When we tell other travelers how much we spend on our vacations, we are met with one of the most ghastly expressions you can ever imagine. This results from the combination of two things that you would not put together: we spend far more money on your average trip than most backpackers and we call ourselves budget travelers at the same time. Now before you immediately rush to the bottom of this post to comment in anger at us for calling ourselves budget travelers, we need to define what our take on what traveling on a budget really means. After reading, you may start to understand:Traveling on a Budget: The act of seeing the world while only spending the exact amount of money you set aside to do so.
The Biggest Misnomer in All Travel Writing
When you read a website of a backpacker who is traveling the world on $50/day, staying in the cheapest accommodations and eating grocery store food, you may call them a budget traveler. But when you see our pricing from our honeymoon in Spain and my five month trip to Asia, you may be a bit more hesitant on making the same distinction. But the big secret? Both us and the thrifty backpacker are budget travelers. (Photo "Euro Coins Texture" by Ayla87)
The misnomer in this case is that to be a budget traveler you have to go cheap. That is, staying in the cheapest places, eating the cheapest foods, and picking your activities to only fit in with the limited amount of money you are willing to spend. In this case a good "budget traveler" in this sense stretches their budget to the max in order to add on more days seeing as much of the world as possible. But that is only one form of what we call budget travel.
On the flip side, lets look at our thought process for the term "budget". We do not necessarily eat at the cheapest places, stay in the cheapest rooms, or selectively pick our activities to meet a daily spending cap. There are many times where we do all of these activities, but it is only in select scenarios and super expensive spots. Instead we may take years to save in advance to cover all of the things we hope to see, and even a little extra reserved for things that come up on the fly when we want to throw our planned budget out the window. Since we are a pretty good judge at how much our travel style costs when researching (thanks in part to our book, The Long-Term Traveler's Guide), we tend to hit pretty close.
While there are differences in how the money is spent and how much is allocated for any given activity, we like to think that both of these are fair descriptions of what it means to be a budget traveler: using the money that was saved in order to see the world without spending any extra. Sure, both travelers will likely spend more than they planned. Its an inevitability of travel. But there is something to be said with seeing everything in the world you want to see, on the amount of money you set out to do, and ending your trip with no bills or regrets. That is our definition of budget travel.
So, What Is Our Budget For The Next RTW?
If you've picked up on it so far, we are not the cheapest of travelers on the web today. So you may be wondering, how much are we budgeting for our next 14-18 month trip around the world? Well, if we have one secret number to keep, it is how much we have in our savings account for the next trip. What we can say at this point is that we have more than enough but less than we would like, and are counting on earning a bit on the road at the same time through freelancing and our websites. But isn't that the case with everyone's travels? Overall we anticipating our trip exceeding $70,000 and we'll leave it at that for now.
By design, we've been approaching our 14-18 month trip with the mindset that we will be spending quite a bit of money. From almost $100/day in India to over $330/day in Switzerland, we've given ourselves a lot of padding for on-a-whim experiences to be covered just in case we change our plans entirely halfway through. Will we spend our planned rates? I sure hope not. These numbers are for the extreme scenarios and we will most certainly not be sightseeing and gorging ourselves with food every single day (okay, maybe just the latter). Then if we manage to save a few dollars here and there, well, that'll help us with our Antarctica cause over the course of the entire trip or allow us to do something completely unexpected.
Plan for the worst, hope for the best, and get Antarctica out of the deal for being cost conscious? Now that is a good plan!
Our Financials Will Be Open
Rest assured, our full financials will be revealed as we go with monthly spending reports and a full recap at the end of our trip getting down to the final dollar amount spent. From the biggest expenditure (hopefully Antarctica), to the amount we spent on toiletries (hopefully very little), even the amount received as gifts or sponsored will be quantified to help you plan your own trip just like ours!
To get this spending series rolling, we can say right now that without having left yet we've spent $6,025. This includes the following:
- $10 for a business class flight to Paris with 100,000 frequent flyer miles
- $255 for vaccinations
- $637 for clothes, electronics, passport upgrades, and other gear
- $1,338 for Eurail passes for France, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy
- $196 for reservation fees for above train tickets
- $98 for economy class flight from Nice to Geneva (one-way)
- $365 for 4 nights apartment in Paris
- $239 for 4 nights apartment in Bordeaux
- $174 for 3 nights apartment in Avignon
- $222 for 3 nights apartment in Nice
- $331 for 3 nights apartment in Geneva
- $264 for 4 nights 5 bed dorm in Lauterbrunnen
- $227 for 3 nights 8 bed dorm in Zermatt
- $293 for 3 nights apartment in Zurich
- $55 for downpayment for B&B in Mayrhofen, Austria
- $448 for 7 nights apartment in Florence
- $355 for 3 nights apartment in Munich for Oktoberfest
- $380 for two Indian visas
- $138 for two Paris Museum Passes
- $6,025 total - and we haven't even left!
For daily spending summaries, we'll continue to update our "Spending Spreadsheet" for every day we are on the road, for each city and country we visit. A link to this spreadsheet will always be listed under the "Plan a Trip" drop down menu in our header.
For our periodic spending summaries, we'll be adapting our country summary posts from Asia to fit each update. An example from Japan can be found here. Categories featured will include off-beat comments and thoughts that are not found in other posts, a summary list of some of our favorite / least favorite experiences, costs, and statistics, as well as laying out future topics we'll cover after the trip is over! Of course, our popular RTW Tally feature will be making its triumphant return for our upcoming trip as well!
Do you have anything else you'd like to see added to our financial series? Comment below and let us know!
