How to Organize Finances for Extended Travel

Organizing our finances was probably one of the most difficult aspects of our journey. How can we arrange it so we have access to our money from all over the world? How can we pay our bills from Timbuktu? How do we even know how much and to whom we need to pay?!

Getting it Set Up in the Beginning

The process of getting everything organized took many months – many months of working diligently every day to make sure it was all taken care of. Even so, once we took off there was still more that came in and we had to deal with that from the road. Start early on the process, as it’ll take a long time. This is definitely one area that you don’t want to put off til the last minute!

I started about 4 or 5 months before our departure. Every day I picked up our mail and sat down at the computer with the stack of bills and junk mail. Since we would be renting out our house, I didn’t want all that junk arriving. I researched on the internet until I found some address, then wrote and explained our situation and asked that they stop sending mail to this address. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. But at least I made an effort.

Then I attacked the bills. My first step was to read the bill to see if they had an address printed on it where I could set up an autopay – a lot of them did. Each time I got a new bill, I went to the website and set up autopay and asked for electronic bills only. That process went on for an extended period because many of the bills were only due every quarter or even twice/year. If a bill came – I tried to set it up on autopay.

Although most of my bills could be paid directly and automatically, there were a few bills that couldn’t. For those, I contacted the company and explained my situation – and asked what they could do for me. Mostly, they were happy to work with me and we were able to set up an autopay situation. If that didn’t work, I set up billpay through my bank – they will send out checks from my checking account as needed.

As far as I know, I now have no more bills arriving at my sister-in-law’s house!

For other mail, I’ve changed my address to my sister-in-law’s house, and she checks to see if anything important arrives and contacts me via email if something does – and I can make a decision at that time on how to deal with it.

Another option you have is to use one of many mail-forwarding services that have opened to meet the needs of the many full-time snowbirds. You can arrange for them to hold your mail and ship it out whenever you contact them with an address. These services are great, but they will not open your mail to let you know if something important arrived.

Accessing Money from Wherever

The next thing we needed to figure out what how to access our money from wherever we happened to be. We had used an ATM card in the past, and knew it would work quite well – there are ATM machines in all major cities all around the world. However, most of them charge outrageously high fees, which would readily cut into our meager savings.

Fortunately, someone told us about the Schwab One account from Charles Schwab. We opened an account with them, and have an ATM card on that account. With that card, we have NO fees anywhere in the world! NO FEES! I simply accept the charge on the ATM machine, but Schwab waives the fee and I don’t have to pay it in the end. It’s been working well for months now, and I’m sure it’ll continue to work as we move south.

We also carry a credit card, and have set up online banking so we can pay the bill online. Now that we are out of the USA, we only use the credit card sporadically, but it comes in handy for large purchases. Being able to pay the bill online means nobody is bothered with a bill arriving in the mail, and we can quickly to check the balance and make sure nobody has intercepted the number.

Other Tips

Be sure you write down all card numbers and the phone numbers to contact in case of emergency and store them somewhere separate from your cards themselves. If your cards are stolen, you may not have access to internet to get the numbers – and you don’t want to delay in calling to report it stolen.

We have also emailed all that information to ourselves in case everything we have should be stolen.