This blog post is Part I of a series of 3 posts. We’ll be covering our most frequently asked questions which are: How did pay for it all? How did you plan it? (that’s next blog post) and Would you do it again? (next, next blog post). Let’s jump into the first bit!

How much?

Some people have asked us if we won the lottery, we wish!! and other’s think perhaps we are sponsored by some rich uncle/auntie (let’s be PC) or maybe we are trust fund babies? We wish that too!! The truth is that we worked really hard for 5 years so that we could take 2 years off.

If you are still interested in what hard work looks like, here’s how we did it:

Sampling

We had no idea what a trip like this would cost so we took a trip to mexico, for 1 week, to research. During that time we traveled like we thought we’d like to travel on such an epic, long term trip as one around the world, and tracked all of our expenses, meticulously! We figured out our expenses would probably look something like this. And indeed they did! Check out our Cost of Traveling - Year 2 blog post.

We padded the numbers a little, to account for expensive countries like Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Western Europe. Finally, we landed at USD 120/day for 2 adults; this included EVERYTHING - that’s accommodations, transportation, food, activities and anything else we hadn’t anticipated. For the most part we stayed within budget but you can read all about it in the blog post linked above.

Debt

Then we took a look at our debt - what could we feasibly pay off?

As you can see we had student loans and car loans. We doubled down and paid all that off so that we could aggressively save. By the end of 5 years, we were saving about 50% or our earnings for our trip. Of course, this didn’t happen over night, it took us at least 3 years to really start to see the fruits of our labor. Additionally, having all that paid off also meant we didn’t have to pay that during our travels. Right before we left we sold our cars so we had no car related expenses at home. The money we received from the cars did not go to our travel fund, we saved that to buy another car once we returned.

Other expenses

We also reduced our what we call marginal expenses - these are the expenses that are so small you don’t really feel they’d make a difference. We cut our cable TV; no more movie channels; less movie outings; less eating out; less trips; less coffee; less Shiatsus…. pretty much less of everything. All these little things add up to a lot and we more than made up for these little restrictions on our 2 years on the road.

Hoarding points

Thanks to some amazing travel hacking friends, who gave us awesome advice, we were able to literally hoard miles very strategically. We knew the long hauls would be expensive legs and we focused on earning enough miles to cover those segments. We cashed miles for our US -> Peru flight, US -> Australia flight and New Zealand -> Hong Kong flight. We also accumulated hotel points for the times we needed to stay in a nice place without breaking the bank. You can read all about how many points we saved & what other perks we got in our Wallet, Cards & Savings blog post. This blog post is about how much we saved on the road, but it’ll give you a good idea of our points saving.

The secret is out

There is no secret, at least for us, to be able to afford this trip. It was 5 years of buckling down and doing the hard work. We do acknowledge that we live in a very privileged country where we make good wages and that helped enormously! And we are 1000% grateful for the fact that our passports allow us the opportunity to visit so many places.

We hope you found this blog post helpful. As always, here’s a video of us talking about the very same thing you just read, but hopefully more funny.

Leave us a comment if you have any questions! We love hearing back from you all.