17 Ways to Cut Your Expenses & Save Money for Travel in 2025

Get out a sheet of paper and write down all your set expenses: rent/mortgage, car payments, cable/streaming bill, cell phone, insurance, school payments, etc. Tally them up.

Then write down all your discretionary spending. This is what you spend on food, movie nights, drinks, shopping, that daily coffee from Starbucks, your daily midday snack, and other similar things. If you don’t know what you spend money on, go track your expenses for a two-week period, see what you spend, and come back.

Add that all up. What did you get? Probably a large sum of money.

And I bet there will be many expenses you didn’t realize were there. Financial experts call these “phantom expenses” — we never know they are there because the expenses are so small. People bleed money without realizing it. A dollar here and a dollar there…it adds up. Even a daily bottle of water or candy bar can make a substantial difference over the course of a year.

What does this have to do with travel?

Well, one of the main reasons why we think we can’t travel the world is money. “I can’t afford it,” people say to me, “I have too many expenses.”

Most of us certainly have expenses we can’t cut (though remember when you travel the world long-term, many of those expenses disappear), but if we cut our phantom expenses, reduce our set costs, and find other ways to save we can build our travel fund much more quickly.

Cutting your daily expenses, being more frugal, and downgrading to a simpler way of living will allow you to save money for your trip around the world without having to find extra sources of income. Of course, the lower your income, the longer it will take to save enough to travel. But longer does not mean never. A little bit every day adds up to a lot over a long period of time.

Here are some simple and creative ways to cut your expenses, make money, and get on the road sooner:

1. Track your spending

As mentioned in the introduction, most people don’t have a budget so the first thing you need to do to save money is to know where you’re spending it. In an age where you tap an app and a car arrives, it’s easy to not think about how much we spend. You can use a spreadsheet or one of these websites. You’ll probably be surprised at where your money goes once you start paying attention. Start tracking your expenses — and keep doing so — so you can keep cutting out the low-hanging fruit and find where you’re spending money.
 

2. Set up a separate…