Unique ways to make overseas travel affordable!.

A photo from our days WWOOFing in Italy.

Traveling can be costly but since we are always on a big budget we’ve found ways to stretch our travel dollars. One thing we’ve done quite a bit of has been WWOOF’ing on organic farms –  you can read more about our adventures below. Recently we’ve been selling some of our stuff as well – including CD’s. CD’s have become pretty outdated for us because the Ipod and Iphone keep all of our music for us in a tiny compact case! I mean really who travels with CD’s anymore anyway?

If you want to sell your cd’s, a great site to check out is Music Magpie.  Music Magpie is changing the way people think about storing CDs and DVDs. Now money can be easily made by selling unwanted CDs and DVDs, music and film lovers are choosing to cash in on their collections of old, which can be used to fund trips abroad.

Music Magpie is big in Germany which is home to a great many tourist attractions, including the City of Berlin, The Black Forest, The Frisian Islands and Lake Constance, Germany is also at the forefront of carbon-saving technology. Freiburg, for instance, is thought to be the greenest city in the world, boasting numerous passive homes (in which no active central heating system is required) and solar PV manufacturing on a global scale. Being an amazing western European country it also means that Germany isn’t cheap to travel through.

But Germany loves WWOOF’ers and if you have a lot of CD’s to purge you could find yourself sampling the local brews & pretzels for a fraction of the typical traveler costs.

If you’ve diligently building a music and film collection over the years, you now have a chance to change your unwanted CDs and DVDs into money. After entering the barcodes of CDs and DVDs into a search box (or using a smartphone app to scan the code), members are made an offer for the goods – usually set at between £0.50 (€0.57) and £1.50 (€1.72) per CD or DVD (although price really depends on the products in question).

If you have collected enough CDs and DVDs over the years, it is not inconceivable that you would be able to sell enough of them to afford a trip to Germany. Ok, maybe not an entire trip but at the very least you could pay for more beer your airfare, train pass or your hostel. Even if the sale only generates a modest sum, it is likely to help pay for food, even more beer and various travelling expenses that cannot be always accounted for when planning the itinerary.

If you really want to spread the extra dollars consider signing up for the WWOOF program in Germany. This way you could have your food and lodging covered while saving your money for the extras – such as tours, activities and of course, even more delicious German beer!

Available in Germany, the UK and other European nations, WWOOF is a charitable organization that holds a database of organic farms and gardens offering accommodation and food in exchange for certain types of work. WWOOF farms may require help cultivating land, picking fruit or some other practical activity. Not only can you learn learn new skills and support green initiatives while helping to run organic farms and gardens, but you can save a TON of money and meet some really awesome people. We just finished two weeks of WWOOFing in Serbia so stay tuned for lost of posts and pictures about our adventure. In the meantime you can read all about what it’s like to WWOOF on a vineyard in Italy! In a word – incredible. We had the time of our lives!

Selling media to Music Magpie and WWOOFing means that traveling to Germany (or anywhere else in Europe) need not be expensive, in fact it might end up costing very little.