Cost of traveling - Year 1

How much does a year of traveling cost? for 2 adults, who are more flashpackers than budget backpackers? We had a budget, and we stuck to it pretty close. But first let’s see what places we visited:

Our Grand Total from Oct 1, 2017 to Sep 30, 2018 was a whooping $45,161.28! The average was about $123.73/day for 2 adults and it’s broken down into the following categories:

And this is the breakdown per category:

Lodging

As you can see, we weren’t kidding when we said we were flashpackers. 47.6% of our budget was spent on hotels vs 34.1% in hostels. AirBnB came in a distant 3rd and RVing in Australia and New Zealand barely dented the budget (‘cause we found a good deal! did we mention we love good deals?) Ok, moving on.

Food

Because we normally eat breakfast at the hotel, whether store bought or provided by the accommodation, breakfast is very small. It makes sense that dinner and lunch would take up more of our budget (more than 50% combined) but we were hoping groceries would be more significant than just 10.7%.

Transport

It’s no surprise that the airplane category is the biggest since airfare can be quite expensive. Not included in these figures are flights booked with points so the 37.1% is probably deceivingly small. Trains came in second because of our stay in Japan.

Activities

What the heck is entertainment? coming in at 15.5% this category covers shows and movies. Beauty/Spa is mostly massages. Obviously tours came in first since we took site tours in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Nicaragua and Belize. Sites are all the fees paid to enter a particular site, for examples museums and church entrance fees would fall in this category.

Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous tries to capture all remaining expenses. The biggest section is the miscellaneous section and that’s usually things like gifts. Technology comes in second and that was usually data for our phones.

We hope you guys find this info useful. If anyone wants to share about the costs of a similar adventure, even if it’s not as long, feel free to post below, we’d love to hear from you.