of any ways I left out, please feel free to leave them in the comments. Let’s fund your travel.
1. Plan in Advance
To make your trips the most cost-effective, plan as far in advance as possible and be flexible on destination. When searching Google flights, put in the information such as dates, but leave out a location. When you search, you are now able to see the roundtrip price for various locations so that you can narrow down what is affordable to you!
Also, try to plan a few months out, that way you can watch flights, make a budget, and save for all your expenses.
2. Pay Over Time
Many credit cards have this feature where you can break your large purchases into monthly payments as opposed to one lump sum! Sometimes there is interest on the plan but often it is minimal. However, I have gotten offers that made the plan free for me to use. I still use this occasionally when booking some of my hotels if I am not using points but want the cheaper rate they have for paying upfront.
This also allows people I travel with to pay monthly as well, making it easier on everyone’s budget.
If you prefer not to use your credit card feature, oftentimes on the checkout website there is PayPal and Affirm and you can use them. Keep in mind that affirm sometimes shows up on your credit as another line of credit. I found that out the hard way when I decided to use Affirm to split payments for a dress I purchased lol.
Another option is to create a one-time card with Klarna as they also have the option to pay for things over time. This also carries interest if you choose plans over $400 but you can avoid it showing up on your credit!
Finally, you can use sites such as Airfordable. For an upfront fee, and downpayment, they allow you to book your flight and hotel and break it into payments. There is no interest or credit check!
3. Pay at Destination
This is my favorite to use for hotels! I typically book at Hilton for my consulting job and Hyatt for my vacations and will choose the option that allows me to pay at the hotel. It allows me to save up the money to pay when I get there.
You can do this with many hotels and some will ask for a deposit normally one night stay but it is often significantly less than the full stay!
Keep in mind that sometimes this option is not the cheapest but for many it will be cost-effective if you are going to pay for your flights over 2-3 months and then pay your hotel when you get there if a trip is further out this is a great way to do it.
Also, when booking via Viator for excursions, they have an option that allows you to pay later. So you are able to reserve my excursions for the times and dates I want and they charge me 48 hours in advance. This saved me for my Bahamas trip. I was heading to Curaçao and Rochester before this trip and did not want to pay the almost $600 needed for the Swimming with Pigs Excursion.
4. Start your Credit Card Journey
As you start to travel and realize you love it, Get a travel credit card that is not linked to an airline. This will give you the most flexibility as you are figuring out where you want to go in the world. I started with more Airline Credit Cards and while that did work for a while, having a credit card not tied to an airline has allowed me to book more hotels and made my flight to Thailand less than $300. To learn how I booked Thailand on points and miles check out Can You Travel to Thailand for less than $500.
Had I not had points I could transfer to multiple airlines, I would have been stuck using pretty much all my points at the time if that would have even worked, or paying well over $1000 for my flight and maybe even more because I booked two one ways.
You want to have point flexibility when starting out, so you can maximize your traveling budget.
Once you figure out the card you want, I would suggest the Chase Sapphire Preferred as it has a low annual fee but is a great card, begin to put everything on it. Soon you will be able to book a flight for almost nothing. You do have to pay the taxes on flights booked with points.
With my Chase Sapphire Preferred, I can transfer to both airlines and hotels. The other day, I was looking at flights to Europe, specifically London, and they had one-way economy flights for 22,000 miles on Air France, a transfer partner of Chase, American Express, and Capital One. The flight can be easily afforded through the sign-up bonus for most credit cards including the Chase Sapphire Preferred. Typically, the sign-up bonus is 60,000 but right now they have an elevated sign-up bonus of 75,000 points.
When using credit cards there are multiple ways to earn points daily through spending, check out How to Earn Points Daily to Learn about them.
5. Create a Sinking Fund – High Yield Savings Account
One of the things that has helped me the most is having a high-yield savings account in which I deposit a certain amount of money monthly that is specifically for travel. This helps when last-minute things come up and allows me to always be able to afford a trip and the excursions. Start small and build your way up. I started originally at $25 a month before increasing as I got my finances in order.
I like knowing I have funds I can use for any trip coming up and do not have to worry as much if something comes up at the last minute.
6. Utilize Portals and Apps
Utilize portals shopping portals and apps to earn money or points for things you are already doing.
Fetch is an app that gives you points for receipts. You can then turn these points into gift cards. In terms of travel, they have options for you to get gift cards from Airbnb, Hotels.com, Uber, Lyft, and more.
Rakuten is a shopping app that you can utilize both in the store and online to get cash back or membership rewards (American Express) points for shopping.
Prolific is a website that allows you to answer surveys for money that can then be transferred to Paypal. This is a great way to save up for a trip or even pay for your excursions. I typically do this while watching TV.
7. Travel Scholarships
I recently found out about AYFN which offers scholarships for their group travel. I was not selected for the trip I applied to, but I would recommend others to apply as the videos I have seen of those who were selected seemed like they really enjoyed it.
8. Pay your Rent
If you are a renter, a great way to fund your travel can be through paying your rent using the Bilt Card. With this no annual fee card you can pay your rent without any of the normal charges and fees. There are 3 ways to pay, check, connect it to your bank account, and simply charge it on the card. I started using this a few months ago and love that I am now benefiting from paying my rent.
Paying your rent allows you to quickly earn points that can then be transferred to airlines and hotels. This will help make some of your trips cheaper.
I highly recommend this card for renters.
Conclusion, How to Fund Your Travel?
These are some ways that you can fund your travel that do not make you have to get another job but can continue what you are doing but just add to it. By utilizing apps and surveys to get additional income or applying for scholarships you can live your travel themes. Payment plans are also included because they are a realistic way to pay for things.
Let me know if you do something else to pay for your travel.
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Great ideas. I had never even heard of Bilt Card… but it would be amazing to earn travel points when paying rent, as well as via credit cards! 🙂
And be sure that you pay your credit card bills in full every month.
Great post! I’ve only recently started collecting credit card points to use towards my travel and it’s such a big help. I’ll have to check out some of the cards you mentioned above, thanks 🙂
Great suggestions on how to pay for travel. I love when I can pay for hotels or flights with my credit card points. I also do digital marketing when hosted to offset the costs.
Amazing advice, definitely helpful and smart for saving for future trips.