I am an avid traveler to the point where I have traveled to all seven continents and have a goal of traveling to every country in the world. Obviously this requires money and some of these countries can be expensive to travel to and others are a lot cheaper. So when I saw a screenshot of a so called travel hack, I immediately checked it out and wow this is a bad take. You can see it in full below:
Little travel hack I’ve learned. You can spend A LOT of money on credit cards but you only need to pay back a very small minimum per month.
I literally almost spent $30k this month already and I only need to pay back $80 for the month.
This person doesn’t seem to understand how interest works so even though you only ‘have’ to pay $80 per month, you have to pay interest on the remaining amount. As per google, the average monthly interest on credit cards is 23.9% (as of Aug 2025) so that means that for a 30k debt you would incur an interest of $7,170 per month, reduce the $80 you paid and your outstanding debt comes to $37,090 at the end of the first month. The next month (assuming no further charges) you will owe an additional $8,864.51 in interest and so on. You see where I am going with this?
Instead of taking such a massive debt and end up paying multiple times the money it is better for you to save money (as much as you can) and when you have enough for a vacation/trip take it. Rinse and repeat.
When I first got a credit card my dad sat me down and explained how interest works. His guideline (which I still follow) is to spend as much as you want on the Credit card, as long as you can pay the balance in full at the end of the month.
Travel can be a lot cheaper than you think as long as you are careful and plan for it. Things like taking advantages of sales and traveling just before the season starts (or just as it is ending) can save you a lot of money. You don’t have to stay in the top 5 Star places… In fact Jani and me usually prefer cheaper places because for the most part we only come to the room to sleep. As long as it is clean and hygienic we are happy with it. This doesn’t include the trips where every once in a while we go all out and stay at fancy resorts, but even with them we try to do a package and get any discounts we can.
The other reason we can spend a lot of money on travel is that we don’t have many other expenses and thus can afford to spend a lot of our savings on travel related expenses (and my books and Gadgets & Jani’s Perfume collection 😉 )
Hope that some of you find this useful.
– Suramya