Tag Archives: Running the Numbers

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Spend it All on the Dream

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If you’ve seen me in the last month or two, and you’ve asked me how plans are shaping up for my trip, first of all: thank you. Second of all: I’m sorry. Because I’ve recently realized that almost every time someone’s expressed interest in this exciting adventure of mine, I’ve responded with, “Yes, but I’m so worried about the money. It’s so expensive.” And that is a super annoying response.

Counting every penny

It’s annoying for a few reasons, right.

1) The basic middle-class-white-woman-in-the-US problem, wherein just by those demographics alone, I am in an impossibly higher income and standard-of-living bracket than so many of the people I’ll be meeting on this trip. Privilege is a complex thing, so it’s never as easy as “other people have it worse than you, so quit whining”; it’s more “other people have it worse than you, so what are you going to do about it?” For me, the answer involves voting across all levels of government, making public stands with others at rallies and marches, calling my representatives on big issues (don’t just email!), and coming up, volunteering with various organizations. That’s all well and good, but the basic distastefulness of fretting over funds for a year-long pleasure trip in a world so fundamentally unequal remains.

2) This isn’t exactly an attainable thing for a lot of people I know, either. Most RTW blogs like to talk about how anybody can do this! live your dream! cast off fear! And that’s a nice sentiment, but it blithely ignores crushing student loan debt and wretched wages in this economy, not to mention health problems and family obligations. RTW trips aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but even for those who’d like to take one, there are very real and sizable obstacles. I’m unattached, not in a career job, debt free, and in good health–a relatively rare confluence of conditions.

3) I have saved quite a bit of money! I never did the hardcore saving, giving up daily luxuries and forgoing drinks at the bar; instead, I enjoyed the heck out of my life in Chicago and still managed to put away a few hundred dollars every month for this trip. I’ve done dozens of calculations, and I’m pretty sure that barring any disaster (knock on wood), I can at least make it through eight months of travel, enough to get me to England for my grandmother’s 80th birthday celebration. Of course, I intend to keep traveling after that, but if that has to be the grand finale, well, that’s not too bad.

If the trip ends sooner than expected, I’m okay with it ending here.

4) It is just plain obnoxious to complain about how broke you are. Unless you were born into cyclical poverty or are having a really rough time making ends meet and genuinely wonder how you’ll make rent this month, please don’t complain about your finances. (Not to say there aren’t good sites for talking about the very real money problems we all face, especially young people trying to figure out how it all works.) Setting aside whether anyone else would want to go on the trip I’m about to go on, no one wants to hear me moan about my money woes. We all have them.

Seriously, no one wants to hear about your money woes

Okay, but I’m still concerned about money for this trip. You can skip this if you’re already burned out on the subject (I don’t blame you), but in case you too are planning a RTW trip and wonder why no one ever seems to talk about this on their RTW blogs:

1) It’s all about stability, right? It’s scary to leave the best apartment I’ve ever rented, and a decent job, in a city I love, not to mention all the people I’ll miss. It feels selfish and foolish to leave an office job in this economy. I hate job hunting–it’s all the worst parts of dating without any of the fun parts–so I haven’t looked for anything in the last five years. But I have many friends who have moved jobs, and it’s been rough. Some of them looked for over a year to find something in their field, and these are really qualified people. It’s a scary thought, coming back to an economy that I can’t imagine will be much improved (and if a certain someone is elected in November, might well be worse). Sure, there’s the whole spin of “I’m a great candidate because of the new experiences my travels afforded me,” but let’s be real, that’s no clincher.

Does “sat on a beach in six countries” make me upper management material, Bob?

2) As I’ve shamefacedly admitted before, I’ve been so focused on this trip for so long that I haven’t made any plans for my return. At this point, I think I have $800 saved in a separate account labeled “Back to Life, Back to Reality.” That is… one month’s rent in Chicago. Not even one month’s rent plus security deposit. I’m really into planning things (shocking, I know), and it freaks me out to be setting myself up for a day-to-day life with no clear picture of what comes after, or how I’ll pay for it.

3) I’ve always prided myself on my independence, but there’s living on your own in the country you grew up in, and there’s being totally alone in countries that use a different alphabet from yours. I’ve gotten good at laughing with a carefree air whenever someone expresses surprise at the idea of traveling solo for such a long period of time, but inside, I’m thinking, “Yes! It is super scary!” I know it will be far more wonderful than frightening, but it’s still scary. Money is the cushion that eases any new/scary situation, so I think I transfer some anxiety about traveling solo onto the more tangible issue of traveling with enough money.

4) With limited funds (and limited time), it is impossible for me to visit every place I’m interested in visiting. This has been a hard one to accept, as you can see by the many times my proposed itinerary has changed. I have serious FOMO about travel (I hear the kids are using that term). I’ve read so many accounts of amazing experiences in just about every country in the world, and I’ve been anticipating this trip for so long, that I’ve convinced myself it won’t be worth it if I don’t do everything all in this one go. Yeesh! What pressure.

I have a lot of pins, okay?

I don’t generally consider myself someone who gets worked up over money issues, because I’ve been fortunate enough to always make enough to be comfortable (those two years in the publishing industry excepted). So these overwhelming fears about having “enough” have taken me by surprise. I see where they’re coming from, but they’re no good. I gotta move past them.

Partly, that involves adjusting my approach to travel in general, and that is something I’m looking forward to doing. I won’t be engaging in the kind of slow travel that some do, but I will be slowing down my usual pace considerably. Rather than zipping from sight to sight to make sure I get everything checked off my list, and rather than worrying about how much it’s going to cost to do all that checking off, I’m going to go at it a bit more leisurely. A week in one location here, a couple weeks in another location there, and I hope to come away with a better understanding of the places I visit and the people I meet. Incidentally, this approach also cuts down on the cost of plane tickets.

I think it’s a sign.

It’s probably terribly gauche to post a PayPal link after a post like that, but here it is. I am genuinely easing up on my anxiety about money, but if you’d like to shut me up about it once and for all, and also fund a swim with dolphins or a volunteer project with elephants, please check out the post here. No worries if you don’t! I’d hate to drive away readers with pleas for money, so I’m trying to keep these few and far between.

Images 1 and 2 mine. Image 3. Image 4. Image 5.

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: My Top 3 Money Mistakes while Planning for a RTW Trip

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Here is a shameful secret: I’ve been planning to do some version of a trip around the world for 10 years, and seriously looking at where I want to go for 5, but I didn’t start making any real saving decisions til 3 years before I planned to leave. And I didn’t invest serious money til about a year and a half out. Spoiler alert: this was not smart planning. So although it pains me to admit it, here are the top 3 stupid money mistakes I made while planning for this RTW trip.

pile of bills and a piggy bank

Would that this were my personal bank account

1. I didn’t automatically deduct from my paycheck until last year.

My parents had told me since college that the best way to save consistently is to have money automatically deducted from your paycheck and put into savings. This made sense to me, but my first post-college job was a classic publishing starter position in that I made less than I spent (and I only spent on rent, utilities, food, and the occasional movie out). So I was going into debt paying back loans, and by the time I got a decent-paying job in the city, I had enough debt that my new paycheck went mostly toward paying that off for a couple years.

I then looked at automatically deducting from my paycheck and putting it in my savings, but my company doesn’t deduct percentages (like 90% to checking, 10% to savings), only exact amounts. Since I infrequently work overtime that changes the amount of my income, that would cause headaches. I took out money from checking here and there and called it good, but of course that meant I wasn’t saving as much as I should have been, and not as consistently. It wasn’t until last year that I realized, hey, I could let the whole paycheck go into checking, then set it up so the bank automatically moved money into savings once a month. Voila.

2. I didn’t get an airline rewards card until this year.

I didn’t know I could have one! I got a Capital One credit card when I was 18, which my parents had to co-sign. They were taken off the card a few years later, but it’s still the only credit card I’ve ever had. Capital One sends me promotional stuff all the time, but never once have they sent me information on a card that gives airline rewards. None of the other major credit card companies have even spammed me with their offers, which is just an inconsiderate lack of junk mailing.

I always thought of credit cards as ways to accumulate debt, and maybe enough credit to do me good if I applied for a loan on a house or a car. I never thought of them as things that could work for me in other ways. If I’d had a rewards card, I could have enough miles for a couple of flights on my trip already! Oh well. I’m late to the game, but I’m in it. I got a United Airlines Visa and am putting all I can on it until the annual fee kicks in.

3. I didn’t set aside any money for my return to the States.

I’ve always joked that I’d go on this trip and come back broke, but I haven’t really put much thought into just how very broke I’ll be. Lots of world travelers are location independent earners, but I don’t have any freelance writing or editing gigs set up and I’ve found it a hard market to break into, so earning money on the road seems unlikely. This means it’ll be a blank slate when I get back, and depending on the kindness of loved ones until I can get set up with a job, home, etc. My parents weren’t keen to have me rent-free for long when I was 22, so they’ll probably be even less so when I’m 32!

I’ve set up an ING savings account and put a couple hundred in there. I’ll let the compound interest help me out, and make deposits as I’m able, but for now, this is the mistake that’s potentially going to cause the most trouble in the long run. Still, part of long-term travel is accepting that circumstances change all the time and there will be opportunities I’m not yet aware of. I’ll hold on to that for now.

Learn from my mistakes

There you have it! For all my big talk, I sure have been shortsighted and unresourceful in the numbers part of planning. It’s embarrassing to admit, but maybe by laying them out here for you, other travelers can learn from my mistakes. I wish someone had given me this advice years ago, so I’m passing it on in true pay it forward style.

(Money joke!)

Image.

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: How to Save for a World Trip

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The title of this post is a little misleading, since this is less a top ten list of ways to cut down on costs and ramp up saving (there are tons of those out there), and more of a question about how much of that is good to do and how much is too much. Can I save up for a round-the-world trip while still enjoying my life here in Chicago, or do I need to radically alter my lifestyle?

counting my pennies

Photo from http://igotmompower.com/2011/06/pennies-from-heaven/

I’ve been planning to go on a round-the-world trip for several years now, and I’ve been putting money aside that whole time, but the amount has varied over the years. I’ve never had a special account for it; I just designate my savings account as the place I save for the trip. It’s a little scary how very basic my financial situation is (no stocks or bonds, a 401(k) with like a grand in it), and that 30 Rock episode a few seasons ago, in which Liz’s nearly identical financial situation is roundly mocked, hit a little close to home. Part of that lack of funds is because I worked in publishing for a couple years, and as anyone who ever copy edited can tell you, you lose money doing that in the first few years. So it wasn’t until recently that I was able to put aside a set amount each month, which really ramped up the saving.

I’ve worked the math a few times, and so long as my employment situation stays steady and major disasters are kept at bay (knock on wood), I should be able to make my goal of $30,000 next August, and then I’ll be off. I’m proud of my ability to save more than I made at my first office job, but on the other hand, I don’t have any dependents, I live in a pretty affordable part of town, and I’ve been supposedly saving for years. Couldn’t I have saved more, faster? Where did it all go?

The answer is: it all went into my life. I’ve been spending my money on enjoying my time here in Chicago, and that has slowed down the saving noticeably. I’ve gone back and forth on whether this is the right way to do it, and usually I think it is. Several years ago, at the end of college, my then-boyfriend and I were considering taking this trip together, and we argued over how to go about it. I wanted to hoard all our pennies as quickly as possible, so we could be on the road right away. He wanted to explore the city we’d be moving to and have enough money to enjoy it fully. He didn’t want to have to miss hanging out with friends because they were going to a bar and we’d only budgeted two beers each that month. What’s the point in saving for fun if it means not having any in the meantime?

Now I think he was mostly right. I should have been saving more aggressively in the last couple years, when my salary got to a comfortable, reliable point, but otherwise I don’t have regrets about the way I’ve been going about it. I like being able to go out with friends and occasionally buy a round, or pick up the check on a dinner with a friend who’s a little cash poor at the moment. I think this kind of relative openness with money is healthy for friendships, much better than everyone counting out their share to the decimal and holding grudges against those who deviate. (Of course, it’s a different story when people between jobs or in a different economic stratum are in the mix, in which case common sense and compassion should reign.)

I also think a general kind of karma is involved. When I was a broke 18-year-old in Berlin, two Australians bought me a drink in a cafe and we spent the afternoon chatting about our travels. I offered to pay my share, but they were several years older, on a break from good-paying jobs, and they cheerfully waved my money aside. All they required was that I pass the favor on later in my travels, when I was in a position to do the same for someone else. A simple pay it forward concept, sure, but that doesn’t make it less important, and why shouldn’t it apply in our daily lives as well as our more exotic travels? Not that I walk around peeling twenties off a giant roll I keep in my pocket, and it’s not that I’m doing any better financially than most of my friends and acquaintances, but it is a conscious choice about how to spend what I have at my disposal.

After all, generosity doesn’t save nearly so well as money, so sometimes you have to spend a little of both and trust that it’ll balance in the end.