Alastair Humphreys - Grand Adventures

THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO GET MORE MONEY IN LIFE:

Earn more. Or spend less. I’m definitely not the right person to advise with Point 1, but here are some ideas to help you begin spending less money.

Remember, in order to save £1,000 for your adventure you need to save less than £3 each day for a year.

Think about all the ways you spend money and where you can make some savings. Consider the small changes you can make which will help lead to a big adventure and a big change in your life. I’m not advocating anything drastic, just tiny tweaks that won’t hurt day-to-day but will accumulate into big piles of cash. If you think you’ll struggle, try writing down every single thing you spend in the course of a week – you might be surprised where you can make some savings for your Adventure Fund.

If you’re serious about saving money, do some Googling: there are blogs more knowledgeable and specific on the subject than I could ever pretend to be. But I hope this section will get you thinking. All the examples below are worth trading for the adventure of a lifetime, especially as they generally make your life healthier anyway.

— Daily routine: Cut out a daily takeaway coffee and you’ve almost made it to £1,000 in a year already. Take a packed lunch to the office and you’re really saving.

— Commuting: Can you work from home occasionally? Can you share a lift or cycle one day a week?

— Home bills: Turn your thermostat down a notch and put on a jumper. Wash your clothes at a lower temperature. Have an occasional cold shower (they are good for the soul, the environment and your bank balance!). Sell your telly.

— Entertainment: Eat out less often or search online for restaurant discount vouchers.

— Alcohol: A pint in a London pub often costs £5. One fewer pints a week and you’ve saved almost 25 per cent of your £1,000. If you’re tempted for ‘just one more’, consider that the price of that drink can easily equate to a day on the road in some of the world’s wildest, cheapest and most exciting regions. Which would you rather have? Beer tastes better on a beach in Belize anyway!

— Smoking: Stop it.

— Eat more veg: An average UK family spends £5,300 per year on food. A moment’s Googling leads me to a site of recipes that will feed a family for just £1,168 per year.

— Stick to essentials: Only buy stuff you really need. We all suffer from ‘stuffocation’. Look around your house and ask, ‘Do I need this?’ When did you last use or wear some of it? Would you miss it if it were gone? Sell ten things on eBay and transfer the proceeds to your Grand Adventures fund. eBay is a great place to buy all the kit you need for your adventure, too. You can save a fortune this way.

I hope I’ve demonstrated that saving £1,000 is achievable through taking small steps. Remember that the same metaphor applies to all the other obstacles standing in your way. Overcoming inertia, generating momentum, getting out the front door, beginning: if you want it enough, you can do it.

Tiny steps. Grand adventures. Are you in?

WISE WORDS FROM FELLOW ADVENTURERS

JAMIE BOWLBY-WHITING

HITCH-HIKED THOUSANDS OF MILES, RAFTED THE RIVER DANUBE AND WALKED ACROSS ICELAND

It is possible to travel entirely without money by a combination of free camping, Couchsurfing and foraging.

HANNAH ENGELKAMP

WALKED A LAP OF WALES WITH AN ECCENTRIC DONKEY

Money-wise, if you do something that involves walking and camping, it’s likely to be an awful lot cheaper than ordinary life. Really, it’s a matter of getting your head around stopping what you’re doing now and just doing something completely different.

DAVE CORNTHWAITE

MADE 25 NON-MOTORISED JOURNEYS

I learned to just downsize my life and limit my outgoings, which I think is a nice lesson overall.

ALICE GOFFART & ANDONI RODELGO

CYCLED ROUND THE WORLD FOR SEVEN YEARS

During those years, including having two children on the way, we spent less than €50,000. That’s what some people spend on a car, and nobody asks them how they did it.

ANTS BOLINGBROKE-KENT

NUMEROUS VEHICLE-POWERED EXPEDITIONS

My money diet mantra was ‘no unnecessary spending’. The only clothes I bought were off eBay or from charity shops (difficult as a lover of fashion). I made sure my saving didn’t overly impact on my relationship, though. This adventure malarkey can be rather selfish and I wanted to save cash, but that couldn’t mean becoming a miserly bore.

GRAHAM HUGHES

VISITED EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD WITHOUT FLYING

When asked how can I afford to travel so much, I feel like retorting with: how can you afford your rent? To keep a dog? To have children? To smoke? When I travel, I have no rent to pay, so 100 per cent of the money I have can go on travel.

JAMIE MCDONALD

RAN 200 MARATHONS ACROSS CANADA

I spent three years saving up for a house. The only reason was because everyone else was doing that. I was just choosing it for someone else’s sake. So I bought a second-hand bicycle for 50 quid out of the newspaper and I flew to Bangkok. And then I cycled home back to Gloucester.

ANDY KIRKPATRICK

BIG WALL CLIMBING & WINTER EXPEDITIONS

Before my first trip to the Alps I was working in a job where I got £100 a week, and just the bus ticket from Sheffield to the Alps cost me £99! I saved one week’s pay, spent it on the ticket and packed in my job. Every penny we spent was considered.

JASON LEWIS

SPENT 13 YEARS CIRCUMNAVIGATING THE PLANET BY HUMAN POWER

I ended up in the clink [prison] in east London for trying to run out the door of the chandlery there with our shit bucket and a scrubbing brush, coming to the total of £4.20. I was rugby tackled by security guards at Woolworths. So yeah, we were just desperate.

© Alice Goffart and Andoni Rodelgo

© Tim and Laura Moss

MATT EVANS

TRAVELLED OVERLAND FROM THE UK TO VIETNAM

I bought a big ceramic savings pot that needed to be smashed to get all the money inside. Every day we came in from work and put all the loose change in our pockets into it. No excuses. This might sound silly but after a while it became normal, and when we finally had a grand ‘Smashing of the Jar’ ceremony, we had £962.28 in it. That’s quite a lot of money for a small daily ritual that didn’t seem to take much effort. The funny thing was, once we’d saved up the money without living like hermits or living on beans on toast, we looked at each other and wondered why we hadn’t been making these changes to our lives since we met. We hadn’t felt unduly broke, we hadn’t lost any friends, and we didn’t feel as though we’d worked our fingers to the bone. Yet somehow we’d saved enough money to have the adventure of a lifetime. All it took was a little thinking, a few tweaks and a bit of willpower.

SEAN CONWAY

FIRST PERSON TO COMPLETE A ‘LENGTH OF BRITAIN’ TRIATHLON

I don’t have much money, so I just got loads of credit cards. That kind of got the funding out of the way initially.

KEVIN CARR

RAN AROUND THE WORLD

Unless what you’re considering is crazy expensive, it’s probably much less hassle to work a part-time second job/overtime than it is to chase sponsors.

PATRICK MARTIN SCHROEDER

TRYING TO CYCLE TO EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD

I know this: travelling made me richer, even if I have less money. The slower you travel, the less money you spend. Money is probably not the thing stopping you, but the fact that you have to leave your comfort zone. That you have to do something scary. Once you step over that line, once you are on the road, everything gets easier.