How much is all this going to Cost?
People keep asking me, How can you afford to do this? How much is this trip going to cost? Budgeting for a one week trip is hard. Budgeting for a 2+ year trip is impossible. It took me a while to figure out a methodology for how to do it. These are the steps that I took.
- Figure out where we were going to go and the rough time of year. The time of year matters because the cost of a place in high season can be quite different than low season.
- Figure out roughly how long we want to spend in each place.
- Figure out the cost for that place on a per person per day basis. I used resources from other blogs like Price of Travel or Cheapest Destinations to help me figure out the price per person per day cost.
- Figure out the cost to travel to one location from the previous location. Flights.google.com and seat61.com were quite useful in this process.
- Find out Visa costs for the locations that we are visiting.
- Add a 10% contingency budget.
- Budget for books, travel and medical insurance, electronics, clothing and luggage, storage for our belongings, home insurance and home taxes
- Budget for the rental income of the house.
The math works like this:
(Location 1 Cost per person per day * 4 * the number of days there + transport to the next location + visa cost) and repeat for each location and sum this up.
Then add a 10% contingency + all the expenses in item #7 – the rental income of the house. I have quite an extensive spreadsheet calculating everything.
The rough budget is as follows:
$186,080 Base cost (location and transport)
$ 18,608 Contingency
$ 20,040 Flights
$ 3,000 Books
$ 6,700 Insurances
$ 4,200 Clothing / Luggage
$ 5,000 Storage
$ 8,000 Home Insurance
$ 6,800 Home Taxes
$ (72,000) Rental Income
$190,928 Total cost for 28 months
$56.49 per person per day
I’m hoping we can knock the costs down much further in a few ways. I estimated the highest amounts for each location, so I hope we can be under budget. Also, I have been stockpiling frequent flyer miles which I hope will cover some of our longer flights and add savings to our flight costs. I hope if we don’t use our contingency as well, we might be able to save as much as $40,000 of what we budgeted.
This would bring our cost down to $150,928 or $44.65 per person per day.
Hi Nicole, I’m really interested in these numbers. We are planning some extended travel also, though not for this long, but I can’t wait to hear what a month in London costs you. I did have some questions about some of your categories if you don’t mind sharing. For your ‘base cost’ are you just basing that on a cost per person number? It seems really high, especially if you plan to stay in one place for a while as many airbnbs or accommodation have long term discounts. Also, what are the ‘books’? Just for downloading onto your kindle? And who did you use for travel/health insurance? Thanks!
Julie,
Base cost is based on the cost per person per day (* 4 * number of days in a place). I used a couple resources but priceoftravel.com is an excellent resource. I am hoping to be under this number. Books are kindle books, but mainly school books and resources for the kids and homeschooling. We used World Nomads for insurance.
Hope this helps!