Our travel-hacking story began during our engagement in 2018. We were budgeting our wedding and planning our honeymoon to Bali when we began to appreciate travel-hacking as a strategy to achieve financial stability y viajar por el mundo. For us, travel-hacking means taking any steps to save money on your travels and/or enhancing your travel experience. In our case, we thought, why not both?!
Con eso, we signed up for the Capital One Venture, Alaska Airlines BoA, and Marriott Amex Bonvoy Brilliant credit cards and placed our wedding expenditures there, paying off the balance every month. We built up our savings fund – Laurie worked at SurLaTable and Danny tutored history and delivered food on DoorDash. Finally, we changed our consumer habits to maximize the points and miles we can earn. The day after our wedding, we owed $0 and earned over 650,000 points and miles to fund our honeymoon. A viajar no fuimos!
We flew Emirates Business Class on the A380 via Dubai to reach Singapore before we made our way to Bali. We flew back to the U.S. on Japan Airlines Business Class on the B777 via Bangkok and Tokyo. In between, we stayed in Marriott properties and leveraged low prices at the Bali resorts we stayed at. Overall, we managed to travel hack 75% of our honeymoon – only paying about $5000 out-of-pocket from a total estimated trip value of $20,000.
Since then, we have continued to travel-hack our travels and build generational wealth. We are new homeowners; estamos pagando los student loans while having a healthy savings fund; and we recently flew Emirates First Class for the first time on our recent trip from Europe. Finally, we started our Instagram page @LatinosWithPassports, where we share our financial and travel-hacking best practices to fellow Latin@s, many who are looking to achieve the same goals as we are.
There’s been several challenges along the way. We had to do a lot of self-education on financial literacy and travel hacking. As we adjusted our lifestyle we had discussions and disagreements on how to achieve our financial and travel goals. We also had to consider balancing our work commitments with our growing Instagram page demands. Finally, esta pandemia presented us with the challenges of not being able to take consistent PTO to ensure self-care and time together to grow our young marriage.
With a good plan and commitment to said plan, we can achieve building generational wealth while traveling the world. Te invitamos to follow us, and we hope that together we can leave a legacy que nuestra comunidad will be proud of.
Vamos viajando. The world needs to see us!
Latinos With Passports 