In 2008 I decided I wanted to go on a trip around the world — some day, some how. I had just moved back to Cleveland, Ohio from Sofia, Bulgaria where I had been working as an 8th grade English teacher. In 2010, I started actively researching ways people have pulled off a trip like this, and went pretty deep down the rabbit hole of accumulating airline miles via credit card points. After signing up for my first Rewards Card and getting that 25,000 bonus, I was hooked. Four years and 400,000 points later, my wife and I boarded the plane for the trip of a lifetime.
A lot of people have since asked me how we did it, and after a few years of just telling people, I decided to finally write it all down. If you have any interest in going on a trip around the world, here are all the exact steps we took to make it happen. If you have any questions about it AT ALL, feel free to email me.
Here’s the beginning of our itinerary, heading west.
This turned out to be a pretty long piece, so I added a table of contents (hello 7th grade writing class). Here’s what you’ll find below:
It’s certainly fun to *think* about going on a trip around the world. But is it really possible? I mean, *really* possible without a huge pile of cash and unlimited free time? Even having experience living abroad, making this happen would be a long game for me. So: working backwards, I knew I needed to figure out a few crucial things:
I would need to save up enough money for:
I would need to buy an Around The World plane ticket:
I also knew I needed to figure out how to:
And, from the time I started planning this trip (alone) to actually booking this trip, I got married. My wife (Cat) was *very* game to make this happen (she’s awesome), and we started doubling down on credit card points (it’s doable, we did it) and saving an extra chunk of money for daily expenses (also doable, we did it).
Throughout this story I’ll go through every step we took in detail re: building a budget, actually saving the money, getting the plane tickets for (nearly) free, figuring out what to do about your apartment or house, and ways to get 2-6 months away from work. But first, let’s talk about this Around The World ticket and the ways you can get one for (nearly) free.
We weren’t living large. We did a lot of hang drying. Worked super well actually. Get this.
We ate *so much* good food in (nearly) every country. Authentic local food was always cheapest & best.
I lost this water bottle halfway through. Hope someone great found it. Replaced it with this.
It’s still crazy to me that there actually is a thing called an Around The World Plane Ticket. But there is. You can buy them from a few places. The most common are through the Star Alliance (United, Lufthansa, Air New Zealand, Air Canada, Air China, Air India, many others) and One World (American Airlines, British Airways, Qantas, Qatar Airways, Cathay Pacific, etc).
The general concept is that you buy a plane ticket that lets you:
For instance, our final itinerary included seven long stops, three short stops, one open-jaw stop (land in one city and take off from another), we traveled west (easier on jetlag, we were told — seems like it was true), and totaled 36,457 miles flown.
Each airline hub has slightly different rules, so take a look at each and make a decision about which will make the most sense for you. Look at hubs in key cities you want to travel to, any airlines miles you have saved up, any credit cards associated with those miles, etc etc. I honestly don’t think it matters which one you go through, they both have upside/downside.
At the end of the day I chose Star Alliance for these reasons:
So — go check out their Around the World Trip Planners (they are both truly horrible websites that seem like they were made in 1999, but they do the job).
Like I said earlier, I wasn’t sitting on a pile of cash, I had a job, we had loans to pay back, and I didn’t have unlimited free time. So this was going to be a long game play for us, and would take a decent amount of planning. Here’s my back of the envelope math that got me started.
Sub-Total: $11,100
Sub-Total: $1800
Sub-Total: ($5000)
$11,100
$1,800
$500
($5,000)
———
$8,400
or: $23/day for 1 year
or: $12/day for 2 years
Note: That’s for TWO people. For a solo traveler, we’re looking at:
$12/day for 1 year or $6/day for 2 years
So, if you are in a position where you can save $6 or $12/day very diligently for two years, and are up for juggling all sorts of other work and lodging logistics, then you can make this happen. But what about work? And your apartment? Those were the next two big things for me (and my wife) to tackle, mentally first and then actually. So, here’s what we did:
This one was, not surprisingly, very tricky.
First let me say: hands down, the ideal scenario is to take a trip like this during a job transition. Whether that’s internally at your company, or to a new job entirely, the key here is to negotiate a later start date. Leave Job A on June 1, Start Job B on Sep 1. That way, you have no pressure to “hang on” to work while you’re traveling, you know you have something great to come back to, and you can be more easily checked out (in the good way) while traveling. Considering most people under 40 will have at least 10 different jobs, this scenario isn’t terribly unlikely. It’s *definitely* the best way to go.
That said, this is *not* what I did (20/20 hindsight etc). At the time I was working as a freelance web developer, making decent but not crazy amounts of money. I had built up a good collection of about twenty clients, and I wasn’t about to say goodbye to them all.
So, about a year in advance, I started letting people know that in July/August of 2013, my wife and I would be taking a two month trip around the world. This is not a super common thing to tell people, and frankly people were 1) very curious about it; 2) generally very supportive of the idea — “Man, I wish we would have done something like that…” or “You know, I did a lot of traveling when I was your age.” I then started the slow process of finding another freelance web developer / marketer to take over my clients during this time. My goal was to create a relative wash situation — pay this person most of the money coming in to run everything, and come back to a still functioning freelance business. This all actually worked out really well. The key was expectation setting with everyone I worked with.
My wife took a different, far more liberating approach: she quit. Four things made this possible at the time. 1) She had been at a great job for several years; 2) We would be moving from NYC to Cleveland post-trip; 2) I already had ongoing work lined up upon our return; and 4) she would start looking for a new job in Ohio once we were back in town.
Take a look at your own work situation, and see what you could make happen. I have seen people negotiate unpaid leave for up to two months, have seen other people sock away a few years of vacation, sick days, and other PTO. There are lots of ways to make this happen. And, like I said, people are overwhelmingly intrigued by the whole concept.
Whatever your situation might be — unless you have kids (which I do now, and is an entirely different adventure in an of itself 🙂 — you likely have more flexibility than you think. It wasn’t until we started to plan this out on paper that we realized we could actually pull it off.
With the rise of Airbnb and all the related rental services, this one has actually become relatively easy to deal with. Nowadays, you can most likely:
All of these scenarios create an interesting and significant savings that we hadn’t realized until we started planning. Being in Brooklyn at the time, our housing was absolutely our #1 life expense over any other sort of loan, food, etc etc. With complete confidence, I’m sure you’ll be able to make this one work.
Here’s where we did all the credit card sign ups, ticket research, and trip planning.
Okay so the only way this was going to happen was to pay for our tickets using “points.” Those mythical things you see and hear about in every 5th commercial. Well friends, they are real and they are awesome. During this process, I learned a LOT about credit cards. I actually become so excited about what I learned that I couldn’t shut up about it. That said, one of my friends took three free trips to Australia to visit his now wife, and two other friends went on completely free honeymoon trips using points.
I also had another major revelation that nobody ever believes until I show them the proof: signing up for a ton of credit cards helped BUILD my credit significantly, not hurt it. When I started this adventure I had a relatively bad credit score to pull off something like this (640), and by the time we took the trip it was up to 780. And, at the time of this I am back up to another 400,000 points and my credit score is up to 815.
Here’s what I learned by talking with many very helpful, insightful credit card customer support people: your credit score is calculated based on a *ton* of variables. However, one of the main ones is how much credit is available to you vs how much credit you are actually using.
So, when I started down this road, I had one credit card with a 5,000 limit. I typically put about 2,000 per month on the credit card (putting as many of my expenses as possible onto the card, to accumulate points) and paid it off at the end of the month. So, my ratio was relatively steady at 5000 to 2000. As one helpful person explained on the phone to me, if I opened a second card with another 5000 limit, but *didn’t use it at all* (other than the first few months to get the signup bonus), then my ratio would suddenly go to 10000 to 2000. Multiply this factor out by 10x, and all of the sudden your ratio is looking pretty impressive. People often say, and worry about, getting “dinged” for opening too many credit cards. In my experience, this wasn’t true. I think it was mitigated by two things: 1) I didn’t try and open them up rapid fire, I spaced them out. 2) The improved credit to spend ratio offset any “dings” I might have gotten.
Side note: By the time we got back from the trip and I started to re-up on my strategy, Chase actually called me to let me know I had the maximum amount of credit they could extend to an ordinary person ($100K/month). Then they very politely and helpfully said, if you do want to open a new card that’s absolutely fine, we’ll just need to reduce the credit extended to you on some of your current cards. Yes, please!
Another thing I learned was to apply for cards where I could pool the points together. Since I was planning on booking through Star Alliance, I stuck with Chase cards. By doing this I could pool my points together from multiple cards into one rewards account.
So, here is an exact list of the cards I signed up for and the points I got:
Then, I put all our spending for two years on one of these cards. Over the course of each year we spent about 30,000 in total life expenses, and earned about 80,000 points from that. So, +80,000.
Also, some of these cards have annual fees, that are pre-paid for the first year. I have heard that if you cancel a card before a year, you will get dinged on your credit score. I decided to split the difference and keep two cards that had annual fees for an extra year, and cancel one of them. So, we did pay about $300 in fees to have these cards. However, the savings we got from having no foreign transaction fees by *using* these cards quickly made up for that expense.
I signed up for all these cards over the course of three years. I wasn’t able to quite get enough points on my own so my wife signed up for the last card to get us up and over the 400,000 mark.
As we were building our ticket and fantasizing about the trip, we had to set some ground rules to make this all do-able:
I had lived in New Zealand and Bulgaria, and had already visited a lot of countries in the Pacific, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. Cat had lived in France and Costa Rica, and already visited most of Western Europe and Central America.
Taking all that into consideration, here’s the itinerary we came up with:
As soon as we confirmed this, I started planning a second trip around the world, in the opposite season, that looks like:
Anyhow, back to the ticket. We figured out the itinerary. We saved it. We spent a ton of time on the phone with some great and helpful people. And we booked it. Here’s a picture of the best email confirmation I’ve received so far to date.
As I said at the beginning of all this, there really is a thing called an “Around the World Ticket” (still makes me so happy just typing that). You can buy them through a few places: Star Alliance and OneWorld are the two most common. Because I had about 15,000 miles saved up from flying on United for a few years, I decided to start there and go down the route of the Star Alliance. It was actually really hard to pin down any actual data on how much these tickets cost, what you actually get for them, and how to buy them. Star Alliance does have an Around the World Trip planner (amazing thing to write, less amazing to use), but it only gives you the total $ cost to buy the ticket, not the mileage amount. After a few long conversations with customer service folks at Star Alliance, I was able to get someone to confirm that I could get a ticket for 180,000 miles. Everyone — that’s NOT A LOT of miles. That said, by the time we actually went on this trip, the mileage price changed from 180K to 200K, and like I said I got married so we were looking at two tickets now, so 400,000 miles total for two Around the World plane tickets.
Making the transition from “this would be so cool to do” to “this is actually &@*(@ happening” is the best thing ever.
First off, when you get rid of your apartment, you really do some serious trimming. That said, in some ways it was far less obvious what to get rid of completely, what to store, and what to bring. We knew we wanted to travel light, but this was a pretty major undertaking. We were intentional about choosing our locations based on weather because 1) I mean, we wanted nice weather, and 2) We could bring less stuff. In hindsight, this was an awesome idea and it really helped.
We knew we wanted to only bring one bag per person, and one backpack. We debated large camping style bags vs roller bags. We ended up settling on one roller bag each, and one backpack each. This worked well. Since we were setting up shop for about a week in each place, it made more sense to be able to wheel to and from the airport or train to our Airbnb/hostel/hotel/etc easily, then set up shop for the week, stowaway the roller backs, and go backpacks.
We packed about 6 days worth of clothes. Typically for the same weather. We also got these awesome packing cubes that made a huge difference actually, in terms of preplanning and compartmentalizing our clothes for overnights, quick access to essentials, etc.
We both have iPhones, and we both put our actual cellular accounts on hold for two months (you can actually do that — just call them and talk to a person about your various options — be nice and they will too!). We were able to use them everywhere we went via Wifi and no data. They were great as a daily camera as needed, and super helpful for all sorts of logistics. We downloaded a few apps I would highly recommend:
I wanted to do the entire trip without a computer. I completely planned on it. Then, the day before we left I had a mini freak out and bought a Macbook Air. At the time I was running a web design company, and I had basically hired/arranged for a friend/colleague to run the company while I was away. Much more on that later. Even though I felt good about the plan, I gave in in the end. Ultimately, it was great to have a small computer because 1) We were staying mostly in apartments with free Wifi, and it was super helpful for planning travel, day trips, etc. 2) It was great to be able to load our photos on there from the trip. 3) I actually didn’t really need it to check in on work, in the end, but I’m pretty glad I had it.
I brought a Macbook Air 11″ – it was small and mighty and super useful. Refurbished is a great way to go.
I did a lot of debating on this one, too. I love taking photos, and regularly do so for work using a Canon 60D. I didn’t want to lug a large DSL with me, but also didn’t want to just use a camera phone for pictures during our TRIP AROUND THE WORLD.
I did a *ton* of research (ask my wife, I was insane), but feel like I ended up with a great, small camera and a handful of wonderful photos I never could have gotten from just an iPhone.
This is the camera I ended up bringing with me (a Sony RX100 f1.8 — it’s pretty old at this point but it was perfect). I bought a refurbished one which worked great.
Mid-trip, we made a rule that turned out to be so awesome: “travel day.” On our “travel day” each week, we promised we would make NO PLANS other than traveling. It is so easy to get swept up in “see as much as you can and cram it all in” but after trying that one time we were supremely tired. Instituting travel day was the best. There was no rushing (except for of course when we would get lots, miss a train, go the wrong way, etc). And even then, there was no major rush because the only then we needed to do that day was travel. It became a thing, a mini ritual: we had funny clothes we would wear, snacks we would pack, etc.