Step 2:Plane ticket-DONE!

Got my plane ticket, thanks to my parents!

I think this makes it officially official and I'm glad this huge hurdle is over. For me, I spent hours looking for the cheapest tickets using Kayak, Bing, Mobissimo, studentuniverse and many others. I poured over articles on what day of the week and what time is the very best to purchase and book a ticket. Here's what I've gathered; Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday's are generally the best days to buy tickets and between 9pm-6am are the best times to buy tickets. Pick days of the month that do not coincide with pay days. Also,  afternoon on weekends are the worst times to buy tickets. If possible always purchase your ticket far in advance because they are much cheaper. Also, watch out for some ticket search engines because they'll show a cheap price of $750 and then they charge $600 in taxes and processing fees.

My personal dilemma for buying an overseas ticket was that  I'm spending a year abroad. Most airlines don't book that far in advance and if they do it's generally expensive. My naive idea (but at the moment, genius!) was to buy a ticket that would return in 6months and then extend the return another 6 months once prices dropped. The mistake was that airlines new this and they would charge you the difference on the original price, so you'd end up paying the same plus $100 for changing the ticket dates. Fortunately my parents came in for the rescue and bought a 1 year ticket from Delta using Skymiles.

Here's an amazing thing about sky miles. The US dollar amount for my overseas ticket was around $2,400. The exchange rate for sky miles to dollar is about 100skymiles/$1. My parents had 99,000 skymiles which is about US $990 worth of purchasing power. I'm not sure if Delta didn't update their system or if this is a skymile perk but my parents were able to purchase the $2,400 ticket for $990 worth of skymiles which is over 50% savings of $1410. Also in respect to Delta, they did offer the cheapest prices for plane tickets compared to anyone else.

So this stressful but needed hurdle is over and I'm excited to board that plane for a 13hr trip across the world.