How can you fund trips around the world when you don’t have a very highly paid job and/or no sponsors to help pay travel expenses? Live in a bin? Sell semen? Enter gypsy street fighting tournaments? Steal? Get a part-time job with the yakuza? Give up eating? No, no, no… The answer is simple, scrimp and save.

- Maybe a bin is taking it too far, but a shithole will do fine. My current abode is the nicest place I’ve ever lived as an adult, but I’ve spent years in windowless mole holes in bad neighbourhoods, one of the worst being a Barcelona rooftop pigeon sweatbox, sleeping on a damp piece of sponge. My girlfriend at the time hated it, but nevertheless put up with it and my monthly rent was about the same price as an expensive meal.

- Go to every free beer/food party and take full advantage. They’re happening all the time so keep an ear to the ground. The motto is “If it’s free, I need it”.

- Get a girlfriend that doesn’t treat you like an ATM. The best girls have brains and don’t need to be bought Louis Vuitton handbags every week to stay happy. If you can’t afford luxury goods, find other ways to please your woman – Learn to cook, improve sexual technique etc… And if you do have a shallow materialistic doll for a girlfriend, you should know that China is the best place to buy cheap fake goods.

- Going to school and having a teacher is the best way to learn something, but an unnecessary luxury. As a world of information is now on the Internet for free, the only thing that can hold us back from becoming genius super-humans is our own motivation. Another good one is going to the bookstore whenever you have a spare 30 minutes and working your way through any book that sparks your interest.

- One thing you should NEVER skimp on is food. I once tried to live off pasta with tomato sauce and a tin of tuna, but the experiment was abandoned as I started to turn green and my body stopped working properly. If you skateboard, you’re an athlete (of sorts..) and need to eat meat and vegetables. Eat as many steaks as you can, but try and get the late night supermarket deals. Cheap food is also a false economy. Even if something costs half the usual amount, it often weighs half and has nothing your body can burn up and convert into skateboard energy anyway.

- Lastly and most importantly, fuck smartphones. Since when has it become normal for us to spend well over 100 dollars a month for the privilege of being constantly connected to a thousand mundane lives with push notifications day and night? It’s not natural to know that an old school friend had eggs for breakfast yesterday or to see a daily selfie of a holiday one-night stand from 6 years ago. In fact it’s weird. Stop it please. I’m as much a victim as everyone else but it seems like not many people seem to realise that these Orwellian tracking devices that we carry around with us all the time are just a distraction from the people and things that we love, and are slowly pulling us away from the real world to the point where we’re stumbling around the city with our crossed eyes staring vacantly staring into these bleeping fucking boxes, groaning and drooling like the zombie apocalypse came early. It’s hard to be a part of modern society these days without social media, but I’ve found a compromise – Get a sim free iPhone, cut down a prepaid sim card to size and jam it in there. The result is a fully working phone that only allows you to connect to the iPhone zombie entertainment matrix when you have wifi. It also only costs 1,500yen a month.

Congratulations. You’ve graduated from Cheapskate University. You’ve saved yourself around 5,000 dollars a year, which is more than enough for a two-month skate trip and plenty left over for a new computer or camera, or that Louis Vuitton handbag if you really need it.

Laurence Keefe
@laurencekeefe