Looking After Your Money When You’re Travelling

When you’re off on a worldwide jaunt for more than a couple of months, it’s easy to forget your financial commitments back home. Unless you’ve sold your house, cancelled all your TV subscriptions and the newspapers, you’ll still have some bills to take care of. Managing your domestic finances is as important as watching your travelling money, so here’s the key aspects to attend to.

Put your travelling money in a high-yield savings account

Keeping your holiday money in a separate account from your “domestic” funds makes it easier to keep track of what you’re spending if only travelling expenses stay in this account. Use a high-interest savings account and transfer funds into your travelling current account when you need them. While the funds stay in the savings account, they’ll accrue interest so that you’ll get a few hundred pounds extra towards the end of the trip. Make sure the account is easy access, though – you don’t want to be paying penalties every time you make a transfer.

Keeping up with your mortgage or rent

You need to use another bank account for your mortgage or rent payment and this payment should be taken care of by direct debit so that you don’t forget it! It’s important that you leave enough in this account to cover everything, so look at this budget calculator here. One thing you don’t want is to be stung by failed payment charges while you’re away!

All your other bills

Again, automatic is the way to go if you want to pay monthly. Alternatively, you could ask your utility providers if they can offer you a discount if you pay for a year upfront. You should have saved up this amount anyway, so why not keep hold of 5% or so? Making your bill payments automatic will help you to avoid late fees and charges.

When it comes to bills, though, you should pare them down to the essentials. Get rid of your Netflix account and lower your mobile tariff to the minimum possible, or even let the contract expire when the time comes. Think about all the subscriptions and direct debits you pay – Amazon Prime and so on – and cut them out. You can easily pick them back up when you return if you want to.

Think about renting your home out if you own it

If you own your home, you could earn a bit of income by renting it out. If you’re going for a year or more, then a long-term rental contract will be best as you can find a letting agent and they can do all the organisation for you.

Even if you’re only going for a couple of months, you could put the place on Airbnb. You’ll have to use an agency to take care of bookings and changeovers and this will eat into the profits. However, even if you only make a few tens of pounds over your mortgage payment, it’s easy money, right?

*This is a collaborative post.