HOW TO BUDGET FOR A YEAR ABROAD

Something thats not normally discussed on travel blogs is creating a budget for an overseas adventure. It’s the not-so-glamourous side to travelling, and unless you have a successful blogging career or work in a travelling profession, you’ll need to have a considerable amount of money before you leave home. I’ve had a few questions lately about how we afford to travel, and where does our money magically appear from? We spent three years working normal jobs and saving all the money we could so that we could have the freedom to travel this year, there is no secret money tree! In this post I will touch on how we budgeted and save money during our travels, and how we decided on that magic number we needed in our bank accounts before we left home.

When we first decided we wanted to spend an extended period of time overseas, I began planning a budget and saving plan that could work for us. Firstly I had to decide on a period of time, so we settled on the idea of living abroad for one year. A nice round number that we could start with and build our budget from there. Next we had to look at how much our accommodation would cost for that year, our food/spending allowance needed to be and our travel tickets allowance (getting from place to place).

Accommodation:

Remember, there are two of us travelling together in this scenario, so our budget needs to be enough for two people. Solo travellers will be able to save less, but also sometimes it can cost similar for accommodation for two people if you use some of the websites that we do.

To begin our calculations, I realised it would be best for us if we could try and save $1000 for each month we are away. Thats $1000 a month (in Australian dollars) for a roof over our heads, which means we have $250 a week, or $35 a night for two people, ($17.5 each). It might seem like not enough money, but throughout Europe we almost always hit our accommodation budget. It’s places like the UK or expensive European countries like France/Netherlands where we struggled, but it’s best to always have a bit more than you’re calculations anyway, and in cheaper countries you might spend less for your nightly budget which can get you back on track. Research what the average hostel bed cost per night for your destination is (we love using hostelworld because they are reliable the website is easy and they have free cancelation). Once you have a ballpark figure the rest is simple. And our rent in Melbourne was much more than this monthly budget, how crazy that we can travel the world and pay less for our bed each night in Australia?! And we have standards, we won’t stay anywhere with less than 85% positive reviews, we don’t like to stay far from the town centre, and definitely no where considered dangerous.

Now for how we spend our accommodation money! We quickly worked out that hostels can be the most expensive option for us as we are paying per bed (meaning we need two singles) and we’ll be in a shared room. Sometimes a bed might be $20-$25 which is totally reasonable but multiply that by two and we’ve blown our budget… Hostels are best suited for solo travellers. We also couldn’t spend an entire year sharing a room…

So thats where Airbnb comes in! So far we’ve stayed in eight Airbnb’s on this trip and we have LOVED all of them! Each one of our Airbnb’s have been private apartments (meaning we don’t share the property with anyone else) and mostly we’ve been right on target with our spending (so $35aud a night). If you’ve never heard of Airbnb, basically it’s people subletting their apartments as a holiday rental! And some people even sublet their spareroom for cheap. As a traveller you can make an account on their website, look for Airbnb’s in your travel area and contact the host to see if the place is available. Airbnb always has your back, so if something goes wrong they’ll help find you new accommodation and refund you what you’ve paid. There are also reviews so you can make sure the place is as described and people have enjoyed staying there. Honestly this has helped us save SO much money, and we’ve stayed in some beautiful and private places.

If you’re thinking of signing up and checking it out, you can use our link and get a free $32 credit to spend on your first stay!

www.airbnb.com.au/c/cyoung461?s=8

Other websites we use are Trivago (when we want to spend a little extra $$$ and spoil ourselves with a hotel room), expedia, hostelworld and just googling can be helpful sometimes too. But your main options are hostels, Airbnb, traditional BnB’s, guesthouses, and hotels. Or look into house sitting/animal sitting!

Food/Spending:

A girls gotta eat am I right?! Working out a food budget can be complicated… so I kind of just guessed a number and it has worked out perfectly for us. I figured why not keep going with this $1000 plan? Which works out at $125 each a week ($17.5 a day per person). The way we manage our spending money is that we’ve given ourselves a payday! So each Monday is payday, and we withdraw $120 each (we let the $5 go for the sake of a round number). It works so well having our weekly money physically in our pocket! We can see how much we have, and keep an eye on frivolous spending habits.

Sometimes our weekly budget is more than enough and we can eat out, cook at home, buy drinks and other miscellaneous items we might need that week. Mostly in European countries it is much easier. Like in Prague for example, we could afford to have a delicious lunch out for $5, and a big dinner at a restaurant for $10! Leaving a couple of dollars for our breakfast (ps. I’m converting all of these costs to Australian dollars, I like to think of my spending in AUD as we are constantly changing currencies). But in places like London, things get a bit tricker. The cheapest food we could find out would be $10, meaning we cooked at home much more. We’ve been fortunate that almost all of our accommodation has had a kitchen, but we’ve made sure it’s been that way. The cheapest way to eat is to make your own food, and save one or two nights per week for a nice restaurant meal. We make curries, rice dishes, pasta, roast vegetables, salads, Martin will buy meat to cook and I’ll get tofu. We both enjoy healthy lifestyles and find it much easier to eat affordable nutritious food if we cook it ourselves. Porridge or cereal for breakfast with fruit is always a good start! Keep an eye out for discount supermarkets like Aldi or Lidl, and small/local fruit and veg shops often are cheaper than big chains!

Even during the odd time that we haven’t had a kitchen to cook in and we were stuck in a Croatian town where they had decided to price all of the food outlets with ridiculous prices… we still managed to make something yummy for cheap. You can always go to the supermarket, buy some salad ingredients, bread or wraps, mayonnaise, and have a picnic somewhere on the grass or beach. Living in true back-packer style! We even go as far as to make ourselves sandwiches or a rice dish the night before we’re due to catch a train to our next destination. You never know what kind of choices the train station will have… or at what price? So homemade lunch and snacks for journeys have served us well.

Or keep an eye out for sandwich bars! They usually have acceptable prices and yummy things on offer. For example I ate the BEST sandwich ever in a town called Bol, on an island in Croatia. All the other options were around $10, but this sweet little beachside sandwich shop offered huge baguettes for $3.5. His olive spread was to DIE for! Or I’ll even google something like “Cheap eats in Dubrovnik” or “Affordable dinner in Dubrovnik” and read through a few trip advisor reviews for a dinner place to get an idea on their prices. We found this great burger bar by using this method!

Lastly, sometimes you’ll have to blow the budget and you just have to accept it. When I run out of moisturiser, or really need a new pair of shoes, I’m learning to just go with the flow 😉 You can’t be perfect all the time! But honestly we don’t buy anything we don’t need. There is no big shopping spree’s happening for us! But we do manage to still go to the movies.

Travel tickets:

So far we need $12,000 for accommodation and $12,000 for food, bring us to a grand total of $24,000! Not a quick or cheap decision hey? At least there are two of us saving in this scenario. But $24,000 is definitely not enough… We haven’t taken into equation that we need to actually get from one place to the next, whether by car, bus, train, plane or boat. Sometimes these tickets are ridiculously cheap! Like that time we both got from London to Paris for $25, or from Zagreb to Split for $10! But other times it will be a flight from Croatia to the UK for $150. It all depends what kind of transport your taking, and how far the distance is. We plan our travel routes so that we are heading in a particular directions and we visit all the cities along the way. This way we can keep travelling by road and saving money.

I couldn’t put a number on our travel costs, so it was more about just putting away any extra that we could. You can get away with a few extra thousand depending on where you are going, and how much travelling you intend to do. Check websites like skyscanner for flight prices, and read trip advisor forums when looking up how much a train or bus might cost. If you’re planning a year trip, a Eurail pass isn’t worth it, nor will it help as you usually have to travel in consecutive days. We’ve found trains to be very affordable when booked a few weeks in advance, but sometimes on the day the prices can be ridiculous! These are the kind of things you only learn once you get started on this crazy adventure. And sometimes it doesn’t even make sense? Like we thought we were going to have to pay upward of $150 for a train ticket when looking at the Eurail website, only to arrive at the station, and the ticket only cost $10. Watch out for websites trying to make you pay more than you need to. Everything is easier once you have arrived in Europe, and buses are your best friend! They’re cheaper and quite comfortable, but always google for a few reviews.

Lastly, we even started paying for things before we even left home. You need tickets to get to the first destination! For us that was $900 each, Sydney to London. If you’re under 26, have a look on STA travel as they have great youth prices. We got to fly Ethiad, with only a 3 hour stop over and for the same price we could have bought budget airline tickets with a 12 hour stop over… It pays to look around! And we also both bought UK working visa for $500 each, so that we always have a back up option of earning money on this side of the world. I like to have a fallback, I’m always prepared. And this way if something awful happens or I had a huge miscalculation, we don’t need to pack up and go home, we have options!

Sorry this post turned out to be so long, I guess I have learned a lot on this journey so far, but there is still so much more to learn. This trip has been the biggest life lesson so far, I’ve learned skills that I would never have imagined. If you’re thinking of embarking on a long adventure overseas, I hope this post has given you a little insight into some of the logistics. Anything is possible, it just might not be easy… but it will definitely change your life.

❤