We took a trip around the world for a grand total of 465 days in 2013-2014, visiting 40+ countries on five continents.
We were neither luxury travelers nor budget backpackers on this trip, and used points to pay for a number of our long-haul flights.
The total cost of this trip? $75,000 – or $80 per person, per day for the duration of the trip.
In this one we dive down into the numbers to show just where all that money went per country and per major spending category.
The issues that go along with spending upwards of $75,000 on a vacation is not something most travelers ever have to consider. But for our 18 month trip around the world, we were faced with some new challenges for this same reason.
While the argument for how much a journey like this should cost is best served for other articles, one of the biggest struggles long-term travelers have to face are the bank fees that are associated with such a large amount of spending.
After many years of paying comically high fees without any other recourse, banks are finally starting to understand the fact that people do not want to pay foreign transaction fees to access their money. We thought we found a great policy with our bank, PNC, but the honeymoon was soon over just 6 months into our journey as the terms were recently changed back to the archaic fee structure we were trying to get away from.
When it comes to luggage disasters, we are no stranger to them.
One month into our year-and-a-half long trip I discovered that my bag had a rather sizable hole where the seams had come undone in the side. We then came up with a rather robust backpack repair that lasted for the rest of the trip.
Shortly thereafter, we found out that my five-year-old backpack was falling apart even more– this time with more holes and a handle which refused to go down.
We needed to decide whether to buy a new bag on the road, order a new piece of luggage online and get it delivered to us by mail, or try a luggage handle repair just to endure.
We decided to try one more fix, and wanted to share our technique for what we did to help if you wind up in a similar situation to us on your next trip abroad.
Hi There Crowdfunding Traveler!You probably got this post emailed to you by either myself or another traveler in response to your request for us to crowdfund your next trip. For everyone else, this one is not for you.
I can understand that you don’t have enough money to travel on and need a bit of help; most of us don’t reach our ultimate goal either (I know we didn’t). We make our plans, save up what we can, and hope that our over-spending is minimal such that we can do it all on the funds we managed to save.
After all, financing a RTW trip can be a tricky thing. You wouldn’t have considered crowdfunding travel if you weren’t in the same boat either. It is a popular thing to do these days and we get several emails a month from people asking us to donate, share, and write about their campaigns on our sites.