Sunday, January 24, 2010

Side Topic: Financial Summary (after the fact)

"If you don't mind me asking, how much does a trip like this cost?"

As you can imagine, we got this question pretty often. With a trip like this, it's a bit hard to say before you leave. Not including COBRA and items purchased before leaving, our "goal" was to spend no more than $20,000 and we promised ourselves we would come home early to keep the total under $30,000. Obviously this doesn't count the cost of not working for 6 months and now being unemployed. So let's see how we did.

RTW Trip Spending Breakdown (from mint.com)
Travel (Other): $13,027 (Mostly foreign ATM transactions, we mostly used cash.)
Air Travel: $5,763 (Individual one-way tickets turned out to be less than RTW tickets)
Visas: $892 (not counting visas on arrival paid in cash)
Vaccines: $262$477 spent and $215 reimbursed from insurance
Prescriptions: $35 $388 spent and $253 reimbursed from insurance
Travel Insurance: $302 (mostly just for medical evacuations)
HostelWorld: $215 (10% down for online reservation)
Total Spent: $20,596


So we are basically on budget, or near enough, though as you can tell from reading the blog, it was a challenging budget to stick to.

Of course, we spent a good bit of money on the trip before we left.

RTW Trip All Expenses (from mint.com)
Total Above: $20,596
COBRA: $3,156 (health insurance for February-July)
Clothes/Luggage: $240 (what we didn't already own)
Electronics: $2,064 (what we didn't already own: DSLR+lens, 2x Kindles, 3x 32GB SD cards, Mini Laptop, iPod Touch, 2x Mini Noise-Canceling Headphones)
Grand Total: $26,057 For two people traveling the world for 158 days.

And worth every penny...

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Trip Preparation

I've created this blog for Josh and I to share our experiences traveling around the world during the first half of 2010. I'm endeavoring to make it easy and painless for all our friends and family to subscribe to this blog using Facebook, LiveJournal, or E-Mail. We'll see how it goes.

The background of the trip, for those who don't already know, is that Josh and I quit our jobs on January 8th and have moved all our stuff to my parents' shed in Oregon. Having thus shed most of our regular financial responsibilities, we are now preparing to depart on January 31st for a Northern Hemisphere around-the-world trip. We plan to return in time for my childhood friend Sarah's wedding on July 10th, and then hope to acquire jobs in the Portland area before the money runs out.

Our rough itinerary so far is as follows:

  • 4 weeks in India
  • 2-4 weeks in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore, and maybe more)
  • 4 weeks in China
  • 3 weeks in Turkey
  • 5-7 weeks in Europe with an emphasis on Greece and Italy, and a side trip to Egypt to see the pyramids