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Hi i’m aaron from broke millennial for the financial diet welcome to the three minute guide brought to you by skillshare you’ve asked how to vacation on a budget especially when you want to travel internationally other than the bland but valid advice to save a little bit out of every paycheck there is one other way that you can save for travel travel hacking
Travel hacking or credit card churning as it is also called is the concept of using credit card rewards to cover the cost of your trip you apply for a new credit card spend what it takes to get the bonus and then for most folks before the year is up and an annual fee would kick in they close the card when done strategically travel hacking can be an awesome tool
To help you see the world win messed up it can ruin your credit score and leave you with debt let’s talk about how to make sure that doesn’t happen last year i travel hacked for a trip with my fiance whom i call peach luckily being the money nerd i am i kept meticulous record of exactly how much money we spent on the trip we spent a total of one thousand seven
Hundred and fifteen dollars and 84 cents for the both of us to go to berlin for six days and that covered airfare accommodations food and sightseeing before i tell you exactly what we did here’s the secret the best way to maximize reward travel is to be flexible on this particular trip i turned an american airlines credit card for two reasons one i already had
About 35,000 american airline miles and two i found a spiked bonus offer it’s pretty common that airlines will spike bonus offers on their credit cards throughout the year so if you’re trying to be loyal to a specific airline it’s great to hold out for those moments you can also find travel credit cards that are not airline specific i held off applying for that
Credit card until i saw a bonus offer of 60,000 miles that meant we actually would have ninety five thousand miles to play with american airlines has a tool called the award map and you plug in how many miles you have the date range you want to travel and then the continent you want to go to and it’ll spit out all of your various options we discovered that we
Could go to berlin for two people round-trip for 90,000 miles so we booked it we did spend 181 dollars and ninety two cents in taxes so it wasn’t a hundred percent covered by miles but still super cheap you can also travel hack for hotel stays but we just booked an airbnb for four hundred and thirty one dollars that left us with plenty of budget leftover for food
And tours and hertha verse bayern münich football match ready to travel hack yourself then you need to keep these things in mind would you normally spend the amount it takes to get the bonus you should not be changing your spending behaviors in order to turn a credit card if you would normally spend $3,000 in three months to get that sign-on bonus great if not
Then maybe that card isn’t for you how strong is your credit score a new credit card will ding your credit score so you want to be safely into the 700 plus range before you even consider travel hacking do you struggle with credit card debt i would never advise somebody currently in credit card debt to ever try travel hacking it’s not worth the risk of incurring
More debt and if you’ve had issues with overspending in the past then consider if this could possibly make you backslide not ready to travel hack with a credit card then you can check out resources like emails from scotts cheap flights or secret flying on twitter trying to improve your side hustle game to have more money for travel an easy and affordable way to
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And habits as always though skillshare offers a huge range of classes on everything from writing to fitness to business and it’s all about what you want to learn at an affordable annual subscription of less than $10 a month and sent skillshare is sponsoring this video the first 500 people to use the promo link in the description will get their first two months
For $0.99 click the link in the description to check out this week’s featured class or any of the other classes skill share has to offer have a money question you want to learn more about leave your topic idea in the comment section below i’m aaron from broke millennial for the financial diet and don’t forget to be here next thursday for a new 3-minute guide you
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How To Travel Abroad On A Serious Budget | The 3-Minute Guide By The Financial Diet