How to travel on a average income (€33.000 net)

Intro

Being full-time traveler is a dream come true for us! Another dream we had for a long time was to have kids. We kept postponing because we did not have a ‘real’ house for example, and were always on the move. We thougt having a home is very important for children and now that we have that, we learned how to keep our travel lifestyle alive, while also providing the stability for our daughter. In this article you’ll learn how we do it, and that you dont need a lot of money to have the best of both worlds.

No house swapping, no living of savings or rice and beans, no side-hussles, but actual freedom to travel the world completely on your terms. How to do this with a modest income while still saving money.

Because when people think of travelers they think of people that won the lottery, or earn tens of thousands of euros with passive income. They think that that lifestyle is not of for them because they are not rich enough to do it. Well, we beg the differ. 

We have traveled the world for almost 7 years now. In all honestly this was only possible for us without having a home and kids. But, now that we do have those. Let us explain how we can still do this for 4 months per year. All the wile still having a job, mortgage, and a social life.

How do we travel a minimum of 4 months per year?

Our family is unfortunately also not one of those families that earn passive income, or won the lottery. In fact, Marc has a “normal” job as a graphic designer and Debby does not even have a job… However, we are still able to travel for a minimum of 4 months per year while our homebase is there for us in the Netherlands waiting for us whenever we come back.

It all starts with a few simple basic ingredients, in order of difficulty:

• Having a accurate insight of your spending and income (this is crucial). If you don’t have a 100% accurate insight yet, read our article about how this can be done easily. If you skip this step you risk the whole system falling apart.
• Willing to take some sacrifices here and there in terms of comfort or material ownership. We don’t own anything basically other then our furniture, stuff for our baby and what’s in our backpacks.
• An income source you can do fully remote. This can be freelance, flexjobs, passive income, XXX, or XXX . Or just quiet your job and travel the world on your savings like we did in 2019.

How much do you need?

Let me briefly paint a picture of our situation. First thing we did was calculate what we NEED t o earn to survive on the basics. Next we set a target to have around 12.000 euro per year left to travel 4 months out of the year. Meaning a travel budget of 3.000 euro per month including flights. To calculate what we needed we started from the top of the pyramid. It goes in our case something like this:

• Gross income:
  Marc works as a freelance graphic designer earning a very modest annual income of a around 50.000 euro per year before taxes. Meaning, around 40.000 per year net after taxes have been deducted. This might seem high, but keep in mind for a freelancer, a lot of costs still need to be deducted from this.

• Net income
  For example, of that 40.000 our pension has to be deducted still. Which make a huge difference obviously. Let’s say this is around 7000 euro per year. Leaving us with 33.000 euro to spend. Now this number comes closer to the average household income for 1 person right? We are certainly not richer than most people. We just figured out a way to let our money generate freedom for us we wanted to much.

• Fixed expenses (year round)
  If you find a way to keep these costs low it will give you so many more opportunities as you might have thought. It’s like earning an extra few thousand euros by doing absolutely nothing. Its basically like magic! Those extra bucks you are going to need at the end, so bear with me because its going to get technical from here on out:

For example. Our fixed monthly costs without rent is €492 in total for a family of 3. This consists of health insurance, a good travel insurance and mandatory insurance for our car at home. This also included optional things like: Netflix, Spotify and American Express. So you can save even more if you don’t have these. Saving every euro possible here is the difference between 2 weeks vacation or a 4 month world trip.
Then our rent, taxes for the house and utilities like energy bills and stuff. These costs us around €1000 per year month together. Together with the 492 per month this comes to a total of 17.904 per year. These costs are undebatable, and need to be set apart first.

The total was €33000 – €17909. That’s €15091 left to travel.

• Variable costs (at home)
  In this category you can also save a ton! We spend around €700 per month combined on groceries, date nights, shopping and other misc expenses. In total this is €8400 per year. Which makes the new total of money left to travel around € 6691. Hmm.. this is pretty low. We did not even include our yearly savings yet, which we do for about €6000 per year.  So that minus our savings would mean we would only have 691 left, which is basically nothing. A lot of people would give up on this point, and very understandable. You just sliced your monthly subscriptions in half and decided not to eat out for the rest of the year, and you gain nothing?! Not really. Because now the real earning starts. Let us explain.

How to “win” your savings back

How to save more without actually saving more. That’s the real question we are looking for. We start with the thing that everybody can do, regardless where you are in the world and what your situation is. We start by:

• Replacing a few months of that €8400 per year of variable expenses with travel months to turn that into actual €€€. Let’s say you want to travel 4 months per year right? We just figured out that that 4 months at home costs you €700 of variable costs. Four times €700 is €2800 what you will “earn back” by not being at home. If you then can also pause your utility bills for 4 months then you can save an additional €800 probably. Let’s be modest and leave the utility bill out of this calculation and just keep it as a nice bonus for later. Remember our €12000 travel budget we set at the beginning? That is just reduced that to €9200 because of this little trick. 

The complicated part

• Here is where it gets tricky, how can we earn an additional €9200 without working? There are actually multiple ways of doing this, depending on where you live. So let’s split it up in two categories: People who live in the Netherlands and people that live anywhere else. Also keep in mind that these things now start to be specific case to case. Your situation you might end up with even more then us. You can always ask us for help to see what is possible in your specific situation.
  
  

If you ARE from Netherlands

This part is not only specific for people from the Netherlands, but we can simply not cover all countries in the world. You might have a very similar situation in your country as ours, but in this case we are going to talk about our own situation in the Netherlands to keep it fair. Double check this yourself because you might miss out on thousands of euros, even if you live somewhere else.

• Subletting your home (legally) is very difficult in the Netherlands. So we are not even going to discuss that here. Than, what can be a different way to earn €9200? Well,  we can do this by double checking your taxes and how they are setup now. The Netherlands has a very complicated tax system, but if you know how to maneuver it sometimes it can be very beneficial. This we can do by government surcharges (toeslagen).

If you have a child you could get child support (kinderbijslag), child care (kind gebonden budget), healthcare allowance (zorgtoeslag) and rental allowance (huurtoeslag). This is not illegal, also not for this purpose. In fact, there is millions of unused surcharge euros that the government literally begs you to apply for. You have a right to!
If you earn a similar amount of money as us (50.000 before taxes), your total government surcharges will be upwards of €7500 euro per year! What is €9200 minus €7500? €1700. €1700 is all what we need to find somewhere to make your dream a reality. 

Your choice

• To make this less complicated you can just leave it at this and use your €10300 euro your just freed up to start your trip. That’s totally doable. You can travel Asia (with a baby) for as less then €80 per day if you use our core travel principles and book our ready-to-book trips. That is more than 4 months of travel already! If you want to visit one of the more expensive places we’ve visited, like the USA on €150 per day this total will still give you more than 2 months. Don’t forget that you also still had the €800 bonus we did not even calculate in part XXX which comes very much in handy now.

If you want however, you can take this a little further and go for the full €12000+ travel budget there is an even more specific way to reach this… If you are a freelancer from the Netherlands and are curious about paying €2800 less taxes (or sometimes even more) read our article about workers rewards. This will give you an additional increase that will help you reach €12000 easily.

If you ARE NOT from Netherlands, or just want even more

In this case it get a little more complicated, but there are ways:

1. Subletting is the way to go: Most countries are way less strict about subletting your home and this makes it very easy to save an additional €9200 in 4 months. That’s a €2300 per month you need to ask to make €9200 back in 4 months. We however do not have specific experience with this.
2. Try to move to a vacation or tiny home: This is for most people the best option to keep their yearly costs down and therefore the travel budget up. An one time investment of €40.000 euro will buy a fully furnished vacation home where you can live 8 months out of the year. It’s a investment that is pretty steep. But consider this: Even in the Netherlands these houses ARE allowed to be subletted. And if you don’t, then the montly costs are sometimes €0. Let’s be modest again and calculate with a lease of the land of €4800 per year. This is €7200 per year less then a normal rental house. This €7200 can be spend 100% on your trip that you would not be able to do otherwise. Next to that, lets say you sublet it for 2 months out of the 4 months for €80 euro per night. This is an additional €4800 you’ll receive by doing nothing. And this is just for 2 months. Imagine for 6 months, or a year! You’ll be making back that initial big investment in no time and from that moment is pure profit.

Are you still with us?

Until now you have already earned back €10300. Even without surcharges. All the while you did not work a second more and paid already for all your yearly fixed costs, rent, pension, groceries and saved €6000 euro per year! See how all this works now? You are able to live a normal lifestyle next your dream the travel lifestyle without feeling guilty of your spending, or your life choices.

If you follow everything in this guide you’ll see that making an additional €12000 without paying income tax is very doable. Imagine if you combine all the tips togheter… How much would you save then? But that’s a story for another day 🙂