How Much Does it Cost to Travel Around the World? (August 2012 Update)

Each month we provide a monthly summary of our expenses during our trip around the world. We’ve documented every dollar, yuan, and bhat spent on our journey to help you see how affordable RTW travel by showing you how we break down our expenses. For more stories into how we saved for this adventure and actionable steps you can take to save for your own dream, click here to get our book Dream Save Do.

August signaled a return to great wine and languages with Latin characters as we re-entered Europe. After almost a year in Asia it was nice to be able to enjoy a bottle of wine again with good friends. We kicked off the month by departing Russia on a 40 hour bus ride through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. We arrived in Berlin, a city we’ve both been excited to explore for years. It turned out Berlin was the perfect welcome for Europe and the only sad thing was the need to move on and explore more of the continent.

Europe is not cheap, but thanks to a few key partnerships and wonderful friends, we were able to tame the high costs of Europe in August.

• Without a doubt, the best thing we’ve received are 2 Eurail passes, thanks to Eurail.com. We are taking full advantage to see more of Europe than ever before. We cannot recommend these passes highly enough for their flexibility, freedom, and ability to save money. Train travel is not cheap in Europe and these are a great resource for anyone.
• We stayed with wonderful friends who cooked us to great meals, shared their homes, and most importantly treated us to delightful conversations.

Let’s Get to the Numbers

• Total spending to date (for entire trip) through August 2012: $48,031
• Total spending for August 2012: $2,146
• Daily average for August 2012: $69.24
• Overall daily average (23 months on the road): $68.62

Expense Breakdown:

 Frequently Asked Questions:

Over the course of providing these monthly spending reports, we’ve received a lot of questions and requests for clarification on our spending and finances. In order to spread the answers to more of you we’ll start including one here each month.

 How do you decide where to go next?

This is a great question that we receive several times every month. Most of our decisions are left up to unforeseen opportunities – an unexpected invitation, a house-sitting gig, a friend telling us they are going to be somewhere that we’d like to visit. Most of the time we identify a general direction we want to travel (for example, 18,000km from Thailand to Portugal) and then start putting in place the stops along the way. Often we don’t decide on individual stops, but instead leave it up to fate/chance where we will go.

As much as possible, we try to leave ourselves flexible to any opportunity that comes along – a ship to England, house-sitting in Europe, or visiting friends along the way who’ve invited us to stay. We always have ideas of things we want to see/do, but we rarely know where we’ll be a few months from now.

After almost 2 years on the road we’ve found the experiences we’ve enjoyed most are the ones we never could have planned. As a result we do far less planning and far more telling people where we’re going. With that idea in mind, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be arriving in Miami on a ship from Copenhagen on October 14th. This will extend our “over-land/over-sea” journey from Thailand to Miami, for a total of 26,337km! We’ll be visiting the US for a few weeks to catch up with friends and family. If you have any creative ideas for how we can travel through the US without using planes, we’ve love to hear from you. Click here to send me a mail with your thoughts.