How to calculate a budget for a trip around the world? We tell you everything here!
As you can imagine, traveling around the world for a year can be expensive… and there are a lot of different things to consider when calculating a budget: flight tickets, gear, accommodation, meals, transportation, insurance, visas and vaccines to name a few.
FLIGHT TICKETS
There are different ways to book flight tickets for a trip around the world. You can book a round the world flight through a specialized travel agency or book the flights directly with one of the three airline alliances (Star Alliance, One World, Skyteam), lastly you can choose to buy each flight separately as you go.
We have quickly decided to forget about the last option as it is the most time consuming, since you need to compare each single route to find the cheapest, and in the end it might cost more. So we concentrated on booking with an agency or through an alliance.
In theory booking with an alliance is pretty simple, you book all the flights at once on their website. All flights are “open” meaning that you can modify the date of each flight as many times as you want and with no fee. That offers great flexibility, especially knowing that we are booking these more than a year in advance and our plans might change… After toying around and making various simulations we found that the alliances put pretty strict rules on how you can build your itinerary and their tool you use to build it wasn’t very easy to use (as Matt would say, it was a huge pain in the a**).
After eliminating these two options, and given the advice we read on traveling blogs, we chose to book our flights with the help of a specialized agency. The first advantage is that you can get free quotes on the different itineraries we had in mind. Secondly, theses agencies give you personalized advice depending on the itinerary in order to optimize the trip and pay a little cheaper. As with the alliances, we can change the date of our flights with no fees, the only constraints are that we cannot change any flight routes, and our last flight cannot be 1 year after the first.
We ended up settling on the TRAVEL NATION agency. We read good feedback on different blogs and it is also one of the largest and oldest agencies specialized in around the world tickets in Europe.
Given the countries we want to visit we booked the following flights : London-Lima // Santiago-Auckland // Christchurch-Melbourne // Sydney-Bangkok // Ho Chi Minh-Dubai // Dubai-London.
We will do the rest by bus, train, taxi, foot…
In total we paid $3,500 per person.
GEAR
For the gear we will be writing another blog post detailing everything we put in our backpacks. Stay tuned!
For purpose of budgeting, we already had some gear so we calculated about $2,500 total (we still needed to buy backpacks or sleeping bags for example).
COST OF LIVING
The cost of living includes all the day to day expenses: accommodation, meals, transportation, activities and of course the occasional (daily? Or hourly? Hell I won’t be working!!) beer for Matt, or going shopping for Maider.
We were able to estimate a daily cost per country thanks to the amazing website http://planificateur.a-contresens.net/ that lists the average daily cost for all countries in the world. Using that and doing our own little research on hostel and transportation prices and of course reading blogs from people who did this before we came up with the following budget:
| Pays | Days | Cost per person per day | Total |
| Peru | 35 | 35 | $2,450 |
| Bolivia | 26 | 30 | $1,560 |
| Argentina | 45 | 50 | $4,500 |
| Chili | 35 | 45 | $3,150 |
| Australia | 46 | 100 | $9,200 |
| New-Zealand | 21 | 100 | $4,200 |
| Thailand | 35 | 50 | $3,500 |
| Laos | 30 | 40 | $2,400 |
| Cambodia | 25 | 40 | $2,000 |
| Vietnam | 30 | 40 | $2,400 |
| TOTAL for 2 | $35,360 |
To be safe we over-estimated a little in each country. At least we hope we did! Otherwise you might see us come back after 3 months…
INSURANCE AND BANKING
At the time we are writing this, we haven’t settled on an insurance plan yet. But there are a few options in France that propose plans specialized for people traveling around the world. Total cost for both of us is around $1,400 for the year.
As for banking we have decided to keep a savings account in the US, and we have a credit card with no international fees. We will also need to be able to withdraw cash so we will open an account at N26, a German on-line bank that offers a debit card with no international fees when both paying and withdrawing! Shout out to Matt’s mom who is always on top when it comes to new apps and technology trends!
VISAS
As French citizens, the only countries where we need a VISA are the following:
| Country | Per person |
| Thailand | $36 |
| Laos | $30 |
| Cambodia | $30 |
| Vietnam | $48 |
| Total for 2 | $288 |
In South America, Australia and New-Zealand we can travel for up to 3 months without needing a VISA.
VACCINES
With the help of a doctor at the Vaccine Center in Chicago, we decided to get the following vaccines done:
| Vaccines & Pharmacy | Per person |
| Yellow fever | $88 |
| DTP | $24 |
| Rabies | $66 |
| Typhoid | $67 |
| Japanese encephalitis | $126 |
| Other medicine | $120 |
| Total for 2 | $982 |
Our total budget for the year for us both comes up to $48,000.
HOW TO FINANCE THE TRIP?
First thing we did was to open a savings account, put money on it with every pack-check and never touch it!
Then we started to save the most money we could. As we mentioned in our presentation we have been planning this for a while so it gave us enough time to put the money aside.
It’s not a secret, saving money isn’t easy :), we had to make some small sacrifices but knowing why we were doing it made it so much easier!
First thing we stopped was the gym membership, weirdly enough that wasn’t too hard to do!!! Then we decided to move to a cheaper place, no more living on the 26th floor with a view on the lake, inside valet parking and a rooftop with swimming pool. Instead we now have to park in the street and can’t close our bedroom door because our bed barely fits in the room! The rest of the savings were made by going out (a little) less, taking fewer Uber rides, doing absolutely ZERO shopping for Maider, cooking more often to avoid take outs and finally drinking PBR and Miller High Life instead of Ballast Point for Matt.