An interesting question that often comes up in the long-term travel scene is how much money you need to return home with. Depending on who you ask, this figure can be all over the place. A student taking a summer off who is returning to school may not need much past what is needed to pay the month-to-month bills. A professional on sabbatical who has a guaranteed job and house on hold may need a little more depending on the return date. A married couple who sold everything to travel, like us, may need quite a bit.
How much did we plan to return home with? Well, we knew that it was potentially going to take quite a bit of time for one of us to find a job, and considering we sold just about everything, we placed the figure at around $10,000.
After roughly eight months until the first offer came through we were very happy that we had allocated that much to return with.
The Starting Figure - $7,500 - Was Actually $13,500
We planned to hit the magical $10,000 figure when we returned home, but as you can imagine traveling got in the way and we extended our trip by just a bit to make a few targets (specifically attending a press event in Costa Rica and a conference in Mexico). We actually returned home with roughly $7,500 in cash and were comfortable with the trade-off of one more month of travel.
So, where does $13,500 come from? The one perk that I can say for running this site is that we were able to make some income while we looked for employment. So while we had a notable monthly spending while hanging out with our families, we made roughly $6,000 over the eight month period. This brought our perceived savings to be around $13,500 if we had it all on day one and did not work at all while we searched for jobs.
Unfortunately, we had some monthly and incidental spending along the way, and after eight months our final savings was around $4,500 when it came time to move.
As we quickly found out, this was simply not enough.
Moving Expenses Are Astronomical
You know what sucks? Moving states. Not only that, moving to a city with somewhat high apartment rents means you need to have enough fluid cash to make it all happen.
For us that meant a first month's rent, security deposit, and pet fee for Tamale (50% of a month's rent) which came in at $3,675 in total- and that was just to get the keys on the first day. There was also the little issue that, other than some kitchen items we received for our wedding as well as a dining room table (minus chairs), we owned absolutely nothing. No other furniture. No bed. No car. Nothing. We sold it all to travel, remember?
So we had to go shopping, and spent quite a bit:
- U-haul for Two Days: $350 + gas
- Car Down Payment: $500
- Internet Fees and Insurances (Car/Apartment): $750
- Food: $400
- Furniture: $1,750
- Bed: $1,250
Yeah, somehow we ended up spending well over $9,000 within a three day period.
Oops.
We Knew This Ahead of Time
We wouldn't be telling the full truth if we didn't know ahead of time that we were going to make all of these purchases. We did. It was a calculated move based on future earnings and my relocation package from my job, but we could have spent far more had we been able. Our apartment is still not completely furnished, and the furniture we bought was on the cheaper to middle-range side of the spectrum but definitely not the cheapest we could've purchased.
Whether or not you can afford such spending when you start a new job is one thing, but odds are if you sell everything to travel you may have significant expenses like we did. Your rent may not be as high as ours, you may not buy as much furniture right after moving, or even purchase a new car like I did, but no matter what you do many of these costs will sneak up on you sooner rather than later.
Overall, I can safely say that the $10,000 figure for us was a very good target, especially because no one really goes home with that exact figure due to always wanting to travel a bit more at the end of the trip. Unfortunately, we also relied on our blog income to offset most of the living expenses once we returned home and really hoped we wouldn't have been looking for employment as long as we did.
If you think you'll end up in the same situation as us, you may want to be prepared to take on part-time work or look to other options to bring in some money so you can allow your returning home cash to be used for what it was intended for: starting over.
Did you have to start over after returning home from a long-term trip? How long did it take you to find a new job and how did your returning home savings work out for you? Comment below to let us know!
