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...