Tag Archives: budget

The Donate Button is Live

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Dearest fellow travelers, as you know, I’ve been saving for this trip for a very long time, and I’m proud to say that it’s all my own savings. Still, I’m not one to turn down others’ generosity. Some friends and family members have expressed interest in helping me out a little, and I’m grateful to them and want to make that process as easy as possible.

I’ve set up a page with special excursions I hope to make that are a little pricier than the fee for a museum or national park. You can take a look at these and decide if you’d like to contribute a little toward getting me there. I think this is more fun than handing me $5 and hoping I do something worthwhile with it. You can find that page, called “Fund This Stowaway,” in the top banner of every page. You can also click the “Donate” button in the left sidebar, to go straight to the PayPal page.

I have a longer post brewing about the anxieties of travel, money, and self-sufficiency, but for now I’ll just say: It’s important to me to pay my own way. It’s important to me to grow comfortable with the fact that I can’t afford everything I want to do on this trip. It’s important to me to gracefully accept the help others offer to open up possibilities.

Thanks for reading this and all the other posts. I enjoy keeping up this blog more than I expected I would, and I’m excited to keep it going on my trip. Please feel no pressure to press that “donate” button, and just enjoy the posts and leave comments. If you do donate, thank you, and I’ll email you personally to say it again.

Running the Numbers: The Forgotten Costs of a RTW Trip

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There are about a million “how much does it cost to travel around the world” pages out there on the World Wide Web, and I’m finding many of them really helpful in estimating how much I’m likely to spend per day while on my trip. Bloggers break down their costs by transportation, food, lodging, and miscellaneous (souvenirs, admission prices, etc.). This is what I’ve been concentrating on when figuring costs, but lately I’ve run across blogs that point out the non-daily costs essential to any RTW (round the world) trip–gear, insurance, immunizations, storage facilities. Let’s take a look at what some of these might cost me.

Travel Insurance
The most recommended travel insurance I’ve seen is World Nomads, which specializes in covering emergency evacuations, health costs, and even baggage loss. I considered not buying any, but the possibility of being stuck in a medical emergency halfway around the world without access to healthcare, or finding my trip interrupted for some reason and looking for compensation, I gotta go with coverage. I ran a basic search for one year starting in September 2012 and came up with a $900-$1200 quote.

Immunizations
Immunizations for a broad travel itinerary can run fairly high ($550 according to one estimate), but that can include things like meningitis, which I think I got covered in college (Mom?). Also, I’m hoping that my health insurance with my current job will cover some, so I’ll be taking advantage of that as the departure date grows closer. So this might cost me more like $200.

Storage Unit
A lot of RTW bloggers write about selling all their worldly possessions before heading out on the road, which makes sense if you can make money off your belongings. I don’t think I’d get much for my bed, bookshelves, and dining room table, but the cheapest Chicago storage unit I found that would actually fit that bed is $48 a month. Let’s say I’m gone for 15 months; that’s $720! So I’m still undecided on whether to go this route.

Visas
Apparently the way visas work is much the same way the rest of international relations work–you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. So the US lets citizens of some countries enter the States paying no or little visa money, and those countries return the favor for US citizens visiting them. Other countries don’t have such generous arrangements with us. For example, South Africa and New Zealand don’t require a visa, but China and Russia both cost upwards of $150. I added up the visa fees for all the countries I’m planning to visit, and I’m looking at $700.

Add those all up, and I’m looking at about $2800 before I even buy a plane ticket. Yikes! Next time I run the numbers I’ll be looking at gear and clothing, so check back for that.

Running the Numbers: Where to Go

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Hello, dearest fellow travelers! Sorry about the unannounced break; there were weddings and BBQs and many delightful things that kept me away, but now I’m back for our regular Tuesday/Thursday schedule. Today I’m introducing a new recurring feature called Running the Numbers. It’s time to get serious about budgeting for this world trip next year (NEXT YEAR JUMP BACK), so I’ll be working out what I can reasonably afford and sharing those insights with you so we can all furrow our brows in a shared nervousness about RTW budgets. Fun times, right? The budget I’m planning to work with is $30,000 over the course of a little under two years.

When I tell people I plan to travel around the world for about two years, the questions usually go: Really? By yourself? Is that safe? How can you afford it? To which I respond, yep, yep, as safe as living in a major American city, and I sure hope so! Since I plan to leave in 15 months, it’s time for me to get serious about that last part, and I’m starting to break down the budget and be judicious in which places I can realistically visit on that budget.

Every single blog written by world travelers contains at least one post on how much money the authors spent on their trip, so there’s a lot of info out there to analyze. I like the breakdowns on this blog and this one, although I do get dispirited when I see that our routes are different enough that they might not make the greatest basis for comparison. In fact, they go to many fewer countries than I had been planning to visit, so I’m starting to seriously considering pruning the itinerary. I don’t want to visit lots of places only to not have enough money to see all I want to see in each.

Currently I say I want to start in Australia and then see a lot of Asia, take the Trans-Siberian, and work my way down to some of Africa, then end in India. Looking at the phenomenal cost of visas ($80 to get into Kenya! $70 to visit India!), carefully plotting a course seems an even better idea.

So now I’m thinking my best course would look something like this:

Australia
New Zealand
Indonesia
Singapore
Thailand
Cambodia
Vietnam
China
Japan
South Korea
Russia
Poland
Hungary
Serbia
Turkey
Israel
Egypt
Morocco
Senegal
Kenya
Zimbabwe
South Africa
India

I’m sad to cut out Scandinavia, but those countries are super expensive and one of the main reasons I’d want to go, the aurora borealis, is never a certain sighting, so it’s smarter to come back another time when I can focus on patiently waiting for the lights to appear. I’m still not totally sure about each of the countries in Africa, because unlike in Asia they are much farther apart from one another and therefore they add quite a bit to transportation costs, but there are specific sights and cultures I want to experience in each of the countries listed, so I’m keeping them on for now.

Don’t forget that the plan is to return to the States after India, spend time with all the loved ones I missed, and save up a bit of money so I can go to Latin America (for those who are about to comment, “how can you not go to Peru/Argentina/Mexico?”).

Right then, dearest fellow travelers, what do you think? You’ll be reading about each of these places for the next several years, so chip in if you think I’m really missing out on a particular spot, or if you’re especially excited to hear about a place listed here.