Matt Kepnes - How to travel the world on $50 a day: travel cheaper, longer, smarter

We are told travel is too expensive to do long term. Fancy tours, hotels, five-star meals, and budget-blowing flights are supposedly what travel is all about. The travel industry keeps this image alive with advertisements in magazines, on TV, and on the Internet. These advertisements always have the uncanny knack of showing a luxurious holiday in some far-off destination where we can go to get away from the stress of our day-to-day life... if only we pony up the money.

At least, thats what big corporate travel tells us. But they are lying by omission. They are hiding the fact that travel is affordable because you cant run a big magazine or media company by selling hostels, discount transportation, or cheap tours. You need big ad revenue and luxury travel companies have that money.

So the media promote a style of travel that is more upscale and thus more lucrative. Even when I read budget travel magazines, they often list budget accommodation at $150 USD as if anyone could afford that! That is probably out of the reach of most of us, and seeing those kind of prices keeps most of us at home.

Yet everyone I know wants to travel more. Many of the people I encounter in life dream of wasting their days in paradise sitting on a beach as a breeze cools their face and a beer quenches their thirst. But when most people travel, they always seem to head out on a short vacation. Even if they had the time, most think its too expensive to travel longer. We internalize what those magazines and ads tell us, we never consider the possibility that travel could be affordable.

Experience has shown me the opposite is true. It has shown me that travel can be done cheaply without sacrificing comfort. Actually traveling showed me that everything I knew about traveling was wrong.

But that realization didnt happen overnight.

Back in 2003, I was planning my first trip overseas. I had just graduated from college and was working as a hospital administrator. I was putting in forty-plus-hour weeks and looking forward to my precious two weeks per year vacation. I booked a trip to Costa Rica and spent two weeks falling in love with travel. I loved the sense of adventure. I loved how every day held something new. I loved the feeling of endless possibility each day brought, which was in stark contrast to my well-planned-out days in the office. The next year, I used my limited vacation days in January simply because I couldnt wait to get somewhere else again. Costa Rica had given me the travel bug, and when 2004 rolled around, I left right away.

And thats when my life changed.

In January 2004, my friend Scott and I ventured to Thailand. While we were in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, I left him for a day to visit a temple outside the city. I shared a tuk tuk (the name for inexpensive shared taxis in Asia) with five non-American backpackers. On the ride we began discussing vacation time, and they were amazed that as an American, I only got two weeks of vacation per year. They all received at least a month in their home countries.

I was extremely jealous. I wanted that much time off to explore the world. Our whole conversation made me rethink my life. It was heading down a road that I realized I wasnt ready formarriage, house, kids, 401(k)s, playdates, and college funds. While those things arent bad, at twenty-three, those werent the things I wanted right now. I wanted to travel.

A few days later, while lying on a beach in southern Thailand, I turned to my friend Scott and said, Im going to quit my job and travel the world. I knew the second I told Scott that I was making the right decision. I didnt want to go back to working sixty hours a week at twenty-three. I had my whole life to do that.