Hello, unemployment! Our last day of work was last Thursday, so I'm well into my second "working" day of not working. I'm feeling pretty good so far. Maybe the shock hasn't hit me yet, but right now I'm enjoying life. I woke up Friday in the basement of our house (like a true unemployed person), then promptly drove 10 hours to bum at my parent's house for a few days (cuz, again, unemployed :) ) Nothing like having mom hover and cook delicious meals for you for a few days to feel like you're on top of the world.
But in all seriousness, I haven't yet freaked out about quitting my job and it's been nice to spend some quality time with friends and family back home for a few days. But my new position does tend to prompt the question of how we plan to pay for this adventure. So for those people, and for anyone hoping to do something similar someday, this is how I have budgeted for this trip.
First of all, Matt and I are very blessed for lots of reasons and I know not everyone is as lucky as we are. But we've been fortunate to graduate college without any loans via scholarships and working hard, and we've also had great-paying jobs for several years. Luckily, we're also both savers so we've naturally saved up our money over the years. I've always been one to prefer to spend money on experiences rather than things.
So this isn't a how-to save money type of article, but more of a guide on how to start formulating your own budget for traveling if that's something you're interested in. Obviously your own numbers could vary a lot but I'm hoping this gives you the formula to plug in to your own situation.
I've broken this into three main sections: expenses on/for the trip, expenses back home during the trip, 6 months worth of expenses once we get back (since I don't have a job lined up for when we get back I wanted to have 6 months worth of expenses saved up).
Expenses on/for the trip
For this portion, we've estimated we'll spend $150/day per person. This includes everything: lodging, food, transportation, and activities. There will definitely be days where we spend over this, and hopefully more days where we spend under this. But hopefully it averages out to under.
Including our domestic road trip, we'll be traveling for about 8 months ~ 244 days. 244 days * $150/day= $36,600. Just to be on the safe side, I round that to $40,000 for the trip portion.
I am also tracking our on-trip expenses in a google sheet that I plan to maintain during the trip so I can make sure we're staying on budget and also share that at the end of the trip for anyone who is interested.
Back home expenses during our trip
I luckily don't have a ton of expenses. What I do have is (lowered) rent, my cell phone bill, and health insurance. My rent will be smaller than normal since we have a sub-letter helping out with that. So this is the breakdown for me:
Rent at $250/month* 8 months =$2,000
Cell phone is usually about $65/month * 8 months = $520
Health insurance is ~$360/month * 7 months (since Feb is paid for) = $2,520
Total: $5,040
I don't have a car payment and I plan to pause my car insurance while we're gone so I won't need to pay that either.
Expenses for 6 months after
The way I figured this out was I averaged out 3 different past 6 months of expenses to calculate what I generally spend in 6 months. This was easy for me to do because I track all of my expenses in Mint, and they make it really easy to see how much you've spent on what in certain periods of time. I generally spend around $13,000 in 6 months so that's what I've budgeted for, even though I plan to live more frugally if I don't yet have a job.
Total
40,000+5,040+13,000= $58,040
So all in all, I've budgeted about $58.000 for the trip and six months afterwards. Now if I had planned to work or have some sort of income during the trip then that would have impacted this as well.
I don't want this number to discourage other potential world travelers if it seems high. For accommodations we're planning on staying at reasonably priced hostels and airbnbs, so you could spend more or less there. And where you could potentially save a lot of money is on activities, since we are planning to do a lot of expensive activities such as our African safari and scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef. So you could definitely do this a lot cheaper if you needed to. These are just our numbers for the experiences that we want to have.
Now for actually spending our money on this trip we both got a new credit card and a new checking account, with both of them having no foreign transaction fees and no ATM fees. We decided to get the new Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card which has awesome travel benefits. We also both opened a Charles Schwab High Yield Checking account for the debit card.
So that's how we've budgeted so far. In addition to sharing and documenting our travels, I really hope this blog can also inspire and help others plan for their own adventures which is why I'm sharing these things.
Thanks for sticking with us so far! :)
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