Nomad Wallet

Travel More. You Can Afford It.

Research Says You Won’t be Able to Travel in Retirement

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Ads for retirees often show images of happy seniors enjoying trips to exotic locations, but that’s only the reality for a small number of people. For most retirees, that’s just wishful thinking.

Many people will not have money to afford retirement travel.

There have been quite a few surveys on this subject and they reveal the same thing: people want to travel when they retire, but they’re not doing much to make that happen.

HSBC Bank’s Future of Retirement study surveyed 1,000 Americans and found that 40 percent of them wish to travel extensively when they retire, but 30 percent admit to falling short of their retirement goals.

Another survey, by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, asked 1,500 Americans and found that travel is one of the top two goals for retirement — second only to spending time with family and friends. Yet less than half of the respondents are confident that they’ll be able to afford to travel when they retire.

Not surprisingly, the top change retirees would have made if they could do it all over again is to save more money for travel. Just below that is to budget expenses more carefully.

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What You Don’t Know About DCC Could Cost You Hundreds of Dollars in Credit Card Fees

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If you have ever shopped overseas with your credit card at all, there’s a good chance that you have encountered dynamic currency conversion (DCC). But you may never have heard about it at all, even as it slowly burns a hole in your pocket.

What is DCC?

DCC is a service created to make it easier for you to use your credit card when you’re abroad.

Specifically, it gives you the option to charge a purchase in your home currency instead of the local currency where you’re shopping. For example, if you’re in the UK and paying with an American credit card, you can choose to pay for the transaction in US dollars instead of in pounds.

This sounds like a good thing. What’s the problem?
The problem is that merchants don’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts.

When you allow a retailer to charge your purchase in your home currency through the DCC service, he can convert the local price to your home currency using any rate he wants. This is probably not the best exchange rate you can get, to say the least.

On top of this, you have to pay various extortionate fees. There’s the “convenience” fee that could amount to 3% to 7% of the transaction. And strangely, despite paying in your home currency, your bank might still charge you a foreign transaction fee, which usually hovers between 2% and 3%.

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The Only 3 Pieces of Exercise Equipment You Need (They All Fit in a Carry-On!)

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I’ve sporadically had gym memberships in the past. I like getting my money’s worth once I’ve paid for something, so having the membership was a good motivator for me to exercise.

But because I move a lot, it becomes too much work to always look for a new gym every time. Beyond the hassles of having to check out numerous gyms before choosing one each time, it was also a pain to tailor my membership to my typically short stay — I always end up paying more than the long-term members.

After my last gym membership expired, I decided to start working out at home.

As I mentioned last week (in this blog post: 15 Easy Five-Minute Fixes to Save Thousands of Dollars This Year), forgoing a gym membership could save you as much as $800 a year.

The typical gym membership costs $40 to $50 a month, which works out to be $480 to $600 a year. But after adding various fees, you could easily spend $800 a year, according to CNBC.

Of course this also makes exercising during travel much easier.

I’ve figured out that I only need three things to work out. And I can take all these three things in my carry-on whenever I travel.

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Affording Travel Interview With Nora: Left a Six-Figure Job to Travel Full Time as a Writer

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Today, I’m interviewing Nora Dunn, The Professional Hobo. Nora used to be a financial planner, but she said goodbye to her six-figure income to embrace a life of travel. She has traveled full-time for 6 years and has only recently decided to make Grenada her home base.

Nora managed to create this lifestyle by saving up before traveling and slowly building a freelance writing career over the years. She also uses a variety of tools so she can travel full time for less. Her accommodation and transport expenses are ridiculously low! She has just finished writing her e-book How to Get Free Accommodation Around the World; it’s a great resource for anyone who wants to try free accommodation options.

Read on to discover her secrets! Click here.

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15 Easy Five-Minute Fixes to Save Thousands of Dollars This Year

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This being the last blog post of the year, I feel it’s only appropriate that I write about something that often shows up in new year’s resolutions: saving money.

These little tricks won’t take much time at all to implement and they can result in big savings with minimal effort. In fact, you can probably do some of these things before getting ready for the countdown party tonight.

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Affording Travel: How Steve Jobs the College Drop-Out Paid for His Trip to India in the ’70s

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In India, he met a cab driver who brought him to a crappy hotel, a market vendor who sold him watered-down milk and a holy man who shaved his head. He took too many rides in overheated, overcrowded buses. He got dysentery and lost 40 pounds.

These sound like things you’d read about a broke budget traveler; not things you’d expect Steve Jobs to have gone through.

But it’s true: before he was known as the CEO of one of the most successful corporations in the world, Steve Jobs was a budget traveler. Not just any budget traveler either — he was a hippie college drop-out who enjoyed smoking a joint and dropping LSD every once in a while. Like a bad ’70s stereotype, he also went to India in search of enlightenment.

So how did Steve Jobs pay for his trip to India?

Read on to find out. Click here.

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5 Practical Travel Lessons I Learned from a Taiwan Trip Gone Wrong

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When the lines of people in the aisles thin out, I got up and scanned the plane. I spotted a flight attendant who didn’t seem too busy.

“Excuse me,” I said, “could you tell me what ‘Internet cafe’ is in Chinese?”

I spoke a little Mandarin, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, fluently. I repeated what the flight attendant said a few times, then handed him a scrap of paper, “Would you mind writing that down for me?”

It was a little after 4 a.m. and I had no idea I was about to experience a series of unfortunate events throughout the day.

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How 5 Location-Independent Bloggers Afford to Travel

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As I surf the web, I sometimes come across blog posts where the blogger reveals how he or she manages money while on the road.

And because these location-independent bloggers have done a great job at explaining how they support themselves, I feel like interviewing them would only repeat information that’s already available on their own websites.

So I decided to present some of those blog posts here.

I have chosen five location-independent bloggers who have continue to make money as they travel.

Because these are prominent bloggers, they may also make money from their websites. But as far as I can tell, they can all survive without blogging income.

Because it’s been a while since some of these blog posts were written, I also reached out to these location-independent bloggers to check if they have any updates.

I think it’s interesting how they do very different things to earn money while traveling. :)

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Travel With Passive Income: Is It Really Possible?

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Passive income has become an overused cliche, thanks to overzealous internet marketers. There’s a lot of backlash out there against the idea that you can laze around on the beach as money flows into your bank account. Forbes has gone so far as to call passive income “a dangerous fantasy”.

The problem is this disillusioned view of passive income is it defines passive income so narrowly as to render it useless. Obviously you can’t create passive income by just putting up a bad website in a few days and letting it run completely on its own for years after that.

But passive income, as money that you regularly earn without having to put in much maintenance work, totally exists. There’s even a Wikipedia page about it. It’s not some new, earth-shattering idea.

In fact, most people are working towards building a kind passive income

It’s called retirement savings. (And if the news is to be believed, nobody’s doing a very good job at it.)

What is retirement savings, really, if not a way to make sure that Future You will have enough money without having to work? Only instead of having something that produces regular income, Future You will have enough cash stashed away to last decades.

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Affording Travel Interview With Ania and Jon: Hitchhiking — It’s Safer Than You Think!

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You’ve seen it at least once on TV and have heard more than one horror story about it. It has a bad reputation, so despite it being a free way to travel, you might have reservations about doing it yourself. After all, the hitchhikers in the movies almost always end up dead or something.

I’m one of the many people who have been too chicken to try hitchhiking.

My interviewees today, though, have hitchhiked all over the world for years and they’re still in one piece. In fact, they say the only danger they’ve ever encountered was irresponsible drivers. And who hasn’t been driven around by one of those? Sometimes I even pay a bad driver for his services.

So without further ado…

Meet the Hitchhikers: Ania and Jon of Hitchhikers’ Handbook

To read the interview, click here.

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