Money Saving Tips Before You TravelTak's dispatch released on 25 September 2014

Yesterday was another interesting day. 0445: Wake up; 0610: On Train; 0900: call time for editorial fashion shoot; 1900-2300: Meetings; Home: 0200 +1. In between all that I got to thinking about what I need to do before I leave for Vietnam in October, and I noted two other important money saving tips if you are leaving for an extended period of time. These two would be in addition to the Five International Travel Tips Before You Fly post the other day. I don’t know if these apply where you are — and generally I only know these things from the perspective of how it works in the USA — but you can look into them:

  1. Are you going to be using your domestic mobile phone plan while traveling overseas?

    I never do this as I have found it is much cheaper for me to just buy a SIM card in the country I am in and use that service, rather than using my domestic phone plan with its egregious rates and all. I also found out, at least for US carriers, that many have a time window for SMS messages. If the SMS is not delivered in X amount of days (Verizon had said it was 3 for them at the time), then they delete it. Thus, if I am gone for a month, and I come back – I will only have SMS messages sent to me in the last three days or so.

    Given that I am not using my Verizon plan overseas (in favour of aforementioned SIM card), and given that they aren’t even catching and saving my SMS messages for me, I see little point is having the phone on. Thus, I temporarily suspend my mobile phone service for a date range, saving that money.

  2. Another great thing I do before traveling for any extended duration is to temporarily suspend my automobile insurance. The states have a whole slew of different laws, but check to see if your state allows you to remove insurance coverage from your vehicle without turning in the plates. If so, you can call up your insurance company and tell them you want to move your car into storage. They will then transmit the proper paperwork to the motor vehicles department that your car is going to be in storage (e.g. not being driven by anyone), and then they can remove the great majority of coverage. Upon your return, you call up and ask for it to be taken out of storage, and you are good to go.

    There are many caveats with this — state laws, insurance companies and so forth — but I have saved a good deal of money doing this and would recommend you look into it. Also note that there are usually limits of when you get put your car into and out of storage, which reasonably prevents people doing this all the time. Don’t be greedy and abuse these loopholes lest they get cut off entirely. Lastly, if you are planning on renting a car wherever you travel, you might want to ensure you have proper coverage in case of an accident there.

If I think of anything more as I do my thing, I’ll pop them up.

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Tak

New York, NY
Internationally-published photographer with a passion for creative food, fine products, unique cultures and underground music. Twitter / Instagram / takw at triphash dot com

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