I am not spending more money to get pennies on the dollar—these costs are inevitable, so I capitalize on them. This alone gets me a free round-trip international ticket each three months. 2. Purchase tickets far in advance (three months or more) or last minute, and aim for both departure and return between Tues day and Thursday. Long-term travel planning turns me off and can be expensive if plans change, so I opt for purchasing all tickets in the last four or five days prior to target departure. The value of empty seats is $0 as soon as the flight takes off, so true last-minute seats are cheap. Use Orbitz (www.orbitz.com) and www.kayak.com first. Fix the departure and return dates between Tuesday and Thursday. Then look at prices for alternative departure dates each of three days into the past and each of three days into the future. Using the cheapest departure date, do the same with the return dates to find the cheapest combination. Check this price against the fares on the website of the airline itself. Then begin bidding on www.priceline.com at 50% of the better of the two, working up in $50 increments until you get a better price or realize it’s not possible. 3. Consider buying one ticket to an international hub and then an ongoing ticket with a cheap local airline. If going to Europe on a tight budget, you could get three tickets. One free Southwest ticket (from transferring AMEX points) from CA to JFK, the cheapest ticket to Heathrow in London, and then an iibercheap ticket on either Ryanair or EasyJet to a final destination. I have paid as little as $10 to go from London to Berlin or London to Spain. That is not a typo. Local airlines will often offer seats on flights for just the cost of taxes and gasoline. To Central or South American destinations, Pll often look at local flights from Panama or international flights from Miami. When More Is Less: Cutting the Clutter Human beings have the capacity to learn to want almost any conceivable material objec