Two Year Budget Info

So for our two year road trip we had a budget. It went something like this while we were still in the planning stages:

Matthew: "How much do you think we would spend per month while traveling"
Cassie: "I dunno, maybe about $2000?"
Matthew: "Okay so take that times 24 months and you get about 50 thousand dollars. That will be our budget goal"
Cassie: "Sounds good but how much should we plan to come back with to make sure we have a buffer?"
Matthew: "How about between 10 and 30 thousand?"
Cassie: "Seems reasonable"

Once we got started with the trip we started a spreadsheet itemizing EVERY expense EVERY Day. It was a pain, but we really felt like we needed it to understand where our money was going and project ahead since we were trying to look ahead 2 years. We had 4 months in the USA to base our USA budget on, and then had 3 months in EUROPE to base our ABROAD budget on. We are still tracking our budget and on average are hitting the numbers we need to be, we use the new averages every months to look ahead and see where those figures leave us for the end of the trip.

These numbers are for 2 people

USA Budget = 1700
ABROAD Budget = 3400 * this is VERY location specific, see the section on Abroad budget

The budget breaks down something like this (these are actual numbers from one of our months in the US)

gas	391.74
groceries	557.96
camping	59.07
misc	154.22
health insurance	$237.68
van insurance	$60.00
phone	$81.78
mailbox	$6.00
laundry	28.5

I have listed out the main expenses so that you can see if you think those numbers agree with what you would actually spend on those items. for example you might not spend any money on having a cellphone, health insurance etc.

I would say the following about our traveling budget. We are certainly not dirtbaging our way around the world. We pay for things that have value to us and usually don't pick the cheapest accomodations, often near it, but we usually opt for a bit more comfort than the least expensive.

We pay for camping when we need to (we almost never try to camp for free if it is discouraged/banned in a climbing area, we just pay the fee) for example we payed for 30 days in squamish to stay at the chief campsite instead of camping on the forest service road which is recommended against being either outright illegal or just against the rules. Other people did it and got away with it, we just didn't want to do it. That being said we camped a ton in the western usa for free in forest service areas, such as at TenSleep, Joe's valley, Vedauwoo etc.

Car Insurance: We made sure to have full coverage on our van, plus had the contents of it insured so that if we lost the whole van all the contents would be covered (had to buy an extra RV package from progressive for this) we felt it was worth it considering how many climbers have returned to their vehicles to find all their expensive stuff gone.

Health Insurance: We have only catastrophic insurance, even the 200 a month only gets us a 10,000 deductible meaning we are liable for the first 10k of any accident. It would certainly ruin the trip, though at least we wouldn't be in debt for the rest of our lives. That being said if we need to spend that much on a hospital bill the trip is probably over for health reasons anyway.

Food: We aren't eating canned food, and we really watch what we buy. we cook our own food and almost never eat out. often dinner is Pasta,Couscous,PorkFried Rice,Stirfry,Hamburgers, mac and cheese. For drinks we often buy a cheap bottle of scotch which can last us a month. when it's hot we sometimes buy a case of pbr or tecate

Phone: We have a cellphone that we prepay with verizon, which allows us to turn it off while going abroad. we got unlimited 3G for only $30 a month and we tether it to the laptop for doing blog posts, uploading photos etc. It would be pretty easy to get by with no phone at all, but we like the ability to stay in touch with friends/family easily.

Laundry: We don't handwash our clothes unless we are abroad, in the usa we go to a laundrymat and make a rest day of it.

Mailbox: we have a post office box with UPS store and since they don't put that pesky PO on the address it has become our defacto mailing address, even car registration goes to that address. They bundle up all our mail and forward it to where we tell them to whenever we tell them to. Pretty good deal.

Gas: Our van gets about 20mpg and we have been paying about 3.85 per gallon in the US. We try to limit our driving by getting groceries for at least 4-5 days and avoiding doing too much sightseeing unless it's on the way somewhere. That being said we have done a good but of driving and have covered a huge amount of the western usa,canada and have made it all the way to ohio (see our trip map for that detail). For the month we stayed in squamish and drove very little we only spent about $150 on gas.

Abroad Budget: We spent a ton more in europe than expected for the three months we were there. Basically it was double our USA budget. We got a leased car for about 1000 a month and spent more on every single budget item than we expected. The upside was we figured everywhere else would be cheaper than this so this is our "worst case scenario" budget for whenever we got abroad, meaning: if we can't afford to spend this amount per month we better not go. Luckily we are averaging about 60% of that abroad amount so far and hope (very much hope) that we can stick to that for SE Asia,Africa,New Zealand,Australia) we'll see... fingers crossed...

Plane Tickets: We used airmiles credit cards for the 5 years leading up to our trip and had about 300,000 airmiles for the trip. We used 130,000 of those for two tickets to europe (paris) and the remaining 170,000 to buy 2 round-trip tickets to Thailand. For our thailand-africa-australia-newzealand-thailand we spent 2,200 each on one-way tickets (not bad considering some friends spent 1300 each just for roundtrip tickets to thailand). We also have some delta airmiles and think we should have enough to maybe do south america next year (hopefully)

The Return to Civilization: As of Dec 2012 we will have been on the road for 18 out of 24 planned months. At that point we will begin looking for jobs, but will only take something that is extremely cool, as we get closer to month 24 we will be less picky, but won't be getting desperate until closer to 30 months (we will probably take anything we can get well before this).

Jobs: Cassie was a biologist and I was a computer programmer when we left our jobs. We definitely will be looking in those fields again when we return and hope the job market will be in good shape.