We are travelling permanently with only carry-on luggage, having sold the rest of our belongings. I have a 30 litre backpack and Simon has a 40 litre backpack and a small travel guitar. It’s been surprisingly easy to live with such small bags and to fit everything we need into them, including two laptops and an SLR camera. Life is actually much simpler when you own less.
Many first time travellers wonder whether they should bring a laptop or not. Some people advise against it because of the security risk, extra weight to carry, and the danger of shutting yourself off from local experiences by spending all your time on Facebook. We have travelled with and without a laptop and would say that if you are a photographer, writer, blogger or work from the road then it is definitely worth taking at least a small netbook.
Managing your money when you are travelling is essential if you want to maximise your time on the road and avoid getting stuck with your financial pants down. Here are our tips for managing your finances on the road. 1) Create a realistic budget – See our post on How to Budget for Long Term Travel. Read the rest of this entry »
We are often asked how much it costs to travel for a year. Obviously this isn’t an easy question to answer – it depends on where you go, what you do and what level of comfort you would like. To answer this question for yourself you need to come up with a travel budget. This is how we budgeted for our year long round the world (RTW) trip.
Have a rough idea of which countries you’d like to visit and how long for. You can (and very probably will) adjust this later, depending on what you can afford and how your plans change.
These include flights (RTW or pay as you go), travel insurance, visas, vaccinations and gear (clothes, backpack, camera etc).
For this you need to know where you want to go, how long for and how much an average daily budget is for that country. For example we budgeted £12 each per day for India for 3 months which totals £1080 per person. It helps when countries within a region have similar budgets, so you can budget say £12 a day for 5 months on the Indian Subcontinent and £15 a day for 3 months in Southeast Asia. This gives you greater flexibility to change your plans without messing up your budget.
We’ve saved hard. We’ve done our research. Our budget’s tight and we’re determined not to go over our daily limit. We know what things should cost and we’ve memorised our key phrases. We’re willing to barter to get the right price. We’re pumped. We’re psyched. We’re ready.
With exactly no hours sleep, we set off at 2:30 in the morning on the 1½ hour drive to the airport. The adrenaline’s flowing, we’re alert and excited. It’s going to be a great trip.
We get on the three hour flight to Portugal. Maybe we should sleep for a couple of hours? Maybe we should talk about all the cool stuff we can do when we get there. Yeah! Let’s do THAT!
We are Simon Fairbairn & Erin McNeaney a couple who sold everything and left the UK in March 2010 to travel the world forever. We write about our travels and our journey to become digital nomads. Read more...