Budget

UPDATES

This is how we planned the budget for our trip around the world. We’ll try and provide updates about how well that actually turned out via the updates link above.

It has to be confessed, we are not travelling the world on a shoestring. We both make a good salary, we don’t have much mortgage on the house, we’ve been planning to go travelling for five years, and the icing on the cake is the generosity of Matthew’s father – he sold his company for a good sum when he retired, and gave us a lot of help.

Nevertheless, once we get going we need a budget if we’re going to return home with the shirts on our backs. We read a lot of advice from travellers who had gone before, and the neatest solution was to set a daily target (we chose £100 per day) and use a spreadsheet to track how we’re doing day by day. Thanks to One Giant Step for having the best example to copy.

If all goes to plan, our year around the world will have cost about £52,000. We’ll have got about £12,000 net from renting our home in the meantime, so the total dent on our savings should be £40,000.

Setting the budget for this trip was one of the hardest pre-departure decisions we faced. Although many websites helpfully dispense advice on how much you might expect to spend as a minimum, we needed to settle on a budget which would allow for our level of comfort. We know we would prefer to spend the night in a reasonably comfy private room, rather than in shared hostel accommodation. And we want to be able to choose an air-conditioned tourist coach for that twelve-hour bumpy ride, instead of the over-crowded chicken bus where Matthew will most definitely get sick. So what does that add up to, for a whole year in various countries? Whatever sums we did, using whatever websites and books for guidance, it always came out different.

So why £100? For one thing, it’s a nice round number and we like round numbers. But it also seems a good compromise when taking into account the countries we are planning to visit. Asia should be fairly cheap, so we hope to under-spend during our five months there. However, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Chile might all be fairly expensive to explore, especially since they are enormous countries. One good advice that we read again and again, is that moving around will end up being more expensive than staying put.

We hope that, on balance, £100 a day will work out just right. But if it doesn’t, we’re not going to ruin our fun for the sake of sticking to an arbitrary budget.

Splurges

What about splurges? Well, we have a separate splurge-budget for the occasional treats. We will use it to celebrate special days, to take time out from the stress of travel, or simply to enhance our experience. After all, we are hoping to see wildlife on our travel so at times we will need to engage the services of an experienced wildlife guide.

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