Depending how you manage your finances, travel nursing can be an incredible opportunity to save money. The pay is higher as a travel nurse vs staff nursing, but so are the expenses and the opportunities to spend. If you go into it knowing that saving is a priority of yours, you’ll want to have some practical ways you’re actively prioritizing saving. Assuming it will just happen isn’t going to fly especially while travelling is literally a part of your job. Here are some of our best tips (that we practice ourselves!) on how to save money as a travel nurse.

1. take what you can get with housing

Finding housing as a travel nurse is difficult, there’s no way around it. Most often, travel nurses choose to find short term furnished housing while away on contract and that can get expensive fast. That said, depending where you’re going for your next contract, there may be some great cheaper options to consider. They may not be the flashiest or most comfy, but your biggest expense while travel nursing will likely be your rent, so if you can cut that down a bit that will make a big difference.

Another way to help save money on rent, is to looking into the housing market and options in an area before committing to a contract there. Maybe take your top five or ten cities and narrow it down from there based on which have more affordable housing options. Also keep in mind that if you’re going to a popular vacation spot (like we did with Myrtle Beach), there’s a busy season when rent will be majorly inflated. Save money on housing as a travel nurse by doing your due diligence and avoiding the most expensive cities at their peak season.

Check out some of our resources on finding housing while travel nursing:

• Travel Nurse Housing
• How to Find Housing While Travel Nursing
• How to Avoid Housing Scams While Travel Nursing
• Finding Housing While Travel Nursing with Pets

2. plan and limit the trips you take to new places

Dan and I have struggled with this one, because there are so many places we want to go! That said, moving to a new place every three or so months is already getting to travel and explore a new place. Save money by limiting yourself to exploring the city that you’re working in and one other place during your contract. There’s plenty to do and see in one new city if you’re only there for three to six months, even if it’s tempting to check out all the surrounding cities as well.

It’s also helpful to make something of a list of all the excursions you want to go on in your new city. We try to save money by focusing more on the free outings/adventures when it’s just the two of us. That way, we can save the paid excursions (zoos, gardens, museums, etc.) for when friends and family visit and want to go out to these places. Otherwise, we may end up going twice and therefore paying twice.

3. make pay your top priority when choosing contracts

If you’re truly in travel nursing for the adventure, being more flexible about where you go is a way to guarantee maximum adventure. Many people use travel nursing as a way to check of specific places from there “must travel to” list, but maybe be a bit more flexible if you’re wanting to save money as a travel nurse. If you prioritize pay the main thing you’ll have to sacrifice is control over where you go. That doesn’t mean you won’t have any control, but there may be a lot of cities that pretty quickly get taken off of the table because they’re in the lowest paying states.

Unfortunately, there are no shift differentials in travel nursing, so being willing to work nights really doesn’t guarantee you higher paying contracts. You’ll have much more to pick from if you’re open to nights, so that may help you to land higher paying contracts in that sense. Essentially, just be as flexible as you can with the other details to your contract if you really want to prioritize saving money. The more you make, the easier it is to save (in theory…).

4. stick to a budget and take out what you want to save first

I know I said the more you make, the easier it is to save, but that’s often not the case without a budget! It’s amazing how quickly you can find a way to use up your income no matter how much it’s gone up if you’re not budgeting. If you’ve never budgeted before, a lot of people recommend starting with tracking your spending to get an idea where most of your money is going. This will help you to identify what can be cut back or cut out, as well as how much you may want to devote to which categories.

Dan and I have always both been big on budgeting and tracking our spending, and we’ve been very grateful for that while travel nursing. Like I said earlier, while the pay is higher but so are the expenses and the opportunities to spend money. Make a budget, do your best to stick to it, and ideally take out the money that you plan to save at the start of each month (or first thing from each paycheck). This will help you to spend less in the other categories of your budget instead of accidentally going over and then finding that you have nothing left to save at the end of the month. Of course, that advice only works if you aren’t overcharging credit cards.

5. meal prep!

Probably the most fun piece of advice (at least in my opinion) is to learn to meal prep! Like I said earlier when I talked about saving paid excursions for when people visited us, we also tried to do that when it came to eating out. Of course we weren’t always successful at that either, but minimizing eating out is a great way to save money. It’s incredibly tempting to eat out all the time while travel nursing be it from exhaustion and lack of time, or simply because you’re in a new place with so many delicious restaurants. Taking time to learn how to cook or cook better will help to make meal prepping more appealing. It will save on your time and your budget big-time.

bonus tip: pick up overtime every once in a while!

Now this isn’t always possible, but so far Dan has managed to pick up overtime during every contract. It’s varied whether he’s worked overtime every couple weeks or maybe just once or twice, but every time he does it’s a nice bit of additional income. If you’re really doing well at sticking to your budget, you could even make a saving goal specifically from working overtime and try your best to pick up a certain number of extra shifts. It’s amazing how quickly it adds up when you put the extra income from those overtime shifts directly into savings.

how do you prioritize saving money as a travel nurse?