[Kyon]

Let's say something bad happens, binge-drinking, theft, anything, and you're stuck in another country with no money. What are your go-to methods to make enough to survive? Have any of you ever had that problem?

[RawGod]

You're at risk of a drinking binge putting you on the street...? Erm ok...
Have a backup means of getting cash e.g. a debit card you don't usually carry on your person.
Have friends/family who will send you a few hundred dollars by western union no questions asked.

[CleanSlate]

I thought this thread would have useful information about what to do if you migrate to another country and later run out of savings.

Now I’m not so sure if this thread will go in the direction I’m hoping for.

[Kyon]

(02-15-2018 12:32 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

I thought this thread would have useful information about what to do if you migrate to another country and later run out of savings.

Now I’m not so sure if this thread will go in the direction I’m hoping for.

I'm still hoping for that.
There could be a million different scenarios where you move to another country, something happens and you are out of money in a completely alien environment.

[Suits]

I've borrowed, I've taken whatever work I could get, I've had my parents loan me $200 to get me through a tough patch.

Not exciting moments I want to re-live.

[Faceme91]

I have a city bank card which i could use anywhere with an ATM . Usually keep it at the hotel in the SAFE. Thats my emergency card.

I alway keep a 100$ bill tucked in the back of my wallet, which i forget about and act like it doesnt even exist.
Its my emergency cash

[Shimmy]

I had both of my atm cards and my CCs shut off for fraud all at once. Luckily I had cash at home and forum member Linux ordered me an uber.

[Dragan]

You need to have a place to sleep even if you're broke. Ideally you've paid your rent/ accommodation before you're broke. Have good friends that can spot you 25 to 30 bucks. I'd never ask a good friend for more. And in all honesty if something happens that's bad, it's my fault for not planning, or i should expect parents to bail me out. But really I shoulda had the money.

[yankeetravels]

For small stuff, I've had other forum members order me an Uber when my apps were being flaky or spot me a couple bucks. For bigger stuff, I've had thousands stolen from me on credit card fraud before abroad, so my advice would be to have more than one card in case you lose one or need to shut one off. Always have a back-up. Also, venmo and paypal are your friend. In the future, I'd definitely make sure someone could spot me some cash on there in a tight pinch or I could pay someone. But honestly, I wouldn't stay abroad permanently without a little safety net in savings or steady passive/remote income. My scenarios are more for theft or a sudden need for cash in a tight pinch.

[Lighter]

Well I just lost all my backup credit cards and debit cards 2 weeks after moving to Vietnam.

Thankfully my primary debit card was not lost. Going to have the replacements sent to my parents house in the USA and then my parents can forward them to me.

If I lose my last debit card in the next month, then I'll just Western Union myself money until my backup arrives.

Worst case scenario, I can always get a job at a party hostel for food and a bed.

[Suits]

This is how I earn cash when I run out of beer and hostel money.

[yankeetravels]

The beg packers with us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvmvO0XbQ-M

[gework]

Resourcefulness and stupidity. If my options are out then my first course of action would be the church.

Repost:

I decided to cycle from Serbia to Croatia for an hour. All I took with me was the bike with rear bike light, passport 5,500 dinars ($55) and a phone with 40% battery life. The typically aggressive Serbian border guard let me through, but on the other side I was interrogated for 90 minutes by the placid Croatian boarder guards as my passport had a problem which meant it was invalid. They told me I had to go back to Serbia, but on trying to go back to Serbia, they also spotted the passport problem and would not let me go back. The Croats said I could stay in Croatia and one of the guards let me hotspot his phone to get on to AirBnB. My tourist SIM had expired a few hours earlier. There was actually a place in the village, but being Scrooge incarnate I decided to save $20 and book a place what I thought would be at most 90 minutes cycle away. Five hours later I arrive at my destination at about midnight, three hours of which were in the pouring rain and with three stops by the Croatian police. Having not eaten since breakfast I took some apples from the side of the road. It's also pretty difficult riding with car lights beaming in your face all night. Once I realised how far I had to travel, I tried to book into a hotel, but turns out dinars are not popular in Croatia.

On arriving at the AirBnB, I was confronted by an angry middle-aged Croatian matriarch, who switched to mothering mode when I told her why I was so late. However, I wasn't able to get to sleep that night and after a large breakfast I biked back all the way to the Serbian border, a round trip of 180km with no sleep in 30 hours, in the pouring rain. I had about 5% battery left on arrival at another AirBnB and luckily they were prepared to swap my dinars for kuna, which I used to go to Zagreb with, booked into another AirBnB and used my encrypted bank details which I had stored on my phone to take out 200 EUR worth of kuna from Western Union. I used this to get an EU-free emergency passport.

My plan B was making a raft from my bike and trying to make it across the Danube.

For extra precaution I think it's best to go with:

USD/EUR in cash
Multiple cards
Phone with encrypted banking details
Ideally same details on a waterproofed SD card embedded in your shoe

[John Michael Kane]

gework is giving away my secrets!

[Dragan]

The old capsule in the hip trick!

[Simeon_Strangelight]

You can fall back on this:

[Winston Wolfe]

I've been there.

It happened after about a year of full time traveling. It was a lot of fun, but I also carelessly blew through all of my savings. YOLO, right? Right. Until you have an empty bank account.

I was in a third world shithole and down to my last $500.

The more I traveled, the more I wanted to give this "digital nomad" thing a shot and give myself the freedom of location independence. Except, I never actually did something to make it happen.

The reality of this situation finally gave me my much needed reality check and a firm kick in the ass. No way was I going back home unless I absolutely had to. This journey wasn't going to end like this.

Luckily my rent for the month was already paid and I did have an old shitty laptop with me. I started looking for ways to make money online. I spent at least 14 hours a day on that damn laptop and saved on every little expense I could.

At first, I worked bottom of the barrel shit jobs just to build an online portfolio. $5 becomes worth a lot more if that represents a 1% increase of your available funds.

Fast forward a couple years later and I still have not fully recovered from blowing through all of these savings, but I am on the right track. Most importantly though, I am still working for myself, when and where I want, and not for $5 anymore either. I make a decent living right now and even that shitty laptop got upgraded.

In hindsight, almost being broke in some third world shithole is the best thing that could have happened to me.

[Shimmy]

How do you embed a waterproof card in your shoe?

[Kyon]

(02-15-2018 09:39 PM)Winston Wolfe Wrote:  

I've been there.

It happened after about a year of full time traveling. It was a lot of fun, but I also carelessly blew through all of my savings. YOLO, right? Right. Until you have an empty bank account.

I was in a third world shithole and down to my last $500.

The more I traveled, the more I wanted to give this "digital nomad" thing a shot and give myself the freedom of location independence. Except, I never actually did something to make it happen.

The reality of this situation finally gave me my much needed reality check and a firm kick in the ass. No way was I going back home unless I absolutely had to. This journey wasn't going to end like this.

Luckily my rent for the month was already paid and I did have an old shitty laptop with me. I started looking for ways to make money online. I spent at least 14 hours a day on that damn laptop and saved on every little expense I could.

At first, I worked bottom of the barrel shit jobs just to build an online portfolio. $5 becomes worth a lot more if that represents a 1% increase of your available funds.

Fast forward a couple years later and I still have not fully recovered from blowing through all of these savings, but I am on the right track. Most importantly though, I am still working for myself, when and where I want, and not for $5 anymore either. I make a decent living right now and even that shitty laptop got upgraded.

In hindsight, almost being broke in some third world shithole is the best thing that could have happened to me.

The need and will to survive sometimes enables our hidden potential. Comfort and safety are the death of growth

[Cyclone]

I've never gone broke / zero while overseas, but I have been in situations where my debit card wouldn't be accepted at their ATMs, or I had some form of money that wasn't compatible with my current city. That is nearly has dangerous as "losing" your money, for all intents and purposes. Folks, always have MULTIPLE forms of money on you at all times, don't rely that credit card / paypal / swiping will work everywhere.

(02-15-2018 05:45 AM)Lighter Wrote:  

Well I just lost all my backup credit cards and debit cards 2 weeks after moving to Vietnam.

Hah, literally the exact same thing happened to me soon after moving to Hanoi
Wallet + debit card got swiped at a festival
Had to borrow cash from fellow interns for a while until my replacement card got mailed to me, then paid them back.
.

[The Alpha Virgin]

My wallet and everything got stolen once when I was dumb enough to think I could save a little money by staying a night in a hostel instead of a hotel, when I was in Hamburg. This East European scumbag stole my stuff while I was a sleep and had all the stuff right next to me and went through all my stuff even though I had the bag in my bed and everything. I had to spend the rest of the trip going to different police stations which took me the whole fucking day (it was no point in doing that by the way).

Luckily I could use a laptop and lock all cards online and I also transferred money to be able to afford a trip home. I was lucky to have just enough cash on my Paypal to be able to transfer to Western Union and go to a shop and get the money.

There were also this online facebook group for guys into game in the city and one of those guys borrowed me some money so I could get some food before I went home (I had gone out with him before, so having connections with guys like that is valuable when shit hits the fan).

[Jnx]

Sleep in parks
Eat canned food
Use tricks to get free public transport
Swipe people’s drinks at bars and clubs
Shower at girls place

Fly to job on companies dime and make $20k in 2 months
Can’t afford $25 baggage fee
Repeat

Such is life as an alcoholic working in oil related industry. Can make $50 last weeks now.

[utterbbq]

My Credit card got maxed out and my other two backup debit cards had very little money on them.

I always did all my banking business online, but in order to sign in i had to use an app on my phone or a small device that I got from my bank (I did not bring this).

The problem was that i lost my phone.
So in other words, I had all my cards, but I was completely locked out from my bank with almost no money left.

The little money I had left was enough to buy a new phone,
but in order to setup the app on my new phone I needed to be signed in to my bank to get some kind of activation code.

I called my bank, but they could not give me a new code of pretty obvious security reasons, I had to sign in on my account by neither using the app, device or go to the bank to verify myself.

In the end I managed to call my friend on skype over a very sloppy internet line, he went to my place, found the old bank device, and with my instructions sign in to my bank, request a new code and then send it back to me by mail.
We did it! And it felt like mission impossible.

Now I always bring the bank device with me on my travels.

[Zerdame]

Alittle different from being broke on a vacation but I'll share my story when I was interning in Japan:

I was doing a year long internship in Tokyo and being a young guy with a limited paycheck and savings, money was constantly a problem.

To get to work, I needed to change two trains which cost me about 600yen round trip. Multiple that by 20 working days, its a lofty 12,000yen or about USD115, a big sum of money for a guy that was being paid 500 a month for my internship. Transportation was paid for by my company in the form of cash reimbursement. However, I realized that the cheapest brand new bike I could get in Tokyo was about 12,000yen, exactly the same as my transportation fee to and fro work. It was a 40min biking journey to work but i would save 115 dollars a month. I bought the bike, cycled to work everyday but continued to collect my monthly $115 stipend which I used to improve my other aspects of life. A year later, sold it off to an international student for 5000yen. my cost of getting to work for a year was only 7000yen but considering how I was earning 12,000 extra, I essentially gave myself a pay raise by doing the 40min cycling route.

Also, this might sound kiddish but I learnt to cook. Not the healthiest way to live but I learnt to cook large amounts of food and store it in my freezer and then use it to pack my lunches and occasionally dinners. Those helped me save tons on eating out in Tokyo, which can get expensive fast.

Also, just for laughs but my department had a ton of females who were mostly mothers. Most were impressed by the fact that I could cook(most Japanese men cant) and many invited and paid for my meals whenever it was lunch time. Probably their maternal instincts kicking in, seeing a young lad who packs his own lunch everyday.

All of these saved me a ton of money and made me alot more resilient than when I first arrived in Japan. It also forces me to be creative with my game since I wasn't exactly leading the high roller life.

[ActaNonVerba]

Alright, my two cents.

Approximately three years ago I was sick of my boring life and I walked away from my home country and went to live with a girl in Poland. I paid $25 for the bus that took me to this small village and that was also my last money. Not a dime was left after that. Being naive I believed this relationship could and would last. I found a job at a farm nearby and ended up cutting trees in the forest and working on the field. An honest and hard working job with little earnings. I saved up a few hundred.

Fast forward six months later and the relationship ended. I took a train to Eastern Poland (Mazury region) which also ended a couple of months later. The life of a player can't be suppressed I guess. I made quite a lot of money working for a contractor (her father) at the time and my mentality was at the time: "Money comes and goes".

Then I went to live in Estonia and had some fun with some flings. Russia was calling so I took another bus, to Russia. But then ... I ran out of money again. And then what? I ended up being in Siberia in the midst of the winter with no cash and not eating for 7 days. Call me stupid but it made me the man who I am today. I needed my ass kicked. I've spent both day and night finding a job online and after I was about to give up money finally started coming in.

When it seems there is no option left, nothing can be done anymore but you still want it, you will create an opportunity by yourself.

What did I learn from all of this as I'm looking back on it?

- Enjoy every single moment. Don't forget the days when things were tough. When you were enduring awful times with little money or with little comfort. Or when you had no idea how you could ever change your situation at all. You will enjoy things more by reflecting during times of great comfort.

- Don't spend more money than you should. Remember an emergency is always bound to happen. Your life can change within a day. Even if you try to keep it under control.

- Always keep believing and always keep going. You can't give in, you can't give up.

- Have a plan of action. If there's no plan left, kick doors open and create opportunities for yourself.

- A life of balance and with the same rhythm will slowly kill you. Don't do it. The fact you're on this forum and/or reading articles similar websites should already tell you enough.

Failure is a necessity in order to grow. You have to get knocked down in order to get up stronger. You can get knocked down ten times but one time and one day you will get up and decide the world is yours to conquer.

Stay pimpin'.