Travel or Save Money: How to Choose What’s Better

Travel or save money?

Cocktail or a glass of wine?

Chocolate or a bag of crisps?

Italian or Greek food?

Reading a book or watching a movie?

Oh, the great dilemmas of this world!

We don’t have answers for them all (how can you decide between Italian or Greek food??), but we can help you figure out what’s better for you: travel or save money?

Read on and you’ll have the answer in no time.

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Here’s a little bit about our journey, if you are new here! If you know us, feel free to skip this part.

After leaving our old life in Scotland in March 2022 (it rains too much there), we travelled full-time for almost 2 years. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Well, it was. If you think that carrying overpacked backpacks in 45°C heat around streets that aren’t even on Google Maps is fancy. And that’s just 1% of all the fun we had! 😆

During the 2 years we volunteered in Italy and Bulgaria (free travel while learning new skills, anyone?), explored other amazing European countries and backpacked Southeast Asia. Even our secret wedding was more of an expedition than a wedding. 😅

And, of course, we researched and planned everything ourselves, because you gotta keep the budget low, right? If you are like us, you’ve come to the right place, because we want to share all the useful tips and info with you!

Excited? Good. Let’s get into it so you can go on your own adventures too!

Travel or save money: what you have to consider first

First, to get an answer to the question “is it smarter to travel or save money?”, we are going to ask you to do something unpleasant.

Ready?

Okay.

You will need to reach deep inside yourself and find some answers.

Now we don’t mean literally – don’t go cramming your hand down your throat.

But first, before figuring out whether you should travel or save money, you’ve got to figure out these things:

• How much do you want to travel
• Are you the kind of person who lives in the moment (“You never know which day will be your last”) or one who believes in preparing for the future (“I need this and this safety net for my future”)
• What’s your tolerance for risk

You will also need to know how much money you are making vs spending, but for that you can just check your financial records, not necessarily your spleen or your soul – though hey, if they’ve got financial insights, who are we to judge?

Let’s talk about each of these in more detail so you know how to answer them.

How much do you want to travel?

This is a big one. 

Because people say they want to travel more than anything.

But what they often mean is:

• I like to sit on a beach with a cocktail and relax.
• I like to see the main sights everyone talks about, like the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids.
• I like to eat delicious foreign food that I don’t have to cook myself (or do the dishes afterwards).

And these are all valid reasons to want to travel – hell, we also LOVE to chill at a beach, eat yummies and sometimes we even go see the big, popular sights, so no judgement here.

Maybe this question should be phrased differently.

Because what really matters is how much you are willing to sacrifice for travel.

Some questions you can consider are:

• Am I willing to risk my future (=savings) to see the world?
• Am I willing to travel on a low budget?
• Am I willing to trade material possessions for travel?

Again, the purpose of this section is just to figure out how you really feel about travel. We’ll get to answering whether you should travel or save money in a moment.

Do you live in the moment or plan for the future?

This one should be easy to answer, because we are all wired one way or another, so you should know what kind of person you are.

Do you believe in travelling while you are young, in case you never make it to old age? Or in case future circumstances (illness, family, work) prevent you from doing so?

Or do you believe in securing your future and then travelling when everything else is taken care of? So doing things like building wealth, raising a family and then travelling, perhaps in retirement?

Personally, we are a bit of a mix.

We plan for the future (save money), but we also do splash out on wild travel experiences (travel). Again, more detailed info and personal experience coming up; for now, figure out what kind of person you are.

How much risk can you tolerate?

It’s important to answer the previous question honestly, because kidding yourself won’t do you any good.

Say you are a person who is naturally worried about the future, but you decide to spend all your money on travel, pretending you are a spontaneous yolo person. You will have an annoying voice at the back of your mind yelling at you: “YOU HAVE NO SAVINGS!!” even as you chill on a beach in the Philippines. 

How do we know that? Because that’s how we are wired as humans. And also because something similar happened to us.

So figure out what level of risk you are comfortable with.

Saving up a specific amount to have a safety cushion, and then travelling?

Developing a specific skill so that you know you can get a good job at any point – even if you travel full-time for a year and then run out of money?

Find the answer that works for you.

Travel or save money: what does it actually mean?

Now that you (hopefully) have answers to the above questions, we can talk about what is a smarter choice: travel or save money?

The answer depends on the situation.

Situation 1

Long-term travel vs saving money

🤔Does it make more sense to save money or to go travelling full-time aka blowing all your money?

We talk about full-time travel a lot, because that is what we’ve done.

You can read about the 7 simple ways we saved money, how people can afford to travel full-time and also how much money you actually need to travel long-term, if this is a dream of yours and you need more help making it happen.

Because long-term travel is a big commitment. 

You really do need to know yourself, your situation and your priorities.

From a future-proofing point of view as well as a financial one?

It absolutely does not make sense.

If you want to secure your future, build wealth or if you have a specific plan (e.g. wedding – child 1 – child 2), full-time travel isn’t the best option.

Let’s not be vague, though.

We’ll tell you about our personal experience.

Our story

We went travelling full-time, aged 28 and 29. As an engaged, childless couple without owning a property.

We used savings to fund our full-time travels – it’s what most long-term travellers do, they are not all living off of Insta collabs, believe it or not.

For the amount of money we spent (“blew”) on full-time travel for 2 years, we could have:

• Got married and had a big wedding
• Or put down a deposit for a house
• Or had a child and started building savings for their future

How can you decide what you should do? 

Return to the questions we asked you at the start. Hint: it has a lot to do with how you view using your money for full-time travel: is it “spending it” or is it “blowing it”?

Don’t make this mistake

We mentioned that we are a strange hybrid between yolo and worrying about the future. 

In practice, this means that while we did use most of our savings to fund full-time travels, we did so responsibly: we created an emergency fund. 

We wouldn’t recommend anyone go full-time travelling without having an emergency fund. That’s not yolo-ing, that’s being completely irresponsible. 

If you want to know more, it’s all explained in this guide.

Situation 2

Casual travel vs saving money

🤔Does it make more sense to save money or to spend any extra income on travelling during your time off work?

Incomes are low. Prices are skyrocketing (thanks sucky politics). What do you do with the little you may have left over after you cry over all your bills? Do you travel or save money?

This is a very current topic for us because that’s what we are struggling with at the time of writing this article (June 2025).

Our current situation

After travelling full-time for almost 2 years, we decided we needed a break.

Long-term travel is tough for your health, and we wanted to be able to focus on some of our big goals, namely getting married (success!) and building our own business (you are currently seeing a part of it – this website).

So we set up a temporary home base in Slovakia.

And we won’t lie to you, we did also need to make more money.

In between funding our full-time travels and paying for our wedding, we weren’t left with much.

But now the big dilemma. 

The money we are making now.

Do we save it all? For future travels, once we are ready to go again? Or for far away future, by investing it?

Or do we spend it, because we are based in Europe, where you can just take a bus or a short plane and be in a different country, and there is much to explore and eat and see and do and omg let’s go travel now.

Yep, it’s a daily battle for us.

We’ll tell you our solution. But we also want to tell you about a big lie.

A big lie

If someone is telling you that you can have:

• Your usual salary
• But also travel comfortably
• And also save up for the future

They are lying to you.

Unless you are earning a decent amount. Decent as in after you pay for everything you have to pay for, you still have loads left over. 

You can’t have it all.

You will have to make some adjustments.

Here is what we mean:

• Increasing your income. That can mean a variety of things, from a side business to asking for a raise, getting a promotion or selling feet pics on OF. No judgement here!
• Travelling on a low budget. The cheaper you travel, the more you can do it. It’s simple, yet most people don’t think about it.
• Putting less money aside into savings, but being smart about it. This is not a post about how to save money, so we won’t go into detail, but there are smart ways to save and… not so smart ones. As always, be smart.

Travel or save: what do we do

We promised to share our take on this and how we manage to navigate the forever dilemma: travel or save money.

Throughout this article, we mentioned our situation a few times, but here it is in more detail. Maybe it will help you figure out what makes sense for you.

First, the 3 questions from the beginning of this article:

How much do we want to travel? 

We are travellers at heart. We are willing to sacrifice A LOT to be able to travel. That means making sacrifices to save money, travelling like crazy people and waiting 12 years to get married.

Do we live in the moment or plan for the future?

As we mentioned, we are a mix of both. We do splash out on wild travel experiences others wouldn’t pay for (people did think we were mad to travel full-time too), but we always make sure we have at least some safety cushion – be it investments or an emergency fund.

A little note

Don’t ever follow someone else’s life blindly.

If your favourite influencer quits their job with a one-way ticket to Bali?

Think about all the things you might not know about before you do the same.

They might own a property that will be rented out, so they will have income coming in.

They might have investments which are compounding for their future.

They might have a family inheritance coming in that they can rely on.

You never know the full picture, especially when it comes to finances, which is a sensitive topic for most people, so don’t make a mistake following someone else’s plan. Make your own.

What’s our tolerance for risk?

We talked about something interesting that happened to us when we were full-time travelling here. What having no money coming in did to our heads. 

We won’t repeat ourselves in this post, but basically, sometimes you don’t know how finances affect you until you get to a certain situation.

It’s always less risky to have at least some plan B, than yolo-ing it all.

For us, the plan includes working on ourselves constantly (learning, developing skills, general personal development), having investments and an emergency fund.

What do we do these days?

So, we did say that these days we are struggling – travel or save money is a constant battle.

Here is what we do:

• Every month, after paying for life expenses, we take what is left over
• We divide that equally between investments (saving for the future) and future travels
• When we do casual travel, we do so on a low budget. We talk about this a lot on our Instagram, so if you are not following us yet, go become our friend now

For us, it’s a bit different because we are saving to leave our home base again – what we call “future travels”.

Essentially, we are saving for two goals: future savings (investments) and future travels.

So any casual travel we do these days takes away from these savings, and that is the battle of “living now” vs “taking care of your future self”.

What does this mean for you?

While your situation is, most likely, different from ours, the principles are the same.

Here is a step-by-step process for managing your money and figuring out whether you should travel or save money:

1. Answer the questions from the beginning of this post
2. Figure out your monthly expenses
3. Figure out what you are left with when you do the calculation of income minus monthly expenses
4. Then, decide what to do with that money – your 3 options based on answering our 3 questions:
   • If you are a yolo person, spend that money on travel (but we would not recommend this. Always aim to have some safety cushion)
   • If you are leaning more towards future planning, save it all (but smartly)
   • If you are looking to do both, travel and save, figure out how much you can save and how much you would be left with for travelling
5. If you are doing a mix – travelling and saving money – first, cover all your life expenses, second, put away a chunk of money to be saved for the future and then find ways to travel with whatever you have left 
6. If the amount is too small, you will need to increase your income – can’t have it all without extra effort, remember

Travel or save money: what’s better

All in all, no one can tell you.

No one can tell you whether you will get hit by a bus next month, so you should take all your money now and spend it on an all-inclusive yacht holiday.

Since we can’t tell the future, the best solution is a compromise:

Travel AND save money.

Your job now? Finding ways to make both work.

You can have a nosey around our website – we’ve suggested a few articles in this post that are packed with extra tips that will help you.

And if you are feeling overwhelmed? You can book a consultation call with us and we can out figure out this travel vs saving mess together.