If you’ve been poring over social media photos of other people’s exotic and exciting travels, your own life might have begun to seem a little humdrum. How do they do it, you might wonder? How do they find the time and money when you can barely keep up with your bills or do much more than go to work? There are plenty of ways to shift your life around to incorporate travel, starting with the tips below.

Cut Your Expenses

One thing you may start to notice about people who do a lot of traveling and who aren’t independently wealthy is that they tend to save most of their money for that. You may be surprised at how much more disposable income you have when you only shop for necessities, you limit eating out to special occasions and you drop your gym membership and get rid of your car in favor of cycling to work every day. Being able to utilize Earnest student loan refinancing can help as well, lowering the payments that you make each month. See if you can cut back on your utilities. If you’re a renter, think about moving somewhere cheaper.

Traveling for Work

One way to get a lot more travel into your life is to look for a job that incorporates it. This could mean working in the actual travel industry, such as in a flight attendant position. It could mean getting a job that involves frequent business trips to other cities or countries. It could even mean a job where you get to live in another country. This could be possible with anything from teaching to travel nursing to working for a multinational business and getting transferred to another country. You could also consider starting your own business that you can run from the road, although in this case you’d pay your own way.

Maximize Your Time and Money

Even if you have financial freedom, traveling on someone else’s dime is great, but the drawback is that you might struggle to fit in the actual travel between all the work, meetings, and other obligations. Another option is to figure out a way to make the most of the time and money that you have. This means no more going home from work on Friday and crashing on the couch. In fact, if you have a regular 8-to-5 job, consider that from 5 on Friday to 8 am on Monday, you have around 63 hours. You could get in your car, hit the airport, or jump on a train, and cover a lot of ground in that time. 

In addition, look for jobs that offer more generous vacation time than the usual two weeks or even careers or companies that offer sabbaticals to their employees. See if you can negotiate with your employer to work remotely some of the time so that you can go anywhere with an internet connection. To save money, sign up for credit cards that offer flight points and other travel perks. Put everything on them and pay them off each month. House exchanges, pet sitting, camping, or staying in hostels can be great ways to save money on accommodations.