How some people afford to travel around the world for months without working?

Think it's called a trust fund

Born into wealth. This is honestly the most likely answer

Beneficial living situation (e.g living with parents) that allows them to save up a significant amount while having minimal expenses. Eventually, they can just take all that money and travel for months on end.

A job that travels with them. Successful vloggers make money through their vlogging, for example

People here are all saying rich or trustfund or something. But in my experience people who do that are often still young and living with their parents, which allows them to save a lot of money and have no rent to pay.

And where I'm from many of them travel to backpack countries like Thailand or Indonesia. Plane tickets to those countries are not cheap but once you're there you can live really cheap if you want to. You can get pretty decent hotels for 10-20 euros a night in those countries (can be even cheaper if you're willing to sleep in hostels. And food and activities can also be really cheap. So if you save up a couple thousand bucks you can live/travel in these kinds of countries for quite a while.

I'm American and of the Americans I know who traveled longterm or lived abroad, or traveled for free or on a budget:

• They were part.of a student exchange in High School and.lived in Europe.for half a year(program was competitive and free)
• They were part of a program in college that included an annual international trip (program was free)
• They went.to college or university abroad and would travel during breaks (had to pay for school and for the travel, but traveled on a broke student budget)
• They were a nanny for a wealthy family in Europe
• They taught English as a second language in countries like India, Thailand, South Korea and China, usually living there from 1.month (very short cultural.program when hey were in college) or several years (working FT in private ESL schools), which allowed for a lot of inexpensive travel.in Asia
• They perform on cruise ships full time and visit the locations where they stop
• They live frugally,.save a bunch of.money and vacation days, then travel to the places with the cheapest airfare and COL, also typically not during the busiest tourists times (off season or.shoulder season)
• They go where they have friends and can crash on their couch, or travel.with friends and split the costs
• They are "digital nomads" and work remotely while they travel
• They are vloggers and their travel is a part of their content; they make.money on YouTube etc. (this also can include digital nomads - they may work their FT gig and.do the content creation on the side)
• They are retirees, some relatively young (military or nonprofit/governmental pensions,.money saved in Roth IRAs or.other retirement accounts that they can tap early), traveling for.months at a time or living abroad and doing a lot of traveling from that jumping off point)

Of the above, if they have student loans that they are paying off, they usually don't travel longterm anywhere. The lifestyle requires little to no debt.

ETA: Thinking of a few more,, one already mentioned by PP:

• They saved up summer job money and backpacked in between High School and college
• They visited family abroad periodically throughout their childhoods over the summer
• They work for companies that had branches in foreign countries, or for the State Dept., or for NGOs, or are in the Peace Corp

Permanently Deleted

Being rich is often the answer, but also, it is possible to travel much more inexpensively than most tourists do if you don’t care so much about comfort and predictability. Go in off seasons. Ride the cheapest class of public transport to get around. Couchsurf or stay in sketchy hostels. Cook your own food or eat where the locals eat instead of at the places where the staff speaks perfect English.

Do they already have savings enough to support until they retire?

No reason to assume they won’t get jobs after they’re done traveling.

I kinda did this with my wife a very long time ago, so long ago I doubt any of my experience is still relevant. And we had saved up considerable money before we left and still had a nest egg to return to. So, not exactly low budget but not trust fund either.

I met a lot of people who had almost no money however. The principal I learned is that if you have a) enough money or b) enough time, you can get to almost anyplace you want to go to. The people with no money had enough time. They would often stay in one place and work for two or three months to earn enough money to move on to their next destination. These people were pretty chill, except for the ultra minimalists who had like one pair of underwear and would ask to "borrow" yours. Those people sucked.

Trust fund, wealthy parents, etc. The average person can't afford to travel like that.

I traveled for a year with a group of 50 remote workers. By the end of the year, we had about 25 remote workers and 25 people running off their savings accounts. Two big things.

1. Life abroad can be relatively cheap, we were able to get housing, office space, and air travel for under $2k a month, which is cheaper than I was paying for my apt in the US.

2. When you live in a different time zone like in Europe, but work US hours, you get those extra hours to do fun stuff. I typically started work around 4pm and worked until 12am, meaning I could wake up late, go take a 1 hour walking tour of the city, try out some of the restaurants and still be back for my morning meeting.

This also means that evening exhaustion only applies to your work rather than your fun and no one ever says they wished they had worked harder on their death bed...

An alternate answer to “trust fund baby.” My job covered half of the costs for me and my family to work from an office in another country. The half we covered was still expensive, but we managed to cover our part without dipping much into savings. We couldn’t have done it without my employer covering some of it.

Here in Germany we have a concept called "sabbatical year". I think it actually comes from the US, where it was/is a thing for university professors.

Rare in the private sector, but I think civil servants that work for the government have a right to it, if they so chose. Especially "Beamte", which is a special form of lifetime appointment. That for example also includes teachers in some states, which is one of the professions where it is more common.

One model how it may be structured is that the person either works more or takes a pay cut for a number of years and then has 1 year free. For example taking a pay cut of 1/7 for 6 years and then have 1 year free at the same pay. That also means that you take a pay cut during the whole period. But that is definitely doable.

The upside of this structure is that you have a job to go back to. And since you also count as employed during the sabbatical year it doesn't mess with things like health insurance

If you're genuinely interested in an anecdotal reply, I'd be more than happy to share my experiences that started with: buying a ticket to Frankfurt on a whim (Xmas bonus check) and that led to years of travel throughout Europe. I'm not sure how much of the details will help in this day & age, but LMK if you'd get some benefit from my perspective and I'll write it up tomorrow, certainly. 🤓🙌🏽

I backpacked around the world twenty years ago. No house, girlfriend or other commitments. Found a well paid job and saved everything I could. Picked places that were interesting but also where the currency exchange was favourable i.e. not Europe. Stayed in hostels and the occasional guest house, never hotels. Travelled overland rather than flying. Cooked my own food. I didn't want to work while I travelled but met many that did.

Either rich or Only Fans models.

You don't have to be super rich or be a trust-fund baby to travel around the world for months. I find the general estimates for a more frugal world-traveling for a year are $20.000 to $30.000. This is obviously not doable if you really live paycheck to paycheck, but if you have a relatively well-paying job and live very frugal it is not impossible to save this amount of money. Also there is the more irresponsible solution of taking on debt.

I have travelled for very little money in the past, hitchhiking my way around, sleeping behind gas stations or in nature, or utilizing sites like Couchsurfing where people can host you for free (in exchange for cultural exchange). I've crossed all of Europe and into the Balkans this way, as well as went up and around the western states in the US. While I realize this isn't the most fun way to travel for many (but for me it is!), travelling is still doable on a very low budget if you know how to travel and prioritize the concept of travel before your own comfort. I've done a lot of regular backpacking as well. Of course, the situation complicates itself if you're from the US, have a family, lots of student loans or health care debt to pay off, and have very little PTO. In Sweden at least, as with many other countries in Europe, we have a minimum of 5 weeks PTO. And either way, it's customary for people between high school and university to go on a gap year travelling the world.

With some proper budgeting and staying at hostels, or doing things like Worldpackers where you volunteer at hostels for room and sometimes food, you can travel the world for $10-15k per year easily. If you only do half a year or whatever, it's really not that much money if you prioritize travelling and saving up before other stuff. For some it might still be a lot of money, but it must cost something if you want to go for such a length of time. Otherwise you'll just have to become a busker and a vagabond, hitchhiking around. Australia even has a working holiday-visa for 1-3 years up til the age of 31 that is very popular for people to go on, where people work odd jobs in agriculture and what not, often with accommodation included and very good pay (even if the work can be tough), which then is used to continue travelling.

For the guy in the video, biking around is quite cheap compared to flying and whatnot. If you're camping by yourself, your only expense is food, if you've done off with all the other obligations in life like rent and loans. This means you can do it very, very cheap as well. I don't know his situation, but he probably sold off everything else, gave up his place or rented it out. Travelling that way inherently means some risk-taking. And for many people it's worth it.

At least two of the YouTube lads I follow are in maritime jobs. They work for a few months on a ship, then have a bunch of time off. If you just keep an inexpensive apartment somewhere, you can make a lot of travel happen with that sort of schedule. Some oilfield workers can pull similar arrangements.

I've been doing side jobs since I was 13. I never spent any of my own money while living with my parents. After finishing school, worked for some years and then traveled for a few years. While traveling, I also worked (for free food/accommodation mostly). You really don't have to be rich, just be frugal.

It really depends on a lot of factors. I just came back from 10 month overland travel of South America. It is cheap over there - much cheaper than back home most of the time. We saved with my girlfriend for couple of years, rented our house and went for it. On the road we met all kinds of people. A LOT of European retirees. You can live quiet the life over there with the couple thousand euro western European pensions. Some of them go for a few months each year, some have been traveling for years already. Lots of younger people just did what we did - saved for some time and then went for it. Average salary in countries like Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, etc can be just a few hundred dollars a month, so not that hard to do better than that. It’s similar on other continents - Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam in Asia; Kenya, Morocco, etc in Africa - popular destination with lower standards of living that makes them easy to travel to for longer. When you travel for weeks and months it also gets cheaper per day compared to when you go on a vacation for 7-10 days - you cook, you can find deals, you travel a lot - not just to the tourist hotspots and traps. Bali can be just as expensive as a western country, but the Indonesian country side is cheap as hell. Having an own house also helps immensely - you do not pay rent in the months and years prior to leaving and after that you collect rent.

Then there are of course people with inheritance, daddy money, trust funds, etc. In all my travels I have not met any yet. They do not tend to go on the longer trips usually.

You can pretty much forget about making it solely through vlogging, blogging and writing for magazines and websites. It can add something every now and the , but there are single digits few normal people that have made it work full time.

Lucky spawn point

Adding to the other obvious answers, I’m actually one of those constantly on the road, digital nomad types. I’m a freelance/self employed software developer, so as you may imagine, my clients don’t particularly care where I am, and I’m good as long as I have an internet connection. That kind of flexibility enables it.

Now granted, there is actual work along the way, but the freelance bit is key. I can spin my hours up and down (subject to client availability and need, but usually pretty flexible), so I aim for 15-25 hours a week of work.

That wouldn’t be enough money to pay rent in many parts of the US, but you better believe that money is a damn good time in Argentina or Chile, Poland or Lithuania, Greece or Turkey… you get the idea. And of course not paying rent for a “main home” changes things a lot; if Airbnbs are your sole place of living then you effectively have that 1/3 of your income otherwise earmarked for rent, just for travel accommodation.

A friend of my wife won a scholarship for a top European university, got her masters degree and then came back. With that masters, she got a 6 figures job, worked 2 years while living with her parents and spending a little as possible. Quit her job, traveled the entire world for 2 years using that saved money, converted to Buddhism or some or other of those oriental religions. Nowdays is married with a really talented artist she knew from her religion (the guy have illustrated Magic cards, and hit big on the first wave of NFTs) and they both keep traveling the world with his money. Hope she returns to the labor market before Stable Diffusion take her husband job away.

In some countries, law protect sabatical leaves, like you can take a 12 month leave and your employer has to give you back your job.

That said, many people travel for shorter time like 4-6 weeks and just use their regular holyday to do so...

Then there is the whole part of kids who use daddy's money, and the the other who use stuff like Work Holyday visa allowing them to work part-time in a foreign country

Great question. It is impossible for anyone living paycheck to paycheck. Hell, everything outside the hamster wheel is impossible in that case, so first thing is to make a savings account and a budget that allows you to put any amount into savings. If that is not possible, you seriously need to find another job or at least ask for raise. Otherwise you're wasting your life making money for someone else.

It doesn't necessarily cost a lot to travel for a long time, but it does require a return ticket and a way to cover the cost of starting a new life when you return. Depending on how easy it is to get a job on return you'll need savings to do that. I noticed that the backpackers I've met have all ended up in larger cities where jobs are easy to get. Even if it's only temporarily that is a good plan. Just be careful to always keep a surplus so you can advance out of fast food jobs later on.

Anyway that's my suggestion. Plan and enable the return and you're good to go. All you need then is to save up as much as you're willing to spend on your travel.

Some people are able to do it with a whole family and that requires a whole other situation in which you should have a job as you travel. I know a pair who managed to it by landing a hotel review service. Their job was basically to take pictures and make descriptions of hotels worldwide. Unfortunately that is more of a job than leisure and it's hard to get that kind of job. Some of the YouTubers are probably doing something like that.

Being a travel guide is also a really good way to experience different places while working, though it's badly paid and less free. It allows to see some of the more popular tourist locations.

If you have children in school ages it requires a lot more effort and a job and location that is more fixed, but that is also an option if you can find it. Large companies might want a local representative which could be a pretty neat job. Most countries have school programs for international visitors. Much research is required.

I once met a guy from England who had his whole family along, while he was teaching English on a small unknown island in the Pacific Ocean for a few years. I have no idea of how he got that job, but that's also way to see more of the world, though it's more of an immigration than travelling. I think it shows that you don't have to keep running in a local hamster wheel. There are hamster wheels in other places too. :)

I have known some people who worked as a teacher. During the summer, they would take off traveling and not come back until the school was nearly open.

I guess it depends on how much money you need to live day to day too.

Besides the “rich” answers here, there are some others as well — some people save up to afford a round trip ticket and then work where they go.

And I know one guy who had a call center job that let him work from home… so he used his air miles credit card to save up miles, and then “lived” in cheap hotels in tourist destinations around the world — anywhere with a dependable Internet connection.

And then of course the YouTube vloggers get sponsors who pay for their travel expenses. The videos ARE what they’re being paid for.

My former landlord did that, quite simply: he inherited the building and he paid for his travels with our rent. Just how our society is structured. I still liked him more than my current landlord, cause that is a company and it‘s straight impossible to even find out where this money goes. Maybe some billionaire who won‘t even appreciate it cause among 1000s properties it‘s almost a rounding error. At least with my former landlord I could hear some of his stories of what he experienced.