How To Plan A Cheap Vacation: 10 Tips To Avoid Breaking The Bank

How To Plan A Cheap Vacation: 10 Tips To Avoid Breaking The Bank

Learning how to plan a cheap vacation isn’t hard – it’s about knowing the tricks of the travel trade!

A life of full-time travel means figuring out the best ways to travel extremely cheaply. Although I don’t have a rent payment or a car payment, I also don’t want to blow all of my money getting from place to place and seeing the places when I get there. As such, I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to do things as cheaply as possible while I’m on the road.

You don’t have to be a full-time traveler to want to take advantage of the ability to travel cheaply. In this blog post, I’ve put together some of my best tips and resources to help you figure how to plan a cheap vacation – and to help you get to your next vacation quicker!

1. Research, research, research.

My little sister is a research junkie. Seriously, she loves it and would rather spend her days scouring the Internet for the best deals and the best products than anything else. Maybe you’re not as much of an addict for research as she is, but in order to learn how to plan a cheap vacation, you’re going to have to start to love it. You’ll want to research everything – flights, places to stay, things to do, transportation. Planning a cheap vacation isn’t as easy as booking a luxury hotel through a travel agent – it requires some legwork.

2. Let technology help.

Have you ever heard of Skyscanner or Momondo? If you haven’t, get ready to love them. Skyscanner and Momondo are two of the resources listed on The LITMO Life’s Resources Page and they’re both there because I love them. Skyscanner has this amazing feature called an “Everywhere” search, where you can put in your departure airport and search all the destinations in the world. Skyscanner then provides you with a neat little list of destinations, in order from cheapest to most expensive. It’s incredible for the traveler that doesn’t mind taking advice on where to travel! Momondo is a similarly amazing website to find great travel deals.

3. Prioritize your “musts.”

You don’t really have to go to those expensive tourist traps and eat at all of those expensive tourist restaurants, do you? Let me answer that for you: no, you do not. You take vacations to get a break from your everyday life, but also to experience something new. Neither of those things requires spending bucketloads of money. Before you get to any location, prioritze the things you feel like you “must” do – and be smart about it. You don’t have to do everything on every top 10 list you can find about the place. Instead, choose the things you think you’ll love!

4. Be open to staying a town over.

Just because you’re visiting a big city doesn’t mean you have to stay in a big city. I know that what I’m about to say is the equivalent of going to Manhattan and staying in New Jersey – but seriously, it would be wicked cheaper to stay in Jersey! Just because you’re staying somewhere overnight doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of time there – you can still spend all the time in the destination area of your choice (ahem, spend your days in Manhattan instead of Jersey)! But you’ll do it while saving some big bucks on where you sleep.

5. Skip the hotel.

Speaking of sleeping – please ditch the hotel. It’s 2017 and there are loads of other options for places to stay on vacation than just the standard, expensive hotels. You can try airbnb.com or couchsurfing.com or even search for a hostel at hostelword.com. Many hostels have private rooms – it’ll just be a slightly different environment than a hotel with a concierge. You’ll be glad you did – not just because you’ll save beaucoup bucks, but because you’ll often get the chance to meet a local who can tell you even more great things to see and do on your vacay.

6. Scout grocery stores before you arrive.

Yes – you can still eat out at those restaurants that you have read about in all the guidebooks, just not for every meal! Scout out a grocery store near your accommodations before you arrive, and when you get there, stock up on some of your favorites (or some things that look delicious and interesting if you are abroad and can’t find any of your favorites). You’ll be glad you did when you realize you’re not spending upwards of $20 on every meal. It’ll also help give you a break from the huge calories in restaurant foods.

7. Go for cheap or free, but still iconic, activities.

Sure, when you visit Orlando, you should see Disney at least one in your life. That said, you don’t need to visit the tourist trap locations everywhere you go. You can do cheap or free activities like seeing national parks or going on hikes or swimming in famous beaches. You don’t have to break the bank to have an amazing experience on your vacation!

8. Take public transit.

It can be tempting to want to take cabs everywhere in a new place, especially if you aren’t remotely familiar with the public transit system. But you don’t have to learn an entire system to learn how to take a bus or train from point A to point B. Plus, asking for help learning the transit system can force you to meet some locals! It’ll save you a lot of money and the extra time learning is worth it.

9. Ask for discounts.

Don’t be shy: ask if the people you are working with abroad can help you with discounts. For example, if you take a few day trips through the same tour company, ask if they can give you a bulk discount for working exclusively with them. Sure, sometimes it won’t work, and people won’t want to give you discounts, but it’s always worth asking!

10. Be flexible with your dates.

If you aren’t married to flying in and out on certain particular dates, you’ll be able to save a lot more money. Instead of asking for time off from work and then booking your trip, shop around to see what’s cheap and then see what time you can get off. Doing it in reverse will be worth it – sometimes hundreds of dollars in savings!

Or, you could just do what I did and quit your job to travel full-time!

Either way, if you’re interested in learning more about a financially sustainable travel life, check out my new book, “Quit Your Job & Travel The World: The Complete Guide To Making Your Dream A Reality”, available now on Amazon.

The Best Blogging Tools To Start Your New Blog

The Best Blogging Tools To Start Your New Blog

If  you’re looking to start a new blog, check out this list of some of my favorite blogging tools.

Blogging is, obviously, one of my favorite activities. Even before I had The LITMO Life, I created personal blogs in high school and college (obviously, never stuck with them because you can’t be hired by a snooty law firm if your whole life is on the internet!).

Since beginning The LITMO Life, I’ve had several people ask me how difficult it is to start a blog. The truth is: not difficult at all! All you need is a few simple tools to get you going and here, I’ll talk about my favorites.

WP Engine

WP Engine is the best place to host your blog if you plan on running WordPress (and most blogs these days do!). It’s super high performance, it’s made with high-quality blogs that have a lot of visitors in mind and it’s not super expensive. I didn’t start my blog out on WP Engine, but I should have, since I am just going to end up migrating soon!

WordPress

And of course, you need WordPress! WordPress is the platform on which this blog and, as mentioned, most other blogs today run. It enables you to quickly set up a gorgeous website and easily add new blogs every day. Even for the website newbie, WordPress is the god of website building.

Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes is my personal favorite for blogs. A theme is the overall look and feel of the site. For The LITMO Life, I use Divi by Elegant Themes and I use a few of their other tools, as well. For example, my pop-ups are created by their plugin called Bloom. Elegant Themes has a bunch of absolutely beautiful themes for any niche and they’re mostly really easy to use.

Google Keyword Planner

Now that you have your blog all setup, you’ll have to figure out what to write about! Google Keyword Planner will help you do research on what keywords people are searching for and how high the competition is on those keywords. Their algorithm is such that you need to be running ads to see detailed information, but you can still get some help even without those ads.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a plugin for WordPress which helps you optimize your posts for a certain keyword (once you’ve chosen it after doing the research, of course!). It’s super simple to use – all you have to do is plug in the keyword and Yoast will tell you exactly what you need to edit to make your post rank highly for that keyword.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is currently one of my favorite social media tools, though with me, that’s often subject to change. Hootsuite allows you to schedule your posts in advance (I use it for Facebook and Twitter) so that you can set a few posts to go and forget about it! Beats spending all day tied to your computer or smart phone.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is my favorite tool for building an email list. With Mailchimp, you can easily set up automation, you can create campaigns to send to your subscribers, and best of all – you can do all these things in style! I’m a huge fan of Mailchimp.

Canva

Canva is for those of us who really suck at graphic design (like me) and don’t want to spend a ton of time learning photoshop. Their incredibly simple software helps create stunning graphics, whether it’s a logo or a pic for your blog or even an infographic.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is another tool to help you figure out what to write about. You can type in a word or term and BuzzSumo tells you what posts got shared the most for that word or term. It’s also really helpful when you’re out of ideas – don’t ever copy someone else’s posts, but let BuzzSumo help with inspiration!

Google Analytics

After using all these tools, you’re going to want to know how your blog is doing. Enter: Google Analytics. Google Analytics is perfect for number junkies who want to know exactly how their blog is performing, who is coming to their site, when, how old they are, etc.

Pinterest

The blog sharing tools aren’t just centered around Twitter and Facebook anymore. Pinterest is a great tool for anyone looking to drive traffic to their blog. You can also cruise through other people’s blogs on Pinterest and help find people to connect with in your field.

There you have it – my favorite blogging tools. So what’re you waiting for? Go get started on your blog today!

How To Deal With A Crisis Of Country

How To Deal With A Crisis Of Country

I wasn’t raised very religious, so I don’t know exactly what it means to have a crisis of faith. I always pictured something like a complete disconnect between everything you had been raised to believe and everything you were now experiencing. Maybe that’s wrong, but in my head, I viewed a crisis of faith as something that made it seriously difficult, if not impossible, to continue forward in your faith the way you did before.

After the past several days, however, I can at least start to imagine a little better what that might look like, because I’m having a crisis of country. Since the results of the election were announced last Tuesday, I’ve done very little. I’ve been cruising social media a lot more than I did before, I’ve been sleeping a lot, I haven’t been working out a ton and I haven’t been very productive.

In fact, it’s sort of taking everything I have even to just write this short blog post.

I’ve never seen as much hate and sheer stupidity in my life as I have in just the past six days. People whose opinions I once really respected, people who I thought of as intelligent human beings, people who I thought had an ounce of compassion within them, have been revealing themselves left and right as hateful, idiotic Trump supporters.

Add to that the incredible amount of individuals I see posting on social media about the protests, saying “this is what happens when you give trophies for participation” – I’m stunned. I’m stunned I’ve been spending my time and energy with so many people that either don’t get it or are actively trying not to.

The truth is, it didn’t feel right to me to just go back to posting about travel and gallivanting around the world, as though something huge and history-making hadn’t just happened in the country I call home. Now, the posts and articles I’m seeing are changing from just sheer shock and anger to “do something” posts – informative articles about how those of us that were unhappy with the results of the election can begin to make a real difference by getting more involved.

While I appreciate that there are so many people ready to get to work in this country, I honestly don’t know if it will matter.

For a while, in the days after the election, I was really angry. That anger hasn’t gone anywhere – in fact, it’s probably gotten worse each time I delete someone from my online world that I thought was a decent human being – but it does have an added helping of sadness with it, now.

I plan to attend some of the protests and I plan to place calls to my representatives. And I plan to do whatever else I can, while I’m here. And I plan to do as much as I can while I’m abroad. But that’s the important part: I’m still planning on leaving for my travels. And now, more than ever, I really don’t want to come back.

So that’s my crisis of country. I’m sure really soon The LITMO Life will go back to being about the joyful side of travel, but for the past few days, it hasn’t felt right. I want to do the work to make the country I’ve called home my entire life a better place – from afar. Because I don’t want to live in it anymore.

Maybe that’s unpatriotic, or maybe it’s just self-care. When you get burned out from a job, you’re told to take some time off, nurture yourself, and find your center. Maybe leaving the country is just that for me, and I’ll find in a few months that I miss it and want to come home. Or maybe I’ll realize that this wasn’t the place for me from the beginning. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t believe in blind loyalty to anything.

The only thing I do believe in, however, is trying to make the world a better place for the people that are still in it. So I’ll do the work – but it won’t be from within the borders of the country.

No part of me feels a desire to stay in this country that is filled with hateful, idiotic Trump supporters. People that can’t understand the basic logic of “supporting a racist means supporting racism.” Or people that can look me in the eye and tell me their views on Trump’s “policies” of the economy were more important to them than standing up for women and minorities.

So back to the title of this blog post – how do you deal with a crisis of country? I have no idea.

Featured Image: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

How To Deal With Stress While Traveling Full-Time

How To Deal With Stress While Traveling Full-Time

Wondering how to deal with stress while traveling? The truth is, it’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition, but there are a few (non-traditional) things that really help!

It’s no secret that I’ve dealt with my fair share of stress since starting my journey of full-time travel. I’m a Type A, high-tension former attorney, so it’s no wonder I have a hard time calming my brain down.

Traveling is wonderful in a lot of ways – for me, the most important way is that it’s immensely freeing. I can do whatever I want whenever I want. This also ends up being a huge negative: I realized I like having a bit of structure and it’s harder to maintain that structure when your environment is always changing.

In the interest of maintaining my sanity (which is tested on a very regular basis when traveling full-time and thinking about things like fitness, friends, and money), I’ve developed a few particular strategies to keep sane. These aren’t just relevant to a life of full-time travel, though, they are relevant to any kind of travels.

Keep in mind: some of these tips are like the trite (yet effective) advice you’ll hear other places. But some of them are pure fucking genius.

1. Meditate

I’ve spoken before about my use of Hal Elrod’s Miracle Morning method, and the inclusion of meditation. People constantly talk about meditation because it works – no question about it. But meditation doesn’t have to mean sitting perfectly still with your legs crossed on a soft mat in the middle of a peaceful room. Meditation can be as simple as shutting your eyes for a few minutes and just letting your brain be still. Whatever small amount of time you have to devote to it, do it.

2. Don’t neglect physical exercise.

I know – it’s more advice you don’t want to hear unless you are a workout junkie, but the truth is – you have to work out. You have to. Give yourself some time to bitch, cruise Twitter once or twice and then get your ass to the gym or outdoors. It’s not about being thin. It’s not even necessarily about being fit. It’s about the way physical exercise will affect your mental well-being. Just do it. Just DO it.

3. Hydrate

Did you know that if you feel fatigued, with a headache and exhaustion, you may just be missing some water? It’s true: all of the symptoms I just mentioned can be caused by just some mild dehydration. It’s crazy how crappy you can feel just by not drinking enough water. Somewhere on my U.S. road trip, I realized that I wasn’t feeling super well and I started drinking a full glass of water first thing every morning. It doesn’t sound like much, but it helped me start the day right and kept me drinking water all day.

4. Occasionally, tell people to fuck off.

This is some advice you probably won’t find in those “let’s all love each and be stress-free” websites and magazines. Occasionally, you’re going to need to tell people to fuck off. It’s just a fact. People can be annoying, and while you’re traveling full-time, you’ll often find yourself in situations where people treat you like garbage, for some reason. Whether it’s a company representative that has kept you on hold for over three hours when you’re stranded in a city because of a mistake they made or a frienemy from home making snide comments about your new life. Sometimes, people are great. And sometimes, they deserve to be told to fuck off. So tell them.

5. Do some drugs.

Do you ever notice how it’s perfectly acceptable to joke about drinking wine at the end of a long day – like it’s not also an actual drug that can impact you negatively in a lot of ways – but it’s not acceptable to joke about doing other drugs? Now, I’m not advocating you go out and do some heroin (really – don’t do that, ever) but I am advocating you find your own drug. Maybe it’s an actual drug in a state where that drug is legal. Maybe it’s just an activity that you love – like running or cooking or reading. Don’t get addicted if it is an actual drug, but for fuck’s sake give yourself something more than stereotypical alcohol. Fuck the advice about unwinding with a glass of wine – go find your drug.

6. Create small rituals you can maintain over time.

Traveling full-time means you won’t be able to create big rituals for yourself. Things like going to your favorite coffee shop down the road or eating lunch with your colleagues every day. But don’t lose the comfort of rituals completely: create small rituals that you can do anywhere. Maybe it’s just traveling with your favorite tea and travel mug and drinking it every morning. Maybe it’s even just watching the same show on your smartphone on Netflix once a month. Whatever it is, find something small that works for you and keeps you sane.

7. Avoid the news sometimes.

I love being informed and I think it’s important that we all stay informed about the world around us. That said, sometimes people are fucking awful. And they do awful things. Sometimes, to stay sane, the only thing you can do is shut off NPR, pop on some Justin Bieber and forget the world.

So these are my methods of staying relatively low-stress. They may not work for everyone. But try some of my strategies – I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.

What are some unusual things you do to de-stress?

How To Find Things To Do With No Plans

How To Find Things To Do With No Plans

Sometimes, when you’re traveling, you head off to a city with a long list of things you want to do, places you want to see, and people you want to visit. Those trips usually come with the most excitement and anticipation, because you’ve known what you wanted to do for weeks, or even sometimes, months!

Occasionally, however, you end up in a city with no clue what to do. Since I’ve been wandering around the States aimlessly for the past few months, this has happened to me more than once.

Below are some of my favorite places to find things to do when I have absolutely no plans.

1. Local newspapers

A lot of times, local newspapers will have community calendars with long lists of events happening in the area. Even better: you can often find these local papers at a coffee shop for free. Although it seems old-fashioned, local papers have the in on ALL of the events happening in the area, not just those deemed cool enough to be on the web or on an app.

2. Facebook groups/events

…That said though, Facebook groups and events are also both great for finding local events. You can search for an area you have interest in (for example, “Portland Vegans” or “San Diego Runners”) or you can just search the city and see what comes up. I’m a huge fan of using social media to connect in person.

3. Tourist apps

There are obviously several tourist apps designed for the express purpose of helping you find things to do, but two of my favorites are TripAdvisor and Roadtrippers. TripAdvisor has a list of the most popular things to do in any area and Roadtrippers has several different categories in which to find cool activities and attractions (they even have an “abandoned” category where you can check out old abandoned houses and buildings).

4. Ask a local

Nothing beats asking someone in the know! I’ve said before that I’ll start a conversation with my barista or server about what to see in the area, and this is also a great way to find out about can’t miss events. Plus, you might make a new friend out of it. 🙂

5. Meetup

I’ve, of course, extolled the benefits of Meetup.com before and that’s because it’s a pretty fantastic resource for making friends and finding things to do. Even if you don’t hop on meetup with the sole intention of meeting new people, you will definitely find events that pique your interest!

As you can see, it’s not hard to just roll into a city and find a bunch of cool things to do. I’ve done it almost every week for the past three months. 🙂

What are some resources that you like for finding things to do?