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You are here: Home / Archives for travel budget

Semi-Professional Money Transferring: The Travel Made Me Do It

April 22, 2013 By Jillian

Keeping track on our finances on the road was far more complex a job than it ever should have been.  We used two bank accounts, a third savings account, and about half a dozen credit cards.  Although we didn’t quite need all those credit cards, we DID need the multiple banking accounts.

The first checking account is what we used while abroad.  This account paid our credit card bills (the few times we were able to use our credit cards) and was the account we drew on while at ATMs around the world.  (The great part was that it reimbursed ATM fees and didn’t charge us foreign exchange fees.)

The second account handled the ‘other payments’ we still had to make while on the road, namely those pesky student loans.  We did our best to never access this account either online or from an ATM.  Mostly, this account was a backup account in the event we lost our other ATM cards.  If we had the ATM cards with us to the first account, then the ATM cards for this account were safely stored in our hotel room.

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Having and maintaining a separate bank account for travel is important.  It is a big safety factor that cannot be understated.  Equally important is the use of separate savings account.  In our little money laundering scheme, most of our money was in this third account.  Every month it automatically transferred spending money to our travel checking account.  If we needed extra I sent an email home to my father asking him to log into the account to make the transfer.  That savings account also sent the exact amount of money to pay those student loans to that backup checking account.  We also kept money in both checking accounts but never too much money.

We took the time to carefully research our options online before setting all of this up for our trip.  Our credit cards were set to bill themselves to our bank, not all cards can do this.  All banks are a little different and it is really important to compare bank accounts online and make sure you’ve selected the right one for you.  Some will work for some people but not for others.

You never want to be abroad without access to cash to just remember to be safe and keep a backup plan handy.  Once in Tanzania an ATM counted my withdrawals twice and in China I left my ATM card in the machine.  In Guatemala one of the girls in our Spanish class had their ATM info skimmed off their card by the ATM and the bank was withdrawing money from their account every day for a week before they realized.  Setup your extra accounts and play it safe.adventure travel

Filed Under: Headline, Travel & Planning Tagged With: finances, spending, travel budget

Reflections on our Budget

February 24, 2011 By Danny

We recently participatedinacolumn where several travelers compared their budgets head-to-head.  We were surprised to see that we spent less per month than any other traveler featured on the page.  This got us pondering why and how this happened and reflecting on if there had been anything we regret skipping on account of our budget.

More to the point though; did keeping to our budget leave us with any lingering regrets?  We have a few, but as we discussed them last night a certain peace came over us as we realized there weren’t too many, and they weren’t huge things that we feel cheated from enjoying.

  • IMGP3045Patagonia – We spent a lot of time busing down to the tipofArgentina and back up again.  In hindsight we wished we’d take the ferry down the Chilean coast of Patagonia to where we hikedtheW and then worked our way back up.  We would have seen far more (courtesy of the ‘cruise-like’ ferry) and broken up the return journey north a bit better.  We also might have had slightly nicer weather in Bariloche, Argentina.  Cost was the principle driver in not taking the ferry but timings, a desire to hit some whitewaterinPucon, and a hope of getting to Antarctica all combined to help us make the wrong decision.
  • After hikingKilmanjaro, enjoying a Safari, whitewaterboogieboarding in Jinja, and paying the bill for GorillatrackinginUganda…we were feeling like we’d completely destroyed our bank accounts in a matter of days.  This led us to bus across Kenya from Uganda to coastal Lamu.  We soon wished we’d flown.  The flights didn’t work out perfectly but it would have been better than that hectic 24 hours of bus after bus after bus.  At that point in time we also had no idea how we were going to be heading northtoEthiopia and were expecting to fork over some major cash for big, last-minute African airfares in the coming weeks.

It seems that there were two very big keys to keeping our costs down.  First, overland travel meant sleepingonbuses and trains rather than paying for constant airfares.  We decided early on that we enjoyed traveling this way and don’t regret that decision.  Second, we spent only one month in Europe and skipped on Australia and New Zealand.   Although we’d hoped to make it to the South Pacific, we were simply too tired and homesick when the time came.  Our route also kept us traveling most of the time in shoulder seasons where the climate wasn’t quite perfect (not a lot of vacationers driving prices up) but still good enough for us to enjoy ourselves.  The only time the whole trip we had to deal with high season was while we were traveling through Turkey.

While in the Americas we generally erred on the side of keeping to our budgets and passing on the big items (e.g. Galapagos Islands) because we are from United States and those sites are much easier to enjoy to later in life than say, Uzbekistan. For the rest of the planet, we adopted a mental policy of treating ourselves to the big ticket items if we wanted to do them.  Faced with $100-$200 bungee jumping and adventure swings in South Africa and Zimbabwe, we decided to skip and don’t regret those decisions….We also don’t regret the big bucks we spent for game viewing, visas, and climbing mountains.

Although many travel with philosophies that differ from ours, we all have budgets and all make decisions…both good and bad.

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Filed Under: Headline, Travel & Planning, Travel Reflections Tagged With: budget, budgeting, summary, travel budget

Two Years of Travel Costs Less Than You Think?

February 2, 2011 By Danny

We’ve made no secret of our budgets as we’ve posted our spending for each and every country we’ve passed through along the way. Just about everything included brings us to a grand total of:

$59,114

That number is for both of us for 21 months of travel. It includes all of our airfare, (except the one trip we took between the US and Europe since that was for a wedding and not for travel) buses, food, lodging, gifts, souvenirs, postage fees, visas and medical expenses. And again, that’s for BOTH of us….a combined total.

Could we have spent less…absolutely. In Africa we spent $5000 climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, taking a safari to the Ngorogoro Crater and visiting the Mountain Gorillas of Uganda. Take out that two week period and our total trip cost went down by nearly 10%.

What else isn’t included? I think I left off our travel medical insurance. Anything we purchased back in the US isn’t included, which does account for most of our gear, but on the other hand we sold a ton of stuff before we moved out which more than covers that expense. I also didn’t include all the tailored clothing we purchased in SE Asia, since that really had nothing to do with our trip at all.

Otherwise it’s all there. Transportation accounted for nearly one third of all of our spending. Activities averaged out to be about a quarter and food and lodging combined for 28%, but we spent a touch more on food than we did on sleeping, probably thanks to couchsurfing. The remaining 15% or so were the miscellaneous things that can vary dramatically such as how many souvenirs we purchased, over $2500 in visa fees, and how much time we spent at the Internet cafe or on the phone.

The point of all of this, of telling you our deepest darkest secret, is to make it abundantly clear how easy this is to do if you make it a goal and stick to it. We’ve just developed a new financial planning website to help others do the same, so feel free to use it!

CountryDaysFoodLodgingActivityTransMiscDaily Avg
TOTALS580$16.58$11.34$25.12$33.65$15.24$101.92
Mexico & C Amr111$17.76$10.33$23.31$20.50$9.96$79.25
South America135 $15.68 $10.21$19.71 $31.73 $9.42 $86.75
Africa & Levant
174$16.44$12.09$39.90$36.35$19.84$124.63
Europe
32$21.93$6.26$11.94$40.22$9.54$90.01
Silk Road
50$16.46$17.96$19.50$29.01$19.40$102.33
Asia
78
$14.64$10.21$13.07$33.42$20.67$92.01

Filed Under: Headline, Travel & Planning Tagged With: budget, budgeting, costs, money, travel budget

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