How We Travel for Free
I remember before Kenny and I got married, some friends of ours told us about their journey in becoming debt free because debt had been a burden on their marriage. Their advice planted a seed of intrigue inside of us that later blossomed into a journey of our own of trying to structure our lives where we could also live without debt depicting how we lived our lives. The only problem was…we were poor. I remember Kenny and I going on dates in bookstores that led to him browsing the whole store while I sat and read through Dave Ramsey searching for just how we were going to find this magic secret to living debt free. (Spoiler alert…it was hard work and lots of sacrifice…but that’s another story for another day). When we were married over 16 years ago, we did have two sets of undergraduate degree student loans and a very small income that quickly grew to only one small income when our daughter was born two and a half year of our marriage. Being debt free meant a lot to us so we lived off less than what our small income allowed and chiseled away at that student debt to achieve our goal six years into our marriage of being debt free. (Except for our house….we gotta live somewhere).
We want to live debt free, but we always had a credit card for emergencies. I heard of people using credit cards and using their points for travel. I researched different cards and settled on the Chase IHG Credit Card. While IHG hotels might not of been where we always stayed, I realized pretty much wherever we would go there would be an IHG hotel. I also realized IHG wasn’t limited to just Holiday Inn Express…there were tons of options under the IHG name. This was the card we chose and within 6 months we were able to stay for our fall break that year right on Orange Beach for nearly free. In the past three years we have been able to take several trips and pay a fraction of what we would have if we didn’t have this card. It has also opened up doors to stay at super nice places we would not of otherwise chosen. The most important factor is that we did all this with a credit card, but still stayed debt free. We would put everything on this card, but treat it as a debit card and promptly paid everything off that month. We have never accrued interest and are able to take our kids on adventures we never imagined.
Just a few of our travels…there are definitely more but these are some of our favorites!
Orange Beach 2021 – We stayed a week at the Holiday Inn in a room overlooking the beach. We were able to get 5 night for free and paid for 2 nights. Bonus was that they had free breakfast!
New Orleans! This one was fun. We had a week scheduled at a condo at Orange Beach, but was able to add another 5 days to the trip with time in Laurel, MS (Hello Hometown fans!), New Orleans, LA and extra time in Orange Beach. I think I paid $30 total for these extra days.
Niagara Falls! We did one night in Cleveland to see the Christmas Story House and explore Cleveland. After that we were able to do five nights in Niagara Fall. Completely free!
Los Angeles! We were able to stay at this really cool boutique hotel in Beverly Hills for three nights, outside Disneyland for two nights and at the airport for one night. I think I paid $150 for all of it because the hotel next to the airport didn’t take points and we really needed to be close to the airport for ease of returning the rental car for an early flight.