We originally planned to backpack the world on £44 ($73) a day. For 2 people.
This has not happened. At times it has, and we’ve kept under the magic number. But the majority of times we’ve got nowhere near it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure our budget is perfectly achievable in almost every country. Hell a lot of people travel on $25 per day. But we quickly found out that while we like to travel on a budget, we really don’t want to sacrifice too much. Like meals. Or a bed.
So while I wouldn’t call ourselves flashpackers per se, we certainly are not hardcore backpackers – and we’re fine with that.
However we are still on a budget – our funds are not unlimited. So where possible we have always tried to save money. You won’t find us splashing out for £50 dinners or £100 hotels – we definitely have limits.
How much is your trip costing?
The simple answer is – a lot.
A lot being 3 years of extreme saving and selling off most of our stuff before we left England.
As we originally planned on £44 per day, you can multiply that by 486, the rough amount of days we’re going to be away, to get an idea of our RTW trip budget. But luckily we did budget contingency on top of that. Which is slowly disappearing.
So yeah, it’s costing a lot. But to us, it’s the perfect way to use our money. We could have put it towards a deposit on a house, but honestly, life is too short. We had the means to take our perfect round the world trip, and we don’t regret it for a second. We may never get the chance again.
How can you afford to do this?
Save, save, save, save. We’re good at saving.
We lived in London before we left. It wasn’t cheap. But we adapted to our priority of saving for travel. Any spare money was instantly put into savings. We still had a life, we still occasionally went out. But we did sacrifice a lot, because it was worth it.
While not the bulk of our money, we did make some by selling 80% of what we owned. More than the money though, this was a liberating experience, and I never want to go back to living somewhere crammed with junk ever again.
Will you be working while you are away?
Nope. We’re always open to writing offers or sponsorships through this blog but generally we haven’t been and are not planning to work. Reasons include, we don’t want to, it’s hard to do legally in many countries, and did I mention we don’t want to? We’re not lazy, we just want to enjoy the world. We feel like the years we saved for this trip affords us the right to take it easy a bit!