Wednesday 14 June 2017

Post Travel Money Worries

If you've read my other blog posts you'll know I worked in New York at a summer camp teaching horse riding in 2016 and after finishing the camp I travelled for a month. This included a 2 week partnership with Intrepid Travel on their Wild West tour.


However, this post isn't about the travelling but about my final days and months that followed. As you will probably know you don't work at camp for the money. It's all about the experience of being in America living and working, making amazing new friends. If you then add on a month of travel you might have guessed that I came home flat broke.

My last stop when travelling was San Fransisco where I flew home from, by the time I got here I was pennyless and had to make the dreaded phone call home to ask for money to pay for a hostel. I am beyond grateful that my parents where able to lend me the money as I know many people don't have this option!

So as I lived out my final ays in San Fran living off pasta, cheese and bread that i'd bought at trader Joes my time of wracking up debt started. Again luckily only off my parents meaning no interest but debt is still debt either way.

Once arriving home I started back at the shop I had been working at during my time at university, but as it was coming into the quiet winter period I was getting hardly any shifts. I was making between £350 and £500 a month sometimes only working one day a week. This meant that my parents had to pay for my car insurance and a few of my car payments as I payoff for it monthly. I did what I could to earn more money selling stuff on Ebay and taking a second job working at Centre Parks giving children pony rides. This was only for a few weeks over Christmas but it helped. Even with all that I was not able to start paying my parents back.



Having so many money problems as a result of travelling did put a downer on my memories, I sometimes think about how I wish I had been able to do more things while I was there and if only i'd had more money I could have. I without a doubt I had an amazing time. Yet if I was to do it again I would be more careful. I didn't start to budget until I became low on money. I had relied on my camp pay to fund my travelling but it didn't stretch anywhere near as far as I thought after having to use some of it while at camp. In fact I don't even know how much money I went to America with, thats how little I planned.

Therefore the moral of the story and this blog post is that yes looking at money, budgeting and doing the practice things like that may be boring but they are essential and I may have been able to save myself worry and debt if I had invested more time into having a sensible plan.

Have you experienced any money troubled during or post travel? How did you cope with it? Let me know in the comments!

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