“How’d you save all that money to travel?”

(To be honest- it costs less than you’d think to travel for 30 months. I’ll release a budget post soon. I promise. In the meantime—)

1) I worked in the video game industry. I was an hourly-contractor. I worked 100-hour weeks many times over the 10-year span of my career. Once I was out of debt I started planning for this trip- and saved for 9 months during my last contract.

2) I don’t have kids, a house, or anything that ties me down. I do have a cat- but she’s more independent than I am.

3) During my last (9 month) contract, I sold everything, minimized my life, and curbed my spending.

“Go on….”

1) The 100-item challenge forced me to sell everything that wasn’t NECESSARY. I spent years doing this process. It started with me putting crap in boxes and into storage. Then I went through the boxes and realized “I’ve lived without this crap for years! I don’t need it.” (And I was right).

2) When I moved to Seattle (for my last contract), I said to myself, “Self, you have 100 items. If you go to Target to buy something- you need to get rid of one of your 100 items.” (This curbed my spending big time). It also taught me a lot about my spending habits– like that I “stress-shopped” (as most Americans do).

3) I got rid of every single thing that was a occurring payment. Cellphone being the exception. Hulu, Netflix, magazine subscriptions– all went away.

4) I opened a Chase Sapphire card- that gave me points on purchases. I started doing the whole “opening up credit cards just for the points” thing.

5) I wrote down (in an excel doc) every single purchase over 20$. After 3 months, I lowered that number down to 10$. Then 5$. Then anything that was more than 1$ got marked down. This was a great mental exercise for “omg. I don’t want to write THAT down.”

During this exercise, I realized that I was spending about 175$ on coffee a month. (I lived in Seattle- so that’s kinda understandable. But what was even worse was that it was subsidized Starsux coffee…. AND I STILL SPENT THAT MUCH!?) Disgust in myself curbed that (until I went into crunch-time and they offered discount cookies after 4pm).

How do you save money?

EDIT:

I just heard a Marketplace piece that talks about this more.