In our American culture, finances are generally a taboo subject, but even so, the question we hear most often when talking about our current and future travel plans is how do we afford it? We want to answer this question here because we want people to know how they can do it too, if they really want to. We don’t have all the answers, but we’ll certainly share what we’ve done.

We travel economically

We do this mostly because we love to be outdoors, explore wild places, and we love to camp. These are fairly inexpensive activities. If we’re going to buy a plane ticket, we try and stay wherever we’re flying as long as possible to make the ticket less expensive in the daily cost average. So, instead of flying to West Africa for a 2-3 month bike tour, we’re planning to go for at least a six month bike tour. Once we’re there our daily expenses will be low compared to more developed countries.

We live cheap and make saving a priority

Between his trips, Dave has lived much of the last ten years in a wall tent in the woods near where he has worked as an engineer in Flagstaff, AZ. Michelle has lived car-free since January, 2002. What are the average person’s yearly expenses for owning a car between payments, insurance, license, upkeep and, now more than ever, gas? It’s not just the big expenses, but the little ones add up too. For instance, Michelle gave up a daily latte habit a few years ago which saved about $1,000 a year. Eek!

We realize not everyone wants to make the choices we have, and we don’t judge those who live differently. We just really like to be outside, and we’ll do anything we can to play outside as much as possible! Hopefully we’re giving others good ideas, info, or at least good reading material with this lifestyle and resulting website.

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In order to help support the website, we’ve included ads that link to products and stores that we think you might be interested in. If you buy from these affiliates, we’ll get a small percentage of the sale at no added cost to you. Even if you click on one product ad and end up buying something else at that store, we’ll still get a commission. So, shopping through our site is one way to show support for us and this website.

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Whether you shop or donate through the site or not, we thank you for reading and we welcome your questions and comments.