How They Did It: A Family Takes a Year Off and Goes 'Around the World in Easy Ways'

Twenty-two years ago, Lisa Shusterman was a financial planner with clients who wanted to take a year off to travel and, like many of us, that idea instantly appealed to her. "Not just taking a year off to travel, but taking a year off from your life, taking a year off from what you do on a day-to-day basis to live a completely different lifestyle," she says.

Soon life took over, but in 2006, she realized it was now or never. "This isn't one of those things that just happens. You don't just pick up one day and say, 'We're leaving.' If we were really going to do this, now is the time to start planning it."

So, between June 2008 and 2009 Shusterman was the layman's Phileas Fogg -- traveling the world and doing it with a family of four for just $118,000 (including trip-specific preparations). In her book, Around the World in Easy Ways, this Cincinnati, Ohio mother details what it took to take the trip of a lifetime from planning, accommodation, transportation and everything in between. It's all there between the pages, but she has been kind enough to share the best of it all right here just for you.
"When I came back, people kept saying, 'you should write a book.' I thought, what am I going to write, a guidebook? Guidebooks are obsolete and the family already wrote a blog and one day I realized that the book I need to write is about how to do this because I couldn't find that information from a readily available source," says Shusterman. "I found bits and pieces here and there, but, at the time that we were looking, we couldn't find information answering how do you decide where to stay?, how do you budget? how do you decide what goes on the itinerary?"

Those answers are here now as WalletPop went one-on-one with this goddess of globetrotting to give you some of those insider secrets that you usually only learn by doing it yourself.

Making Sure You Have the Money
As a former financial planner, saving is in Lisa Shusterman's DNA, but what if you want to travel around the world and it's not in yours? First, she says, having a goal is half the battle. "The compulsion to save for a rainy day, even when you don't know what it's for becomes even stronger when you do know what it's for." Suddenly, it becomes easier to save and easier to do without. Shusterman says that in order to make their trip possible her family had to take something from their present to save for their future. "We didn't go to movies, we rented DVDs and we didn't eat out for the entire year before we left because we knew we'd have plenty of opportunities to do that on our trip." Ever since she dreamed it 20-plus years ago, she thought in terms of 'Do I really need this?' and had developed a nice little nest egg of her own. In 2004, as the trip got closer and closer, every purchasing decision was weighed in terms of priority among the family. Then in 2006, as it was being planned, every purchase was thought out: "My husband and I like to go to the theatre and we didn't go to the theatre for two years." They found substitutions, so they weren't totally depriving themselves, but it didn't feel like deprivation since they knew what was just around the corner. (For an idea of what it can cost on the cheap, check out GoBackpacking.com's budget for his around-the-world trip)

Things to Think About Before You Go
For Shusterman planning begins with deciding at what level you want to travel. "Even if we had the money, we would never have aspired to do a luxury trip because that's not who we are." They wanted to meet locals and other long-term travelers, but they had to figure out what kind of travelers they were going to be: Hostel travelers? Backpackers? They also had to figure out how far they were going to stretch their dollars. "We met lots of people who were traveling around the world, but they would skip the entire continent of Europe because Europe's expensive. We also met people who were on the road for years who never left Southeast Asia because it's cheaper than living at home." As part of their own strategy, the family wasn't willing to skip a continent, but they didn't go to a lot of the more expensive places, like London and Paris in Europe. Instead, they went from Holland to Poland. "Not inexpensive compared to other parts of the world, but cheaper than your Prague and your Vienna," she says.

Accommodations
Probably the single difference between the Shusterman clan and one's stereotypical vision of the budget traveler is that they skipped the hostels or motels in favor of apartments. "We were four people traveling," reminds Shusterrman. "In North America it's rather easy to get a room with two beds, but in other parts of the world it often doesn't happen, so we would have to buy two rooms in a lot of cases." Turns out that having an apartment with a living room and multiple bedrooms is often cheaper than getting two hotel rooms. Oh and don't forget the added economic and health benefits of having a kitchen and being able to cook your own food. It goes without saying that eating out is the greatest expense of any vacation and to eliminate the need for that saves copious amounts of money. "You also get a different travel experience because you get to be a local temporarily. After all, you are shopping at the grocery store and you'll have the experience of purchasing items from another far away culture," says Shusterman. Of course, she also warns that you don't always know what you're buying, but that's part of the fun of it. Through the internet you can find apartments available for holiday renters by the day, by the week or the month and some places are easier than others. "We would often get discounts if we agreed to stay for longer because it was easier on the owner since they didn't have to clean or find new people as often." In places where apartments weren't available like India, China and Africa, small hotels and guesthouses were often very cheap anyway, to the tune of $14/night. Apartments could cost as little as $180/week or as much as $500/week, but they also afforded people their space. "If someone couldn't sleep, you didn't have to sit in the washroom and read, so as not to disturb the other person, like you would in a hotel," adds Shusterman. Plus, in a hostel you often pay per person and the space is communal.

Flights
In terms of flights, Shusterman says that flying within continents like South America is very expensive. "Lots of people said you can reduce your flight expenses by not going to South America. We weren't willing to do that, but we could have." There are also a lot of plans available where you can get around-the-world tickets by booking with a group of airlines, such as Star Alliance. "We had decided where we wanted to go and we wanted to be able to go to those places, so we did use an air broker, but we didn't get around the world tickets." Air brokers can get you discounts by combining flights. "For example, we flew from New Zealand to Buenos Aires theoretically on one ticket." They went to Tahiti, Easter Island Chile on their way to Argentina with all the locations on the way treated as stopovers. It also helps to reduce flights and elect to use more ground transportation such as trains, cars, boats or buses.

Food
Having a kitchen and buying food from the grocery store opened a variety of options for Shusterman's family when it came to dining. "We always ate breakfast in the house, but a lot of times we would be out and about during the day, so we would eat out at lunch and then come come and make dinner." They could also pack a lunch and have a picnic with their own water in tow wherever they went, so they never had to pay for bottled water. When they did eat out, the family stuck to family restaurants and stayed away from fine dining. "We have young kids who really weren't interested in classy restaurants and it wouldn't have been fun for my husband and I to hear, 'Are we done yet? Are we done yet?'" In some countries, like Bangkok, they were comfortable with the street food, while in Africa and India they stayed away from the street fare. Sometimes they were invited out to dinner with a fellow traveler. One of Shusterman's daughters is what she calls, "one of the pickiest eaters in the world", so they packed her peanut butter that she could carry wherever she went as a security blanket. "Everywhere we went we also could find that country's version of pizza or pasta, so there was always something she could latch onto and she had the peanut butter for emergencies," says Shusterman.

Health & Safety
Speaking of emergencies, many travel books don't even touch on saving money on immunization or protecting your valuables from those notorious pickpockets, but Around the World in Easy Ways has you covered. For the record, Shusterman's husband did get pickpocketed three times in South America. The only thing of value stolen was a toiletries kit and thankfully, it was towards the end of the trip. "We were getting a little lazy with our strategies," admits Shusterman. Strategies that included wearing a money belt and keeping their computer, camera and journals in a backpack on their person at all times on travel days. "If you had to go to the bathroom, you took it with you." They did the obvious things like not going to inappropriate neighbourhoods or walking on the beach alone. "It's a mix of common sense and listening to other travelers," she says. They took out an international insurance policy that covered them medically everywhere outside the U.S. For immunizations, they got everything that was required and assessed their likely risk for everything else. "We got the immunizations we were at greatest risk for and took the chance we wouldn't get anything else," she says, having only gone to a doctor twice that whole year, thanks mostly to obsessively washing their hands. In Africa, they took anti-malaria pills and had evening clothes soaked in a special bug repellent called methrin that could endure up to six washings.

Activities & Attractions
Her family managed to control their activity budget by combining the more well-known attractions with community activities. "You go to the museums and see the things that are really important to you," she says, "But you don't get caught up in, 'Oh, because I'm here, I'm supposed to see this.' You just pick and choose those things you really want to see and pass up the rest." Of course, they saw the Sistine Chapel and the Coliseum in Rome, but there were also days where they spent no money. "When you're traveling for a year, if every day is packed to the gills, you'll burn out; so what you do is have down days," confirms Shusterman. That means days where you do laundry, read, catch up on e-mails, edit pictures, blog and maybe just browse around town. They also rented bikes a lot and explored the countryside that way. "It was adventurous to come across a river and realize to get across you needed a bamboo raft. These day-to-day experiences are what we remember the most."

For more info, including photos from the trip, the family's personal travel blog and how to purchase Lisa Shusterman's book, visit her website www.aroundtheworldineasyways.com