Around the World Trip: Budget

Of all the questions I get, “how did you afford it?” is the one I hear the most. And trust me before I traveled I wondered the same thing. I used to assume that you only traveled if your parents were willing to back your trip. Over time I have meet tons of people who have found a way to do it. This is the way I did- it definitely isn't the same for everyone but hopefully it will help you brainstorm ways you can make your dreams reality. 

*Myanmar*

I believe that if you desire something enough you will work for it and sacrifice things of lesser value, to obtain it. While planning for both trips I was attending school full time and working at least one job. To afford the trip I saved what I earned and found ways to cut costs in other areas. The fall before my first trip Jaims and I learned how to glean. Lucky for us a lot of people in our small town had huge gardens and not enough mouths to feed. We willingly accepted squash, apples, berries, tomatoes, zucchinis or you name it to add to our pantry. We were not picky and would find creative ways to prepare the food we had. That fall we mastered the skill of making homemade applesauce. We had soo much that we were even able to share it with anyone willing to try and on occasion trade it for other goods. Already being rather thrifty, any new clothes during this season, came from the local second hand store.  I tired really hard to only purchase new clothes when it was necessary. We still enjoyed life fully and would go to the dollar movies and ride our bikes around town. We even ate out on occasion. We just had to be creative in finding ways to have fun without spending our saved up travel fund.  Think of ways you can save or items you can remove from your spending. I laugh when people tell me they are not able to afford traveling while they hold a Starbucks Coffee in one hand and a designer bag in the other. They can afford it but choose not to. Living in a city where gluttony is very easily available we can forget how much we are spending. If you eat out once a day for $10 and get a $5 cup of coffee and then spend even as little as $40 on alcoholic beverages a week you are spending over $7,000 a year on coffee, eating out and drinking. Now this is an extremely low estimate. But for me I knew if I cut these down or completely out in my case since I don’t drink, I could easily afford 3 months traveling around the world. What you are wiling to sacrifice in order to fulfill your desires or dreams is completely in your hands. I know my example may seem extreme, but sometimes we must do extreme things in order to achieve our dreams.

*one of the few street food items I didn't try ick*

When deciding where to go, we looked at places based on cost of living and found a good variety. We figure London will be very pricy but India is ridiculously cheap. We actually spent almost the same amount of money in London for 4 days that we did for a month in India! Yeah no joke. Crazy cheap. We googled budget estimates for  each country and found average costs of hostels and street food- which I LOVE, and transportation costs. We ran simple equations to figure out just how much we would need. We of course than planned on bringing at least 20% more than our estimate. Both times I broke even with my expected budget taking into account that some places had hidden expenses, like booking a flight out of Cairo right before the protests started in June 2012. And other places were actually cheaper either because we decided to couchsurf  (Stay tuned for an upcoming post on how much I LOVE couchsurfing) or were there during low season. You can travel on just about any budget while still having a great time. Just plan ahead and know what you are willing to spend based on what you want to do.

*hot and sweaty in a bus and they still wanted to be our friends!*

My husband was really good about keeping track of our spending. We carried a small little notebook with us and at the end of every week would tally our costs in the following areas: transportation, food, hotel/hostel, activities (tours or classes), tips, extras (gifts for ourselves and occasionally for family). If I found that we were spending less in one area than we guess I would take that money and move it over to the extras area for some fun spending or we would consider an extra activity like renting horses for the day. Other times we let it transfer over to the next country as a safety net which we ended up needing more than once.