Budgeting for Our Year Long Trip

2 - Budget

Now you have listed of all the places you’d like to go. It’s time for a reality check.  Unfortunately, you probably don’t have the money to see everything that’s on your list. An unfortunate truth to be sure. You’ve made the commitment to plan an entire year of your life, you’ve accepted you’ll be living out of an RV the size of a small room in a house with your family and yet you’re restricted by something as trivial as money.

Create a Budget
We cannot stress enough how important this is. Start with a sheet of paper but soon enough you will wind up using a spreadsheet of some sort.

We started with two numbers; the first is the amount of money we would ‘like’ to spend on our trip, the second number is the most amount of money we could possibly afford to spend. Be honest with your numbers, otherwise all of your planning becomes a colossal waste.

Our two numbers were $50,000 for the amount of money we would like to spend and $75,000 for the most amount of money we could possibly afford.

At $50,000, we had $4,166.66 per month. We started out with this as a template:

We are also using the website www.budgetyourtrip.com to find out average travel costs per country we plan to visit.  This will help us ensure that we are spending our money in the most effective way possible.

While we use the above template to budget our trip, we have to take into consideration that there are many one-time costs that we have to include in our budgeting.  These are things that we have researched very well and have decided that we want and need both for the RV and personally to make our trip much more comfortable and enjoyable.  That being said we don’t know the exact costs of some them so we have guessed for now and will include proper costs once known.

Cutting Down the List
Armed with an idea of how much money we want to spend and an estimate of how much it will cost to see all of the many places on our Destination list (keep in mind that this list will most likely change over time) it’s time to make some tough decisions. We have tried our hardest to make our estimate and our budget match up and in fact, for this first draft, it does – YEA US!!!

Since we are going with our kids, we need to keep in mind that we will have to go to places that will appeal to all of us.  Not every single place, but they need to enjoy themselves as well.  We found a great website (www.travelforkids.com) that we are using to find places that kids will have fun going to as well (more on that in the next section).  We have marked our list with “MUST SEE” destinations.  We have then taken it one step further and marked the remaining destinations from 1 – 5 based on the following criteria:

-          Is it kid friendly?
-          Will we all learn something from it?

We thought it would be important at first to think about how long we would like to visit each destination.  But then we started thinking would happen if we absolutely loved The Loire Valley and decided to stay for 3 weeks instead of 5 days?  Or hated Paris (perish the thought) and left after 3 days when we had intended to stay for 10 days?  That would throw off the rest of our ‘itinerary’.  We threw that idea out the window and decided to budget instead based on country.

 
This is a trip of a lifetime, don’t cut places you’ve always wanted to see just because of the cost!  You may never get the chance to do it again – so do it right the first time!

Next up let’s discover the gajillion places available on the web for you to research your trip and all of your possible destinations. FUN!