This is one of the most common questions we’ve been getting lately, both from our readers as from people we’ve been meeting along the way. How on earth have we been able to continue our nude travels for more than a year and how are we going to manage to stay alive for at least one more year? Many think that we are nude millionaires, that we have won the lottery or that we are some kind of WizKids who started a successful internet company and live from the profit of it.
Well, let’s break that bubble for you.
We didn’t sell an app for millions of dollars before we engaged in this adventure. Unfortunately, because our lives would be so much easier, but maybe it’s also a good thing. The struggle to try to travel as much as possible with a limited amount of money does keep pumping our creativity.
We didn’t sell an app for millions of dollars before we engaged in this adventure. Unfortunately, because our lives would be so much easier, but maybe it’s also a good thing. The struggle to try to travel as much as possible with a limited amount of money does keep pumping our creativity.
How we got the money to travel is pretty basic… We worked for it. For several years we worked a lot, were lucky to have decently paying jobs and tried not to spend too much money on things like cars, furniture, big-screen TVs or whatever we would later have to sell for a much lower price anyway.
Saving up some money is an essential part if you want to travel at least somewhat comfortably. But it’s not a necessity.
Saving up some money is an essential part if you want to travel at least somewhat comfortably. But it’s not a necessity.
We’ve met several travelers who are selling bracelets or bandanas on the beach and travel with the money they make from it. Much respect for them, but we prefer to have some financial security. Also because we don’t want to write blog posts starting with “Yeah, we’re still in on Playa Zipolite nude beach, it’s been 6 months now but we still haven’t made enough money to get to the next nudist destination…”. That’s not how we roll.
This is not a regular nude holiday
One big mistake that is often made when people think we are rich is that they try to compare our way of traveling with theirs. They take vacations of one or two weeks and during that time they don’t think too much about money. Once they get back home they will earn their spendings back. We’ve met several couples along the way who easily spend 3000, 4000, 5000 dollars on their 10 day holiday. If they do the calculation what a year-long trip would cost… We can understand why they believe we are millionaires.
Truth is, what they spend on a 10-day trip can easily keep us going for 2 or 3 months.
Truth is, what they spend on a 10-day trip can easily keep us going for 2 or 3 months.
Travel costs can roughly be divided into 4 categories:
– Sleeping
– Eating and drinking
– Transportation
– Others (visas, activities, the ridiculous entrance fee of Madame Tussauds, etc)
– Sleeping
– Eating and drinking
– Transportation
– Others (visas, activities, the ridiculous entrance fee of Madame Tussauds, etc)
In a perfect world, all of those would take 25% of your budget. But we don’t live in a perfect world. In Sri Lanka for example, everything is ridiculously cheap. Except for tourist attractions. A visit to some ruins or a cave temple can easily set you down 25 dollars per person. If you’re on a 100 dollar budget as a couple, that’s twice the amount it should be. In Mexico on the other hand, a cheap place when it comes to food and booze and even accommodation, bus tickets cost you double an inter-European Ryanair flight costs.
The solution to this is the pace of traveling. An amazing advantage we have is that we are not in a hurry. We have lots of time. If transportation is expensive but accommodation is cheap, we just stay longer at the same place. 25 dollars a bus ride is expensive if you move on every day, but if you stay for 5 days it’s only 5 dollars per day. Ask Kelly and Sherry from Casablanca Guest House in Zipolite, we intended to stay 3 days but ended up extending our stay twice to 2 weeks (but that was also because Zipolite is such a magical place).
In Croatia on the other hand, even the campground fees were over budget, but car rental seemed to be pretty affordable. Because we had our own car, we were able to do more in one day, so we could travel faster and spend less on accommodation. We could also have slept in our rental car, but then we come back to the point of why we chose to save some money before leaving. We like at least some comfort.
Travel hacks for cheaper nude vacations
We have to admit, traveling long term does require a lot of mathematics. And we do understand that if you have no intention to travel for a long time as we do, it does sound very hardcore. We had the same while we were still having a job and the odd vacation in Belgium. Who cares whether that hotel is 40 dollars or 60? Who cares whether that bottle of wine is 15 dollars or 30? Let’s have another one! In the short term, it doesn’t make much sense, but on long term it’s critical.
We use “travel hacks”, however, which can easily be applied to short term and long term travels. Something we never do for example is package holidays. We know it’s very easy but basically you’re paying a company a huge amount of money (often 20-25% of the cost of your whole trip) just for arranging things you could easily do yourself.
Because what you need is simple: A place to stay and a way to get there. Or otherwise: A hotel and a flight.
Because what you need is simple: A place to stay and a way to get there. Or otherwise: A hotel and a flight.
Unfortunately, not all of the nudist places have advanced to using the big booking websites, so it’s often not possible to get a good deal. If you don’t really care whether your hotel allows nudity or not because you’ll be spending most of your days on a nude beach anyway, your best chances are certainly to use a booking website. Our all-time favorite is Booking.com. It works great, it’s easy and when you’ve used it for a couple of times you get a “genius” account which gives you a default 10% discount at most places. Give it a try below, you’ll love it.
By finding the best deals on Booking.com we’ve saved a huge load of money and we’ve been able to stay at hotels that are normally way over budget but which apparently just had a good deal while we were searching.
Next one: flights. So many people still think they need to contact a travel agency or visit the official website of this or that airline to get a flight. They are losing so much money, it’s ridiculous. Today there are several websites that help you to find the best (and cheapest) flight for you. That’s kind of what the travel agency does, but instead of charging their commission to you, they’ll charge it to the airlines. In the past, we’ve used a combination of Google Flights and Skyscanner.com, but recently we found an even better one: Jetradar.com. Unlike the previous two, it doesn’t only scan airline and travel company websites but also the websites which scan those. Confusing? Yeah maybe a little, but give it a try below and you’ll see that they have some awesome deals!
If you’ve been used to buy package deals, we would seriously encourage you to check out the above and see what your trip could have cost you if you had used those two easy tools. You might be impressed.
Have a look at the best websites for cheaper travel on our Resources Page.
Naked Wanderings is (not) a gold mine
One last bubble we’re going to splash here for you is that we’re earning a huge load of money with Naked Wanderings. Haha, we wish! And it’s not that we’re not trying… of course it’s one of our big dreams to earn money with Naked Wanderings and be able to keep traveling the world from one nudist place to another for the rest of our lives, but sadly that’s not how it works.
Without going into too much detail, the big advertising companies that work together with all the other bloggers, Google and Amazon, refuse to work together with us. Indeed… because of the nudity. Well, lucky for you… that’s why you don’t see many ads on this website.
On the other hand, the advertising companies that do want to work with us are often obscure or porn related, so they’re not worth anything either. As much as we’d love to make some money with this, we certainly don’t want to promote anything that we don’t believe in ourselves.
Does that mean we really don’t earn anything from Naked Wanderings? No, fortunately not. We do get some profits. Because we have grown a lot, many nudist places started to recognize the importance of our website and invited us to come over so we can talk about their place. Which means we’re spending less on accommodation. It’s not going to make us rich, but it will keep us longer on the road. And in the end, that’s what really matters.
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I certainly hope you can keep going for another year and more because I have really enjoyed reading your blog. Surely there are naturist businesses the world over who would pay to advertise to your world wide following? While I don’t want to see your blog overrun with adverts a few discrete adverts are fine to support such a popular blog.
Thanks for the kind words Stephen!
We also don’t like blogs that are more advertising than content, so no worries 🙂
Bonjour Nick et Lins
j’aime beaucoup votre initiative de vivre nu et votre esprit J’ai moi meme vécu nu autour du monde et continu à le faire tous les jours que je peut Je suis aussi d’accord pour supprimer toute publicité j’ai fait un blog https://vivrenu.wordpress.com/ sans publicité et censure
Je vous encourage à continuer tout simplement comme vous le faite et merci de nous faire partager votre belle experience
Hello Nick & Lins, it’s great to have more insight on what fuels your lifestyle!
I know it might be a sensitive subject but could you give us a ballpark figure of how much $ has one year of this kind of traveling has implied?
How much did you have to save up before you were comfortable doing this journey?
And finally, how many more years do you envision this to go on? Is there a life waiting for you back in Belgium or was it the kind of selling off everything situation?
Sorry for all the questions 🙂 Just wondering what it took to make this decisions!
Hi Alex!
We’re not going to tell you how fat (or skinny) our bank accounts are 🙂
We have no idea how long this trip will last, because we hope to keep traveling until we pretty much run out of money, so our budget is not really set to get through a certain amount of time, but rather to make sure that we don’t spend half of it during the first two months and to keep track of our expenses and see where we can cut if necessary.
We has roughly estimated a 70 euro per day budget (for the 2 of us), but that was back in the day when we thought that we would stay in Asia for about a year. Of course that wasn’t possible in the USA and it won’t be in Canada either. But now in Mexico we can live more luxuriously while actually saving (or better: spending less) money.
As we said, there’s a lot of planning and math involved 🙂
Great one.
Im not sure that any1 said here that u guys are rich ,but more like, how the hell do u manage to not work for a year + travel at same time ?
But ya, its explained well, tho this still can show that ,well generally ,u still have to have some $$$ to be able to be a nudie, or to travel in general.
Plus as i recall, in Croatia at least, the nudie places cost more then textile right?
As far as sponsors go well .. i honestly dunno why a porn site would wanna be a sponsor, i get why but i dunno WHY lol .. i dont understand what would they have from that …
As for Google and Amazon .. i dunno ,its kinda funny ,yes its a naked site, but just naked and not even exposed naked, so i dunno whats the big deal?
And at the same time those companies are backing LGBT prides, where there are nude ppl marching.
True, unfortunately nudist places are often more expensive than textile places. In some cases it’s that bad that quality/price ratio is much worse on nudist places. Just because they’re becoming more popular and because there aren’t that many, the owners keep rising their prices without upgrading their amenities. Sad but true. There’s a hole in the market and we’re sure that it will be filled one day and that the resorts will have to become more competitive if they want to keep their guests coming back.
Do you need money to be a nudist or to travel: Certainly. But the way we travel (like fulltime) is of course not that common. Compare it with a hobby, playing tennis also comes with a cost. You can of course play tennis in your backyard but it’s just not the same 🙂
The most annoying thing with Amazon (and one that really pissed us off) was that the only amazon ad we had on our website was for a book about nudism that they are selling in their webshop… Pretty not straight forward if you ask us… We’ve sent them a couple of e-mails to ask for clarification but never received a response.
Well Amazon.. all they care about is $ and not to pay their workers properly.. no wonder.
Your explanation makes perfect sense. Do-it-yourself (DIY) travel is the way to save money, and you can hone those skills greatly through experience. For years I traveled for next-to-nothing by taking advantage of deals and through the generosity of friends hosting and sharing tips. That’s how I got myself to 11 million frequent flyer miles ? by the time I was 45. It now enables me to worry less about travel costs, and to sometimes use premium travel. It’s a different form of the saving you did.
I like to pay favors forward. And as a nudist, particularly one who spends most of his time around cash-strapped 20-something nudists ?, I delight in making the impossible a reality for friends, to the extent I can.
Your wanderings are a delight to follow. Know that if your journeys take you to SE Florida, you have a free place to stay. Save your funds for getting around and enjoying the wonderful food and sights here.
Thanks for the offer Martin, Florida is not on the planning yet, but we’re sure we’ll pass by one day.
We’ve tried to figure out the “mile system” several times, but without much success. In Belgium we don’t have decent credit cards to earn lots of miles and because of the low cost airlines we don’t fly often enough with the major ones to earn a decent amount of miles…
Why don’t you guys look into accepting Bitcoin cash (BCH) donations?
Hi Josh, thanks for the tip, but asking money from our readers is our last option. Until we really run out of money, we are going to try to generate some kind of income from other sources.
Hi, Nick and Lin’s
I really love hearing about your travels and look forward to each update. I agree that DIY travel is the best way to save money on travel. I would add that it gives you the benefit of seeing places from a different viewpoint from that of the tourist in a package tour. Take that to another level and look into home exchanging. My wife and I have done this several times an love the experience. Feel free to contact me if you want any information on this, I’ll be happy to share what I know.
As a naturist B&B operator, I have a different point of view on the big booking sites like Booking.com. We are bringing our relationship with them to an end for a couple of reasons. The first is that they have made it virtually impossible for us to identify ourselves in our listing as nude or clothing optional. This has meant that we never know if a booking will result in an upset or outraged client when they arrive, not knowing our house policy. The second is the huge number of no-shows. While we specified that we have a deposit policy for every booking and Booking,com collected credit card information to ‘confirm’ each booking, they do not collect any money on our behalf. While I could (and did ) send invoices for deposits, our collection rate on these was less than 50%. Even when we didn’t receive payment of the deposit, we had to hold the room for the booking because Booking.com had ‘confirmed’ it. We are saying goodbye to this nightmare. We take bookings directly on our website and that’s the way we’ll keep it until there are big changes in the online booking engines.
Hi Paul, home exchange is indeed another very interesting alternative and one we have been considering. But if we want to keep Naked Wanderings a bit interesting for everybody, we have to keep moving on and not stay in the same place for several weeks/months in a row. And that’s mostly what home exchange is about, no?
And also, we’ve sold pretty much everything, so we don’t currently have a home to exchange 🙂
About Booking.com, it seems like many hotel owners have the same issues as you have. The company has made itself somewhat indispensable, especially for the larger places, and has now put its focus completely on the comfort of the traveller. Which is interesting for us, of course, but we understand that it can be a nightmare for the hotel owner. When we are searching for a hotel, we even get notifications saying “book this or that hotel because you can still cancel it afterwards for free”. And we hear that many travellers seem to take advantage of his. Because we spend a lot of time talking with hotel owners we believe that we do know their struggles better than the average traveller who thinks that a hotel is purely a money machine (which in some cases it is of course).
We’re curious what the future will bring for sites like booking.com…
I admire you guys. Firstly for having the guts to pack your bags and head off for these fantastic experiences and sharing your stories as you go along. Secondly your creativity and opinions. I wish I could do the same. I feel like I know you guys through your blogs and I am assuming through your exposure the kind hearted naked people of the world would be looking after you in what ever way they can. Money as I am sure you know is not the most important thing in life. Keep doing what you do. And when you are in Australia drop me an email so we can catch up.
If we thought money was the most important thing in life, we’d be still working 9 to 5 (or probably 8 to 7) in some office in Belgium 🙂
Unfortunately some money a necessity. About a year ago we volunteered at a clothing optional campground in Montenegro in exchange for food and accommodation, where we had zero costs for a couple of weeks, and it was incredible. But it’s hard to maintain such a lifestyle forever…
When it comes to making the choices we made, we like to quote from the Placebo song Slave to the Wage: “All it takes is one decision, a lot of guts, a little vision to wave your worries and cares goodbye”
Great write up guys! My gorgeous partner and I spend at least a couple of months traveling naked every year, mostly in Europe, and the answer for us was simple. We bought a cheap, oldish motor home for not very much money, and by my calcs we recovered the investment in the first year and a bit through savings on travel and accommodation . In fact most years our travel costs are limited to flights (to where our camper lives; we are not European), fuel, road tolls and camping ground fees. No more car rental charges, no more hotels, no more flights. We camp in one spot for weeks at a time, mainly buy and cook fresh food every day, and use bicycles to do our touring. In the last 4 years we’ve crossed Europe twice, visited 12 countries and explored dozens of naturist places. I know this is not practical for most, but it goes to show that where there’s a will to travel inexpensively, there’s usually a way. In fact we enjoy sleeping in our camper so much we have ditched the idea of hotels altogether. I’d love to hear others ideas about travelling on a budget too 🙂
Indeed, for long time traveling through Europe a camper is probably the best and most profitable choice. When we get to the (second) European lap of our world trip, this will probably also our first option. But in the other parts of the world where we’ve been traveling, except for the USA, the nudist places are so limited and wide spread that flying and staying in hotels is still the most economical choice. It all depends on the destination.
You have quite the following and many of us value your insights, reviews, and work finding nudist friendly travel destinations for us to add to our lists! Have you considered setting up a Patreon account? Your readers could pay you directly and maybe you can extend your trip.
I’ve been in your shoes and traveled Western Europe for a year (also saved to do so). It is a completely different way and mindset to travel. I wouldn’t trade that time of my life for anything. This was 20 years ago. The world and tools to get by more affordably are much more plentiful!
Hi Chris! Although Naked Wanderings has become quite a travel related blog, the initial thought (and still our ultimate goal) was to spread the word about naturism/nudism and to tickle people’s curiosity and help them taking the first steps. From that point of view, we’re not big fans of asking our readers for money. Nudism has become a billion dollar industry and we still believe that we should get our income from those who profit from what we do, being nudist destinations, resorts, etc.
Of course, that’s our ideology… If/when we really get to the point that we’ll completely run out of money, we might have to reconsider that idea 🙂
Thanks for the write-up, I was curious about how you managed to do it! Thanks for sharing your journey with us all. Long may your travels continue!
Thanks for this! We’ve been fortunate enough to do a lot of naturist travel, but you two have really set the bar. Great to get a glimpse of how you’re making that work. And we’re grateful that you’re out there doing so much positive press for holistic naturism. Well done.
Still hoping our paths will cross one day. We both work A LOT, so maybe we can scrape together the funds to come find YOU where you are! 🙂
One day we’ll be able to meet up 🙂
Have you been to Zipolite in Mexico by the way? If not, put it on top of your bucket list!
Actually I wanted to ask how you did it, when you were here. Thank you for posting the story and the details. We are doing good at PhuanNaturistVillage. com, we miss you and are hoping that we see you again soon.
I really enjoy your blogs – witty, chatty, level headed, encouraging and above all a mine of valuable information in a world of confused textiles.
I would be interested in offering you some NZ$ to help you continue this web page ( It must be costing you something) so can you insert a *donate* tab, and have it linked to something like PayPal, or is that another expense for you?.
That’s very kind of you, but to something we should discuss via the comments of this post. We’ll send you an e-mail to talk about this further!
Keep going! We love reading about your nudie exploits. After all, life is not a rehearsal. As for Amazon, Facebook, Youtube and the rest, they are all too money obsessed to care about differentiating porn from naturism. I do like your pics though; always make me smile.
Yet another great article. I‘d like to travel more, but finnaly I also enjoy being home after 2, latest 3 weeks to „digest“ my experiences and share them with friends (all my travel is DIY style as I meed to encounter aleays a x4 on every price with only a x1 on the income side). Still, a time-out for a long travel is on my wish list.
To attract the ad‘s it could be an option to make a reader survey and explain the money behind them. That always counts. And explain that we are not nerds, but have normal jobs and buy buy things for normal reasons. OK such a survey would require some very personal questions – with trust into anonymity, but I think that the trust level in the nudist community is rather healthy. Probably a crazy and disputable idea, but an idea. (Although I enjoy the low ad count here).
Thanks for the tip about the survey Alex!
We’re pretty picky when it comes to advertising though. First of all because it looks really ugly on our website and secondly because we prefer not to promote things we don’t really stand behind, or don’t know.
It’s very tricky and Google advertising is pretty good at this because they advertise stuff our readers have been googling before. But they don’t like the nudity…
Love Naked Wanderings.
Jealous of you guys doing what you are doing.
There will be businesses that will advertise, particularly if they take the time to look at your blog and can readily see that there is nothing about sex here.
Have you approached places like Zennioptical for advertising.
Even Nudies wear glasses.
I have purchased from Zenni several times and found them excellent, way cheaper than a local optometrist, reading glasses, prescription sunnies – you name it.
Regards
Bazil
Hi Barry, thanks for your comment! We’ve also considered approaching companies directly but the thing is that it takes a lot of time and effort. And also, they will never apply to all of our readers. That’s the good thing about advertising platforms (those which don’t want to work with us), that they can produce ads specific for the reader.