Our trip is officially finished. For those just joining us, we spent the last 15 months traveling around the world living our dream and visiting 38 countries in 5 continents. We visited the modern cities of Dubai and Paris, saw amazing nature in Namibia and Patagonia, and even explored far flung and exotic destinations like Mauritius, Easter Island, and Nepal. But with the completion of our trip comes one final question: How much did it cost for the two of us?If you've been following our blog, you've been seeing our financial recap posts and our running counter in the RTW Tally. But so far two numbers are completely missing from any of our posts. The first, as you may recall from our pre-trip posts, is how much we left with. The second is the total amount we actually spent while traveling. So how much money did we have, how did we do compared to our planned spending, and did we return with what we thought we would?
Let's get into the details to find out in this post series.
The $75,000 Vacation
The grand total cost of our 15 month trip around the world was $74,814, or roughly $161/day. We kept track of this number in great detail so I would say with pretty good confidence that it is accurate to within 1-2%.
To be fair, there is a lot of detail to discuss where we generated this figure from. To start, we need to go into the hard facts in a quick snapshot of our financials over the last 15 months.
- Money on Departure Day: $82,000 (including already spent)
- Money Earned While Traveling: $13,000
- Money Left at the End of the Trip: $8,250
- Money Spent on Health Insurance During the Trip: $1,500
- Money Spent on Website During the Trip: $4,000
- Money Spent on Student Loans During The Trip: $6,500
- Total Money Spent Traveling: $75,000 (not including items above highlighted in red)
Gifts Related to Travel
One of the comments I get time and time again when we travel is a bit of snark that we must have rich family members paying our way. This is hardly the case. Every adventure we've ever been on has been financed completely by ourselves or via promotional work on this website. That is not to say that our families and friends do not get us gifts every once in a while, but they do not completely finance our way in any capacity.
To counter that comment once and for all we want to highlight here the items not included in our cost above that were given to us as gifts from friends and family for this particular trip. They are:
- Two Underarmour Jackets: $240 (Christmas gift from Angie's parents)
- Two Travel Towels: $30 (Christmas gift from brother and sister-in-law)
- Notebooks: $80 (Christmas gifts to each other)
- Dive Camera: $260 (Christmas gift from Jeremy's parents)
- Angie's Backpack: $0 (Won in a contest)
- A Few Meals When Parents Visited: $100
- Total Value: $710, or roughly 5 days on the road.
Travel Sponsors and Advertising
In a sense, running a large travel blog does have some perks that not every traveler has access to. We make money from advertising and also work on tailored promotions in exchange for free or discounted travel.
During our trip, we made an estimated $13,000 through direct advertising on our websites, book sales of The Long-Term Traveler's Guide, and by freelancing that we mentioned in our above total. But that is not the only way our site has worked in our favor to contribute to our travel tally. We also have worked with a number of travel companies, tourist boards, and brands in order to promote their products and services to you in exchange for free or discounted travel and merchandise.
As our trip was quite long, it would be a bit hard for us to quantify the value of our sponsored activities. We can estimate with relative confidence that our partnered activities offset about $3,500 in base costs to us that other travelers would have to pay for no matter what (such as train tickets, entry in to Machu Picchu, a few hotel nights, etc). However, we also participated in some premium activities that you may not choose to do which could increase that spending requirement even more (such as premium train cabins, taking a full tour to Machu Picchu in addition to the ticket price, and premium hotel stays).
Over six years of writing on our website, the value of our sponsored travels and advertising income is still rather negligible in the long run for the number of hours we put into our site and amount of money we've personally spent on the road. We've done this by choice to keep our content fresh and open to our own writing schedule and inspirations. But we will say that it is a nice thing to have and definitely helped out with this trip to the tune of 100 days added by working during our travels.
Credit Card Perks
Another item that is not included in this $75,000 assessment is the free travel we achieved through our credit card perks. The only reason I did not include these perks in the cost is that the value of what we received is far higher than what we would have paid in the course of our travels. Sure, we easily would have spent $6,500 more on airfare and hotels in some of the destinations we visited, but that is only cost to us. The actual value of our points redemption was much, much higher.
We're planning a full-breakdown of our credit card rewards for a later post, but for now we can estimate that the two business class flights, two economy class flights, and nearly 20 nights at luxurious Hilton properties around the world would have cost an additional $25,000 had we purchased them ourselves!
Suffice it to say, our $75,000 trip would have been over $100,000 if we didn't have our credit cards and paid for those out of pocket (not that we would have)! But while these were premium activities we could never have afforded on our own during this trip, our cost saving mechanisms did help us decrease our necessary spending by at least $10,000 on this trip. Not bad at all.
Now to start destroying those darn things and canceling some unused accounts!
One Final Thought
This adventure was quite possibly the most wonderful thing we have ever done in our lives (with the second being my last RTW trip in 2010). If you are just joining us through reading this post, or even been with us since the beginning, we would like to invite you to come relive our adventures by reading through our 1,000 posts from the last 6 years of traveling the world. But even more important is this - get out there and do it yourself! Use our experiences and advice and start planning your own trip around the world.
You won't regret it.
This entry is Part 1 of series covering our $75,000 adventure. Part 2 of this series will breakdown ways we optimized our route and itinerary to save money over needless spending that could have been. Part 3 will be a detailed pricing summary including a pricing breakdown from every single day of our travels!
