With a few weeks back in the states to “relax” a bit before continuing to Africa we’ve had a bit of time to take stock of how we’ve done and, almost as importantly, how our budget has done.
A reminder of how all this works.  Every dollar amount represents how much the two of us, combined, spent on the average day in a given country.  Airfare to and from the continent is included in transportation in the totals line and aren’t applied to any specific continent.  Even with the airfare this is less than we used to spend living in the US.  For more information visit our spending page.
Colombia:  Coming out of Central America, this beautiful and friendly country was a …

People often ask us how we manage our money while we’re abroad. Do we just use cash, can we use credit cards, how much do we pay in fees, etc. Although we have a nice little page (ishouldlogoff.com/finance) devoted to how we do this, there are a couple of things left unsaid on that page.
Does it all work out as it should?
For the last 7 months we’ve been testing those financial products we’ve come to depend on to see if they do deliver as promised. We use a Schwab Visa card as well as a Capital One Master Card which both claim to not charge a foreign exchange fee. We also carry an American Express card …

Part 3 in the series on our decision, our saving and our spending. Missed parts one and two?
  
So we made the decision to travel and saved the money, but how we’re going to make that money last is probably more important than how we saved it in the first place. It should be obvious by now that we will not be staying at 5-star resorts, but we do still plan to enjoy ourselves. I think when it comes to spending money while traveling there are three main categories: lodging, food, and transportation.
 
Let’s talk about food first, since that is probably the easiest to explain. Eating out three meals a day is simply not an option, both from a fiscal and …

Part 2 on how we’ve made this a reality. For Part 1 – The Decision – Click here.
One of the first things people ask us about the trip is how much we’ve saved. More important than the answer to that question is how we’ve saved. In my last post I talked about the decision to take this trip but more than a decision, it was the setting of a goal.

When I graduated from undergrad I had approximately $50k in student loans, when Jillian graduated a year later she had even more. It was a tremendous amount of money and far more than we have saved for the trip even now. To deal with it all …