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...

1 comment:

  1. I just spent a little while reading your Istanbul blogs. Such a nice comprehensive work you created here. Always fun to dip in to your adventure for a while. From Mom. (Whats an url?)

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