Over the coming months I’mm going to help you arrange every aspect of your adventure as part of Grand Adventures.
The crucial part is to begin saving now. The more money you have, the further you can travel and the shinier kit you can buy. So if you are serious about incorporating a big adventure into your life (and I guarantee you that you’ll never regret it when you are old and looking back on your life), then you need to start saving now.
There are two ways to get more money in life:
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Earn more
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Spend less
I’mm not exactly the right person to help with point 1! So here are a list of ideas to help you start saving money.
Remember, in order to save £1000 for your adventure you need to save less than £3 each day for a year.
Think about all the places you spend money and see where you can make some savings. Clearly they won’t all apply to you, but I hope they’ll get you thinking about the small changes you can make to your life which will help lead to a big adventure and a big change in your life.
I’mm not advocating big money-saving plans, just tiny tweaks to your life that you probably will hardly notice but which will accumulate to big piles of cash.
If you’re serious about saving money then do some Googling – there are countless blogs far more detailed and specific on the subject than this one post. But I hope this little list will get you thinking about how easy it is to gradually accumulate £1000 for your adventure.
- Cut out your morning coffee and you’ve almost made it to your £1000 in a year target already. This website illustrates this nicely.
- Commuting: can you work from home occasionally? Share a lift? Cycle one day a week?
- Home bills: turn your thermostat down a notch and put on a jumper. Wash your clothes at a lower temperature. You can even have an occasional cold shower (good for the soul)! Cancel or downgrade TV packages / Lovefilm / Netflix etc.
- Eating out: do it less. And when you do eat out, drink less alcohol with your meal. Get loads of vouchers from Money Saving Expert.
- Lunches: if you work in an office and ‘pop out for a sandwich’ at lunchtime you probably spend over £1000 a year on your soggy sandwiches. There’s easy money to be saved there. Carry your own water bottle too.
- Alcohol: drink less. A pint in a pub often costs £3.50. One fewer pint each week and you’ve saved almost 20% of your £1000. If you’re tempted for “just one more pint” consider that the price of that pint can easily equate to a day on the road in some of the world’s wildest, cheapest and most exciting regions. Which would you rather have?
- Smoking: stop it.
- Food: eat more veg. An average UK family of four spends £5300 per year on food. A moment’s Googling leads me to this site of recipes that will feed a family for £1168 per year. This isn’t a cookery blog so I’mll leave it to you to look at what you spend on food and where you can make savings.
- Only buy stuff you really, really need.
- Buy second hand. eBay is a great place to buy all the kit you need for your adventure. You can save a fortune this way. Much more on this in the coming weeks.
- If you do your supermarket shopping online make sure to look through the special offers section and stock up on non-perishables when they are half price. (did you know Americans use an average of 23.6 toilet rolls per capita a year [gotta love Google]).
- Look around your house at all your stuff. Ask do I need this? Would I miss it if it was gone? Does it have any re-sale value? Get rid of 10 things. Sell it on eBay. Immediately transfer the proceeds to your Adventure1000 account.
Having written this list I’mm struck that quite a large number of them won’t make your life much more miserable but are generally good things to do in life anyway (cycle more, drink less, eat more veg, watch TV less), regardless of whether you get a £1000 adventure out of it in the end or not…
Please leave your own suggestions in the comments section below – I’mm sure we can get a good list of suggestions.
My new book, Grand Adventures, is out now.
It’s designed to help you dream big, plan quick, then go explore.
The book contains interviews and expertise from around 100 adventurers, plus masses of great photos to get you excited.I would be extremely grateful if you bought a copy here today!
I would also be really thankful if you could share this link on social media with all your friends – http://goo.gl/rIyPHA. It honestly would help me far more than you realise.
Thank you so much!
Grand Adventures from Alastair Humphreys on Vimeo.
*pushes up glasses* Keeping a spreadsheet of your out goings and savings always helps.
Al, I’ve signed up to your newsletter but not received a newsletter yet? Can you subscribe me please 🙂
In 5-9 we trust
1. Don’t forget to free cycle for wants before spending
2. Think about how long you need to work to pay for ‘stuff’, I have found that to be a really good incentive NOT to spend money.
Slightly troubled by the juxtaposition of Americans, toilet rolls and per capita. I’d offer an alternative but my Latin isn’t up to it.
I agree with Peter and Nikki. Keeping track of expenses and savings is certainly a great idea. It not only controls your spending behaviour but also it motivates to see the saving figure growing! In addition to that I would throw in the “budgeting” idea again since that’s what we usually do when hitting the road. So setting a weekly budget (maybe even use a wee formula in the spreadsheet to display daily budget) and withdraw that money from your account on a weekly basis as well. Spending real money instead of paying by card makes you visibly spending money while you hand that over. So the choice seems to be something along the lines of “cardless or careless”… 🙂
If you use a smart phone download an app like Expense Manager (free) and keep track of your spending that way. It’s so much easier to do it immediately as you spend. (Beware of nights in the pub, they always catch me out and I can’t remember what I spent the next day). The various accounts can be exported to a spreadsheet for detailed analysis.