When we were planning what would become our 15 month world trip, we had no idea how much it would cost. We tried to do as much research as we could, but most data we were finding wasn’t relevant to us. Many people who travel long term stick to more affordable destinations such as Central America or South East Asia. That wasn’t what we had in mind, so we had to make our best guess and adapt as we travelled. In this post, we’re going to go through all of our expenses and tell you the real cost of full time travel.

We ended up building our own travel expenses spreadsheet which we used to track every single expense over the course of our trip. We included everything from our travel insurance to our transport to our food to any incidental costs like laundry or medication.

If, like us, you’re interested in the nitty gritty details of the real cost of full time travel, we’re sharing everything. We also have two YouTube videos at the end of this post if that’s more your style!

1. A Bit About the Trip
2. How we Tracked Expenses
3. Our Budget
4. Overall Numbers
5. Costs by Country
6. Costs by Type
7. How We Saved Money
8. Final Thoughts

Please note that all costs in this post are for both of us together and are in Australian dollars.

Where you travel to obviously is the number one factor in how much a trip is going to cost you. This was something that really impacted our ability to find information. From what we saw, most people sharing the cost of their long term trips had spent the vast majority of their time in cheaper countries. We were planning the exact opposite.

In the end, we ended up spending around four weeks in South East Asia, one week in Dubai, around 11 months in Europe, and the remaining three months in Canada and the USA.

We had a few areas that we were willing to save money on, like activities and transport, and others that we were a little more picky with, like accommodation. We still aimed for the cheapest options we could find within our standards, though. Airbnb and Booking.com were our main ways of finding accommodation. We also tried to find options with a kitchen wherever possible. Unlike many budget travellers, though, we avoided staying in hostels as much as possible as we preferred to have a bit more privacy and comfort. We were also lucky enough to be able to spend a few weeks staying with family or friends.

We made our own spreadsheet with Google Sheets that we used to track our whole trip. It included all of our expenses, but also our itinerary, our insurance details and a daily recap of what we did. We would update the itinerary each time we made new bookings, and updated our expenses every few days.

Tracking our expenses was quite easy, as we used our Australia bank card for almost every purchase. We were easily able to check the exact AUD amount of each purchase. When we ocassionally used cash, we would convert the amount into AUD to keep everything consistent.

We shared this spreadsheet with our families back home, so they knew where we were and had our insurance and contact details in case they needed them. It made our trip so much smoother knowing we had everything written down in one place!

The screenshots below show the kind of information we entered into our spreadsheet.

After saving for this trip for around four years, we had a budget of $120,000 AUD together. We were very lucky to have been able to save this much, but we also worked hard to save. We reduced our spending as much as possible leading up to the trip to make sure we could make the most of it.

For us, we felt it made the most sense to break down our budget to a daily level. We knew that some days would be well over budget but some would be well under. We decided that aiming for a daily average was the best way to see how we were going. In the spreadsheet we included a tracker for the running daily average, so we knew not only what we were spending each day, but where our daily average was at.

Knowing how much money we had and that we wanted to travel for at least a year gave us our daily goal of about $328. We had NO IDEA if this was going to be too much, not enough, or about right. After around two months, our running daily average dropped below $328, so we dropped our daily goal to $260. We managed to reach this five months in, which is when we started thinking about going for longer than a year.

We found that having a daily average was so helpful in knowing how we were tracking with our budget. It also made it easier to make choices about what activities we were doing and what we were buying.

By the end of our 15 month trip, the cost of full time travel was $110,943.60, working out to a daily average of $240.14. We could have actually kept travelling for another month or two, but we had a few things to get home to (mostly the Eras Tour).

In our spreadsheet, we categorised our spending so we could get more details on where our money was going. We also tracked how many meals we ate out or made at our accommodation. This seemed like a strange thing to track, but we were interested in the cost per meal difference, and it turned out to be huge! We’ll discuss a bit more about the expenses in each category below.

One of the ways we broke down our expenses into smaller sections was by country. We not only tracked the expense in each country overall, but the average daily cost for each country too. We thought this would be useful for us if we were ever planning a similar trip. It will hopefully also be useful for other people to gauge the cost of full time travel for their own itinerary.

You can see all of our total expenses for each country and the corresponding daily average in this screenshot:

There were a few surprises here, but most came down to the amount of time spent in each country. Obviously, the fewer number of days we had, the more impact one-off costs like transport into the country would have. You can really see the impact of this for the very first country, Singapore. We flew in from Sydney, which cost $1,146.94, and we only stayed for four days. At the opposite end of the scale, we spent $2,324.70 on flights, trains or coaches in Canada. However, this averaged out over the 50 days we spent there.

There were also a few instances of not spending a huge amount of time in a country, but doing quite a few activities while we were there. Vietnam and Scotland were both countries where this happened. Our daily averages in each of those countries would probably have been lower had we not had so many paid activities in a short amount of time.

We also split our expenses into categories, so we could see which categories were taking up the most of our money. Knowing which categories are the most expensive can help you plan for the cost of full time travel and decide on areas to focus on saving in. All of these expenses were around what we expected.

Accommodation, transport and activities came in as the highest categories. We spent the majority of our time in countries that we didn’t need visas for, which meant that was our lowest category. Souvenirs and gifts were things we avoided buying most of the time, which meant that was also quite low. We bought a few small trinkets, and also a postcard in every country we went to.

Two of our most interesting categories here were eating out at $12,445.19 and groceries at $8,436.14. We actually saved so much money by making our own meals, because our groceries expense category covered WAY more meals than we ate out. We’ll chat more about this below!

As mentioned, we tried not to stay in really cheap accommodation, as we wanted to be a bit more comfortable, and this is definitely reflected in our overall costs. Almost 44% of all the money we spent went to accommodation!

This table is a little overwhelming, but it shows what we spent in each category in each country.

Because we were on a daily budget, we found a few ways to cut down on expenses. Having specific areas that we focused on for saving was very useful in reducing the cost of full time travel. The main areas we aimed to reduce costs were eating, transport and activities.

Before we even left home, we knew that food was going to be one of our biggest expenses. To combat this as much as possible, we tried to opt for accommodation with kitchens. When we had kitchens, we tended to eat every breakfast and almost every dinner in. Sometimes we would even have a lunch in, if we only had half a day of activities.

In the end, we ended up eating out for 410 meals, and making our own food for 899 meals. This meant our average cost per meal was $30.35 for eating out and only $9.38 for meals we made. That’s less than one third of the cost! By making our own meals, we saved almost $19,000!

This is probably our number one tip for saving money while travelling long term. Food will always be a huge cost of full time travel, so if you can minimise the cost, it’s a guaranteed saving! Even when accommodation with a kitchen costs a bit more, it still works out better.

Transport was another area that we aimed to lower our costs wherever we could. We avoided flying, opting instead for coaches or trains. Coaches ended up being our main method of transport, particularly around Europe.

Even though they take more time, we found that coaches and trains were cheap enough that it was worth it. When you factor in the amount of time it takes getting to and from an airport, checking in and getting through security, it’s not actually that much slower. On a shorter trip, it may not be feasible, but over the long term, it’s a very easy area to reduce the cost of full time travel.

We actually wrote a few blog posts about the best ways to get around witout flying or driving:

• FlixBus: The Best Budget Way to Travel Europe Easily
• How to See The UK and Ireland Without a Car
• The Best Bus Company to Travel South East Asia.

If you’ve seen any of our vlogs or read any of our blog posts, you probably already know that we LOVE free activities! During our trip, we always prioritised finding free or cheap activities to experience each city. That’s not to say we didn’t pay for activities – we absolutely did. It was our third highest category for spending. But we only did paid activities that we really wanted to do, and filled the rest of our time with free or cheap things.

Especially in big cities like London or New York, there are so many amazing things to do and see without spending anything. If you’re looking to cut down the cost of full time travel, being selective in this area can be very useful.

If you’re interested in finding free activities to do on your travels, make sure you check out our travel guides, where we focus on free or cheap things to do in cities all around the world. We’re constantly adding posts for new cities, so keep an eye our for your next trip!

We hope it was useful to see the real cost of full time travel on a realistic budget. Our biggest recommendation to keep costs down is to choose a few key areas that you’re willing to minimise spending in. You can still spend on your priorities, but use other areas to reduce the overall cost of full time travel.

As always, we’re more than happy to talk about what we spent and how we saved and budgeted for our trip. You can get in touch in the comments below or on our Instagram or YouTube channel.

You can see a bit more about the spreadsheet we used and our total expenses on our YouTube channel:

• Creating a Realistic Travel Budget: What You Need to Consider
• The Best Bus Company to Travel South East Asia
• How to See Europe by Train (Without Interrailing)