What We Spent Travelling the World for 12-Months!
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We travelled the world for a full year. That’s right, 12 whole months travelling the globe. We visited 4 continents, 22 countries and 66+ cities and we spent…
Banff NP was one of our favourite places we visited across the year!
Travel Resources
Budget Template: Keep track of all your travel expenses with ease, with our new BUDGET TEMPLATE!
Flights: We love using Skyscanner to search for the best flight deals!
Accommodation: Did you know you can book hotels through Klook! And as a bonus, you can use our code “GOFORLAUNCHKLOOK” to get a discount!
Transport: Our go-to for booking transport in Asia is 12Go, while our Europe go-to was Omio! Both have a wide range of transport options you can book, from flights, to trains and buses, and offer really competitive prices!
Activities: We use Get Your Guide and Klook (use code “GOFORLAUNCHKLOOK” when booking with Klook for a sweet discount!) to book all our activities! They each have a wide range of activities and tours, competitive pricing, and a lot of reviews, providing you with some comfort before you book!
Car Hire: While you’re checking out flights on Skyscanner, did you know you can also search for the best car hire deals!
Disney & Universal Deals: We love booking our theme park tickets through Attraction Tickets. They always have a bunch of promotional deals running that you can take advantage of, and have some amazing longer-stay ticket deals which provide great value.
Before we let you know EXACTLY how much we spent travelling the world for a full year, let’s go back to the beginning. HI! We’re Rosh & Stace, a couple from Melbourne, Australia who love all things travel and theme parks. In June 2023, we set off on the adventure of a lifetime. We gave up our rental home, left our jobs and sold our car, to travel the world, with the aim of lasting for 12 full months. When we left for our year of travel, we had a specific budget in mind, and we tracked every single cent we spent during the 12 months against that budget.
Before we reveal our target budget, and what we actually ended up spending, lets break it down by our approach, some key tips and the key cost categories!
We managed to get to 4 different Disney parks!
HOW WE TRACKED OUR BUDGET
Before we run through the numbers, let’s run through how we tracked all our costs. We developed a spreadsheet where we inputted every cent we spent, every single day. While there are probably easier ways to do this or apps you can use, this is how we went about it and it worked pretty well.
We categorised each expense by cost-type, city and country. We also inputted each cost in the currency that we paid in. For example, if we paid with our credit card, then we inputted in AUD because we could see the converted amount in our statement and knew exactly how much had come out. Whereas if we paid in cash, we put it in the spreadsheet in the local currency and had automatic conversions to AUD. On that note, every number we quote in this article will be in AUD, unless otherwise stated!
HOW WE CAME UP WITH OUR BUDGET
We used a few different resources to come up with our budget number, which we definitely would recommend doing. What works for one couple may not work for you, and there are so many factors that come into play that can have an impact on what is a realistic travel budget for you.
Rosh looking like a tomato after hiking in the heat in Sri Lanka!
The main source we used, and our starting point, was watching budget videos on YouTube. Unfortunately for us, when we started planning our year it was a bit of a tricky time as it wasn’t that long after the Covid pandemic, so there were not a lot of recent budget videos. While there were a lot pre-covid, obviously post-covid is a different, more expensive world, so we knew we had to take those numbers with a grain of salt. Additionally, any during covid-videos were also not going to be super accurate for our purposes because there were a lot of additional costs associated with travelling during a pandemic, such as covid testing costs.
We ended up using a mash up of pre-covid budgets, during covid-budgets and very few post-covid budgets, to give us an idea on what we might need. On top of this, we also used a website called budgetyourtrip.com which we found helpful as well to start formulating numbers more specific to where we wanted to travel. This website allows you to plug in your destination, pick budget, mid-tier or luxury travel, and it will tell you the average spend per day, which we believe includes accommodation, food and transport. Again, we just used these numbers as a bit of a guide, given there are a lot of additional costs not taken into consideration, such as flights and activities. PLUS, we only had a rough itinerary planned out when we were budgeting, so a lot could change.
Some of the key factors that can impact on your budget include:
Destinations - Spending the bulk of your travels in cheaper destinations (e.g. South East Asia) is going to save you a lot in the long run.
10 tips for travelling EUROPE on a budget!
Duration - Spending longer in each destination, rather than moving around a lot, will also save you a bunch of money as you won’t be spending as much on transport costs.
Travel Style - For most people, taking the leap of faith and travelling for 12-months will mean making some compromises on your usual travel style. If you’re willing to make compromises across the board in terms of food, accommodation and transport, you’ll be able to make your money go further.
Activities - For some people, activities are the crucial part of your travels, whereas for others, things like food or accommodation may be the most important. The types of activities you decide to do will obviously impact your budget in a big way, e.g. opting to trek Mt Kilimanjaro is going to set you back a lot more than some general sightseeing activities. However, we are big believers in prioritising the activities that mean the most to you, and making compromises elsewhere. (HOT TIP: If you book your activities through Klook and use our code GOFORLAUNCHKLOOK you’ll get some sweet discounts! )
Based on all of the above, we eventually came up with our budget number, which was $60,000 AUD. We’ll reveal exactly how we went against that budget later in the article!
DISCLOSURES
And…. one final note. There are a few costs that we HAVEN’T included in our budget throughout the year. The main one is the cost of our Disney Cruise in Australia (watch our video of this EPIC experience here!). The reason for this is that we booked and paid for this cruise before deciding to commence this year of travel, so while it fell within the year, it was a pre-planned event.
Check out our ULTIMATE guide to Disney Cruises in Australia!
There are other more minor costs throughout the year that haven’t been included. We’ve had friends shout us dinner, wonderful subscribers send us money, and have received gifted experiences and money from family for Christmas and birthdays. For anything we’ve spent this money on, we haven’t included it in the budget. For example, we received Christmas money which went towards seeing a Broadway show in New York. Given we didn’t spend the money, we didn’t include it in our budget. Generally anything we spent gifted money on, we wouldn’t have done if not for that money, so they were considered bonus extras, and our budget is still a good representation of the amount of money you need to travel for a year!
COST CATEGORIES
We used 9 key categories to track our costs throughout the year:
Accommodation
Transport
Flights
Meals
Activities
Groceries
Miscellaneous
Visas
Personal & Gear
Now, let’s do a deeper dive into these categories!
By far our biggest expense throughout the year was accommodation. We spent a total of $21,156.78 on accommodation across the 12 months, even though we managed to have roughly 90 days of free accommodation between staying with family, and pet sitting.
Our $10 USD a night bungalow in Pai, Thailand was by far our cheapest accommodation through the year!
1) ACCOMMODATION TYPE
Accommodation costs definitely varied a lot depending on where in the world we were. We really struggled in finding affordable accommodation in Europe. Things like dorm rooms, which most people will think are the most affordable, are not actually that affordable when you’re booking for two people, as you’re paying for two beds. We generally found it to be more affordable to book a private room in a hostel, than to stay in a dorm room. In the end in Europe, the best option we found for saving money, not just on accommodation, but also in some other categories, was to stay in AirBnbs. Not only were these generally pretty affordable, or at least comparable to a private room in a hostel, they gave us the ability to also cook our own food, which saved us a lot of money. They also often had a washing machine as well which also meant we saved some money there too.
Outside of AirBnbs, we used booking.com a lot. They have a great reward program where you get additional benefits as you move up tiers. After a few months of travel we were pretty quickly sitting in the top tier, which gave us a lot of free breakfasts and discounts on accommodation which came in handy. While we’d definitely recommend searching various platforms to find the best deals, it can also be beneficial to stay loyal to one or two to maximise your benefits and savings in the long run.
One of the harder cities in the world to find budget-friendly accommodation in!
2) ACCOMMODATION LOCATION
Location is also a big factor when it comes to accommodation, particularly in Europe and North America. You’ll obviously find cheaper accommodation staying outside of the city centre - how far out will depend on the city. We did this pretty often and so long as you’re near public transport, it really won’t inconvenience you that much. Most cities in Europe have great public transport systems, so it’s easy to get around, and you can save some cash. One caveat to this is ensuring you look up the type and cost of transport before locking in the accommodation, as you want to ensure you don’t end up spending all your accommodation savings on transport!
3) ACCOMMODATION… FOR FREE?
We won’t lie… we lucked out having family living in Canmore, Canada!
We were also able to make some significant savings on accommodation costs by staying with family where possible. We were very fortunate enough to have family overseas that we were able to stay with, plus we had some other family members travel with us and offset some of our costs, which helped as well. Obviously, this isn’t an option for everyone, so another great option to save some money on accommodation is by using a service called Trusted Housesitters (or similar). We used this in the US on two occasions, totalling about 3 weeks. While the platform has a subscription fee, once you lock in a pet sit, you won’t have to pay anything to stay in the location, you’ll just have to commit to looking after some cute pets! Given we were able to lock in a few different sits, we found that we still saved significantly on accommodation costs, despite the subscription fee, and it also allowed us to spend some time in places that we might not have otherwise been able to afford to visit, like Cape Cod! If you’re super flexible with your plans, and are wiling to stay in one place for longer periods, you’ll save so much money using a platform like this.
Following accommodation, our next most expensive cost category was surprisingly transport. Now when we say transport, we mean all transport aside from our flights, so this would include trains and buses, and then local day-to-day transport.
Rosh hanging out of a train from Colombo to Kandy in Sri Lanka!
We’re probably a little surprised we spent this much on transport, but in saying that, we moved around A LOT, particularly in Europe where we moved cities every 3-4 days, and while there are “cheap” buses and trains, they’re definitely not as cheap as they used to be. We also used a lot of different types of transport throughout the year, depending on where we were in the world. In Europe, this consisted of a lot of trains and buses, in the USA, we hired a few cars and then in Asia we had a mix of trains, buses, private vans and even a BOAT!
Check out our article explaining how to catch the Laos slow boat from Thailand to Laos!
I’d say one of our biggest mistakes we made was booking a bunch of accommodation before looking at transport options. We’d definitely recommend looking at transport before looking at accommodation, because it will allow you to be flexible with dates and travel on the days with the cheapest fares, but it will also ensure you know the options you have. We definitely could’ve saved a bit of money in Europe if we were more flexible and could’ve changed up our itinerary a little bit to avoid flying.
The local transport will depend on where you are, but generally public transport is pretty affordable across the board, and then in South East Asia Grab is also a super cheap option and is a little easier than navigating public transport in some instances (Grab is very similar to Uber!).
Taking the slow boat from Thailand to Laos was certainly a transport experience!
Unsurprisingly, following on from transport as the next most expensive is flights. Considering we travelled to 4 different continents, and took 31 flights, this is a pretty good number for two people.
While travelling around the one continent, we tried to avoid flying as much as possible, which was definitely easiest in Europe and South East Asia, however, in the USA and Canada we had a bit of a harder time avoiding flights.
Before we even left, we had made some great cost savings by using Frequent Flyer points (Qantas reward program) to book all our main flights using the One World Classic Reward flight reward program. We have a whole video on this, but in short, using credit card points for flights and accommodation is one of the key ways to save cash when doing something like this, and it’s important to be savvy and on top of this well before you leave for your trip so you can start accumulating the points early! Without going into too much detail, we used credit card points to pay for 18 of the 31 flights we took in the year, including big flights such as Singapore to London, London to Montreal and travelling from New York to Bangkok. We also used points for our brief stop home in November, snagging return flights to LA! Given you only have to pay the flight taxes, this was a HUGE cost saving.
Not exactly an avoidable cost this one, however, we think we did pretty well! We split our meals/groceries into two separate categories, however, there was obviously a bit of overlap, such as when we bought ingredients which then turned into a meal. Therefore, the meals category is more focused on when we paid for prepared food out, as opposed to shopping at a supermarket.
A lot of our food budget was spent on MANY, MANY egg coffees in Hanoi, Vietnam!
In terms of food, it really depended on the location. In Europe and the USA, eating out was very expensive, so we tried to save this for special occasions and experiences. Pretty quickly into our time in Europe we sat down and wrote down the cities where we thought eating out was important to us (e.g. cuisine, cultural reasons etc.), and focused on cooking in the others. Let’s just say, Italy was the MAIN priority!
We found the best way to save on food was to stay somewhere with a kitchen where we could cook easy, budget-friendly meals, that would feed us for multiple days. For example, something like a chicken fried rice was definitely a go-to meal for us throughout the year, as it was filling, packed in some protein and plenty of vegetables, and was very easy to make a big batch of that would last multiple meals.
Check out the COOLEST Cafes in Hanoi!
In contrast, in South East Asia, it was a lot more affordable to eat out rather than cook, so we mostly did that.
The key way you’ll churn money with meals is by buying food that is a one meal item, for example, going to the supermarket and buying a microwave meal. In contrast, you could spend the same amount of money on ingredients and get two meals each out of it. Obviously staying with a kitchen isn’t always possible or ideal but we definitely prioritised this where we could, and even switched a lot of our refundable accommodation to Airbnbs after our first few weeks travelling.
In saying all that, food can be an important part of experiencing a city or country and their culture, so definitely sit down and have a look at the places where you most want to enjoy the local food and prioritise those, and find ways to cut costs on other things.
An activity that includes meals was always a bonus!
We had to try some poffertjes while in Amsterdam!
We spent $6,337.44 on activities throughout the 12 months, which was around what we expected to spend. We set out on our year wanting to prioritise spending money on activities and experiences, so we were happy to spend a bit more on. We didn’t want to end up going home and wish we did something that we didn’t, so we generally did most of the activities we wanted to do. There were definitely a few things we opted out of that we may have done if we were on a regular holiday but all in all we ticked off all the big things we wanted to do!
Having a good idea of what some of the more expensive activities will be at the outset is always good, because you know straight up how much money you need to save in other ways, and you can work towards that.
Our epic sunrise jeep tour in Mui Ne, Vietnam!
We couldn’t visit Orlando and NOT go to Walt Disney World!
We booked a lot of our activities with Klook (TIP: use our code GOFORLAUNCHKLOOK to get some sweet discounts!) and they have great deals all across the globe. There are also lots of other companies you can book activities through, or look to book local, but if you’re like us and like to plan ahead, Klook is great for that.
This of course included many trips to 7/11 in Japan!
As mentioned above, this category covers anything we brought from a supermarket! This mostly consisted of food, but also other general items that you’d expect to pick up throughout the year (e.g. toiletries). Considering how we much spend on groceries each week since arriving home in Australia, this number is looking pretty good!
There aren’t a lot of tips and tricks to groceries, we just found that the prices varied based on where you were in the world, and you just need to be flexible to tailor your ingredients to what is readily available. For example, if you’re looking to cook pasta in Vietnam, it’s going to cost you a little more than trying to do the same in Europe or North America.
As the name suggests, this is pretty much anything that didn’t fit into any of the above categories! Generally, for us, the main expenses that fell into this category were things like laundry, e-Sims, ATM fees etc.
Any savings you make in this category will be a lot less than the other, bigger categories, however, every dollar counts! For us, this included things like bringing laundry sheets with us, so we didn’t have to constantly buy (and carry) laundry powder, or most of the time, only one of us having an e-Sim.
If you want to go super extreme, you can even try and get by without any form of sim card! We actually went our whole first month in Europe with neither of us having a SIM! With Wi-Fi as accessible as it is nowadays, it’s definitely doable, particularly if you’re willing to lurk outside a few McDonalds and Starbucks throughout your trip!
Car hire is expensive, but you have to squeeze in at least one road trip!
And if you’re a Disney fan like us, at least one (or more) Disney visits!
There’s not a lot you can do regarding ATM fees - our card didn’t charge us any fees, but it will always depend on the ATM itself as to whether they charge fees on their end and sometimes it’s just unavoidable. A key tip though when taking cash out, is to not accept the ATM conversion rate, so when it prompts you to convert, click no, and allow your card to convert on its end. The rate your card will use is almost always better than the ATM rate, and you can save a bunch of cash this way. HOT TIP: Similar thinking applies when paying with your card!
Fortunately, this wasn’t a huge expense for us. We tended to avoid travelling anywhere that required a Visa, although we acknowledge that we are very lucky to not need a Visa for most countries.
Vietnam was one of the few countries we needed a Visa for!
Depending on where you want to travel is can be an unavoidable expense so make sure you factor it into your budget! Aside from the cost, make sure you apply early enough to avoid having to lose money on rescheduled flights (definitely, absolutely not talking from experience…..)!
These white t-shirts definitely needed replacing after a few months of travel!
This was a very small expense for us, although we’ll admit that anything we pre-bought for the year, we didn’t include, like our luggage. All in all, those costs were probably only around $1K, so it doesn’t significantly change our budget. Any costs while travelling mostly related to replacing clothes and some small souvenirs.
Now, before we round out the last category, you may be wondering where our insurance category is. Another hot tip is to apply for a credit card that has travel insurance included! This was a huge saving for us throughout the year!
—> Check out our TOP 5 travel essentials HERE!
TOTAL BUDGET
So… unless you’ve been meticulously tracking the costs throughout this article, you’re probably still wondering how much we actually spent to travel the world for 12 months!
After 12 months of travelling the world, including visiting 3 different continents (4 including home) and 21 countries (22 including home), we spent….
FUN BUDGET FACTS
Now for some fun facts on the different places we visited!
MOST EXPENSIVE COUNTRY: The Netherlands (Check out our snapchat guide to Amsterdam!)
MOST EXPENSIVE CITY: Los Angeles (We can’t resist a theme park)
LEAST EXPENSIVE COUNTRY: Laos
LEAST EXPENSIVE CITY: Canmore (Thanks to Rosh’s Aunt and Uncle hosting us!)
NUMBER OF COUNTRIES WE WERE OVER BUDGET IN: 10
NUMBER OF COUNTRIES WE WERE UNDER BUDGET IN: 12
SO… HOW DID WE DO IT?
While good spending practices and being strict with your money are important, the key to travelling long-term like this and sticking to such a strict budget is utilising all your resources possible to save on money. The biggest cost categories when you travel are always flights and accommodation, so saving money in these categories is key to success.
TOP TIPS
1) Plan early
Something like this isn’t something you can decide to do on a whim. You need to be proactive in planning, not only in saving money, but in finding other ways to cut costs, like signing up for points-earning credit cards early and accumulating points.
2) Prioritise what’s important to you
For some people, it’s staying in nicer accommodation, other people it’s eating out, and others it’s in the activities. I’d say for us it was definitely the activities, so we prioritised spending more on activities we really wanted to do, like theme parks, and cut costs in other ways to balance it back out. At the end of the day it’s your year, you want to be able to do the things you want to do and not go home and wish you did more. On that note as well, don’t feel pressured into doing tourist activities that are recommended, if you know they’re not of particular interest to you. We definitely spent a lot of money in the beginning of our year doing activities because we felt like we “had” to, when we’d have preferred to put that money into something else.
3) Spend what you need to spend
Travelling for a year can be really hard. You’re away from home, living out of a suitcase, in tiny hotel rooms, and you’re not always eating as well as you would at home. If you feel like you need a fancier room for a night, just do it. If you feel like you need a proper meal, do it. You’ll find ways to make up that cost along the way, and it’ll help you sustain yourself in the long run.
Euro summer was really awesome
4) Keep perspective of the full year
We were super over budget for more than half of the year and could have panicked, or stopped doing things we wanted to do, but we knew we were spending the next 4-5 months in South East Asia, which would be significantly less expensive, so we kept perspective on that and trusted that we would be able to cut costs significantly there.
5) Plan a smart and strategic itinerary, while leaving it open and flexible
Ultimately, it’s your year and you should visit the countries and have the experiences you want to, but depending on where you go, your budget expectations should shift as well. The more places you visit, the higher your costs will be naturally. We made some early decisions on our itinerary which we are so glad we made. First of these was opting to visit the least expensive countries towards the end of the trip. This may seem weird and not make a lot of sense, but the reason we did this was because we anticipated that if we did these countries first, we’d end up spending more than we needed to, because it was still under budget. By doing it the reverse way, we knew we were very over budget heading into these countries, so we had to go for the cheapest options, bringing our cost per day way down. The second part of this point is leaving it open and flexible. While we think it’s important to have a rough idea of your itinerary, being a bit more open and flexible can help you save some money as well. For example, when I fell sick in Europe, it ended up costing us over $1000 to cancel non-refundable transport, and book new transport and accommodation. While you can’t anticipate getting sick, and we wouldn’t suggest leaving booking everything to the week of, it can help save you some unnecessary costs in the long-run!
