if you are willing to give up living in one place and either move onto a boat, or into an rv, or if you vagabond living 6 months here and a year there-- because you have to pay to live someplace anyway--then your travel becomes just the cost of living rather than a luxury expense.
Yep - you are very right. When we moved into our RV and sold our house, I also removed the "travel" category from our budget. Now our travel expenses are just part of our daily living expenses.
I don't think I would ever consider traveling to be "cheap" though - not when compared to NOT traveling, unless you are essentially backpacking it which some people definitely do!
But you can definitely get way more bang for the buck as you get experienced with travel. Our first couple of years we signed up for "group" travel excursions which was fun as someone else figured out all the details and we just came along for the ride. It was a great way to get started. But after a couple of years we were really ready to do it on our own, and travel expenses dropped dramatically - maybe cut by 2/3 even. Since, as we've gained more experience and later switched to RVing most of it, they came down even more. Now, fulltiming, they are even lower. So the moral of the story is that as you gain experience, travel expenses can come down dramatically OR you can get a lot more travel in for the same $$$.
Our monthly living expenses are lower now living fulltime in the RV than they were when we had a home base and a smaller RV. But all you have to do is ammortize the cost of the RV we bought (which is a depreciating asset), and any idea that this is "cheap" is blown right out of the water.
Doesn't matter though. The RV is already paid for, so we feel like it's "free". LOL!
Audrey
P.S. UncleHoney that is a SPECTACULAR piece of woodwork!!!
it was perty too - but my jaw dropped! we just told the customers about the "artist" and that upped the price of whatever was in the store by a few hundred percent...
