How Much Does it Cost to Travel Around the World? (September 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 detailed insights into how to save for your own adventure around the world why not pick up an electronic copy of  Dream Save Do here.

September marked a big milestone in our new life – 2 full years on the road. So much has happened in these last 2 years and we’ve continued to track ever ruble, kroner, and euro spent and share it here each month to help anyone interested in hitting the road for an extended adventure.

This month we made a big change to our overland journey from Thailand to Portugal. In the spirit of spontaneity we decided to extend our trip a few thousand more kilometers and take a ship from Copenhagen, Denmark to Miami, Florida. We boarded the ship on the last day of September and then stopped in Lisbon to let us complete the first big goal in our overland/sea adventure.

It turns out the cost of the 14-day repositioning cruise across the Atlantic was less than a flight and still kept us right at our $100/day average. Turns out to be a great way to see more of the world within our budget. We will be publishing a special report later this month which outlines how much is costed us to travel from Thailand to Miami without using places. You won’t want to miss it.

September in Review

Once again we’ll say it – Europe is expensive. We were able to control our costs for September through house-sitting and the opportunity to visit with friends we’ve made along the way. Even despite only paying for accommodation for 9 nights we still ended up spending almost $800.

In addition, as we mentioned last month, we benefited greatly from our Eurail passes which were provided by Eurail.com. This enabled us to travel around Europe at our own schedule while saving us considerable money.

One of the best things about this month, both personally and financially, was rediscovering the joy of having our own kitchen while house-sitting in La Garriga, Spain. We’d been without access to our own kitchen for over a year so this was a quite a treat for us. We took full advantage by shopping daily in the village to buy whatever was fresh and then coming back to the apartment to cook. Both our budget and our waistlines benefited, while we fell in love again with an evening cooking and listening to great music.

One big benefit of Europe is great wine at a cheap price, helping us control our alcohol budget figure and still enjoying happy hour.

Let’s Get to The Numbers:

• Total spending for September 2012: $2,152
• Daily average for September 2012: $71.74
• Total spending to date (for entire trip) through September 2012: $50,138
• Overall daily average (730 days on the road): $68.74

FAQ:

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 find your house-sitting assignments?

If you’ve been following our website or the monthly reports here you know that we have been able to save significant money the last two years by taking care of owners’ homes while they are away. This has likely been the single biggest money saver for us in the process.

There are 2 key ways we’ve found our assignments:

• We signed up for the house-sitting services at Trusted Housesitters. This is a great way to find housesitting assignments and then apply online. If you are interested, you can use the discount code “married” to save 25% today on your membership.
• Friends – we’ve been fortunate to have great friends around the world who have entrusted us to take care of their homes. Most of these came about by letting people we know that we’d be interested if they ever needed help looking after their homes and pets.

For more details on house-sitting we’ve written a detailed post to give you more insights into the process.

Note: While we just completed 2 years of travel, we’ve decided to move our big annual spending report to a calendar year. Since we have no plans to stop living this life we feel it would be better to share our annual spending information each January. So look forward to a big summary report in just a few short months.