If you are like us, you want to travel to amazing places and experience some luxury along the way: gourmet meals, good wine and soft beds in nice apartments. But you also want it to be affordable.
You’re not a gap year backpacker. Neither are we.
And you have no interest in staying in hostels or budget accomodations. Neither do we.
You simply want a long luxury travel experience that is affordable. So do we!
Back in our corporate lives we liked taking luxury holidays. But luxury vacations are expensive!
So now that we are full time travelers we focus on finding affordable luxury travel.
Click here to read about the difference between luxury travel and affordable luxury travel.
We work very hard to find affordable luxury travel so we can maintain our full time travel lifestyle in the upscale manner we enjoy.
And we have learned a lot in the process.
So we have some suggestions and ideas that we hope you will find useful when planning your affordable luxury travel…whether it’s for full time travel or just an extended vacation.
Don’t believe you can live a life of affordable luxury travel? Well read on!
You may be closer than you think!
Tip 1: Find Affordable Luxury Travel Destinations
Picking the right place to go is 80% of the battle in achieving an affordable luxury travel lifestyle!
There are places in the world where spending $2,000 – $5,000 a month makes you feel wealthy.
We have:
- Rented luxury flats for 200 euros a month in Bulgaria.
- Lived in a luxury hotel suite in Thailand for a month and paid less than we would have paid for one night at the same luxury suite in New York or London.
- Visited beaches where we stayed in luxury apartments for $30 a night!
And those are just a few examples of how choosing the right places to travel mean you can live like royalty on the cheap.
And when you do go somewhere relatively expensive, go there in shoulder season (the period between peak and off-peak season)! Greek isles in late April. Dubrovnik in September. The Caribbean in November. Venice in November. You get all of the luxury of popular destinations with a fraction of the crowds and the cost!
This tip about finding affordable luxury travel destinations is so critical to our lifestyle that we have dedicated an entire section of our website to it!
Tip 2: Find Cheap Business Class Fares or Other Ways to Upgrade Coach flights
We like to think that when it comes to full time or extended travel getting there is part of the fun!
So we like to find ways to make air travel more enjoyable.
Here’s how we do it.
Points and Miles
We were lucky: we both traveled a lot for our corporate jobs and so both earned lots of miles and points to use in our affordable luxury full time travel lifestyle.
But we were also smart: we constantly used credit card offers to build up our points and miles stash!
If you aren’t started collecting points and miles through credit card sign ups and spending then now is the time to start!
Finding affordable upscale Airfares
But points and miles will only get you so far.
We take basic economy flights when it makes sense. In other words, when they are short and cheap. A good example is the $32 US Vietnam Airlines Economy Lite flight we took from Hanoi to Da Nang, Vietnam.
But we prefer to find cheap business class like the $585 US business class tickets on Hong Kong Airlines we took from LA to Bangkok and back!
Wondering how we find cheap business class flights? Check out our Cheap Business Class Fare Guides:
How To Use Google Flights to Find Cheap Business Class Flights (And Cheap Economy Flights Too!)
Or affordable upgraded economy tickets like AirAsia Premium Flex seats.
Upscale flying is another case where it’s such an important part of our affordable luxury travel experience that we’ve dedicated an entire section of Ready Jet Roam to it!
Tip 3: Earn as you Burn
When we were working corporate jobs we saved as much money as possible so we could live an affordable luxury full time travel lifestyle.
But even with our aggressive savings plan, we really only saved really only saved enough money for one to two years of upscale full time travel.
We wanted more time than that! Don’t you!?
If you are retired and have a guaranteed pension then congratulations! You can skip this step. Because even if you have an income of a few thousand dollars a month you can live a full time affordable luxury travel lifestyle!
But the rest of us need to create revenue streams while we travel if we want to keep doing it forever.
How We Broke Free of the 9-to-5 Trap
Our story is NOT about saving money then quitting our jobs to gallivant around.
And it’s not about some get-rich-quick scheme.
It’s about a significant lifestyle change.
To achieve our dream of time freedom, in 2016 we started online businesses that we could do from anywhere. But none of the online businesses we started on our own gave us true time freedom. Our online businesses were either huge time-sucks or didn’t generate much income. Sometimes both!
Then we took an online business challenge. And that changed everything.
We paid $7 to learn how to build an online business that actually generates serious income while only working on it a few hours a day.
In short, we learned how to work for ourselves online and make money by putting other sellers’ products in front of buyers who already want that item or service.
We didn’t have a lot of social media followers. We didn’t even have a TikTok account!
Didn’t have any technical or even marketing skills. But the course provided everything we needed.
And the best thing about the challenge is that in 15 days it helps you figure out whether affiliate marketing is right for you.
After taking the challenge we truly started to feel not just financial freedom but time freedom.
It isn’t a path to instant riches. Yes, we still work, typically putting in 2 to 4 hours a day. But crucially, we decide when, where, and how we work.
And this one simple thing let us escape from the 9-to-5 trap!
You can too.
Lisa wrote an e-book explaining exactly how we did it and you can get it for free by visiting lisareidmiller.com.
Tip 4: Prepare
Lisa and I gave ourselves a full year after deciding to become full time affordable luxury digital nomads before we launched.
And we applied world class strategic planning and implementation tools to our ‘digital nomad launch’ project!
After all, failing to plan is planning to fail!
Here is our guide on How to Become a Digital Nomad 3 Simple Steps to Prepare.
And here are our 11 Brilliant Travel Accessories and Travel Hacks!
Tip 5: Get Full Time Travel Smart and Stay Smart
Knowledge is definitely power.
If you have read this far then you have already gained a lot of both.
But finding affordable luxury short-term lodging, affordable gourmet meals and affordable upscale travel experiences is an ongoing job!
We hope you will subscribe to Ready Jet Roam by filling out the sign-up form on the right hand side of the page. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter. We even do Instagram!
We’re thrilled to share the affordable luxury travel full time wisdom we have gained and hope you find it useful.
Affordable Luxury Travel Travel Resource Guide
- The difference between luxury travel and affordable luxury travel
- Affordable Luxury Travel Destinations
- A Guide to Affordable Upgraded Airline Tickets
- Our guide on how to make money while traveling full time
- How to Prepare for Full Time Travel
- 11 Brilliant Travel Accessories and Travel Hacks!
