Money Update - Through 2 Weeks
by Jason -- November 10, 2009
I plan on posting a more extensive update on how we will be managing our money during the year-long trip, but for now I’d like to give an update on how the money situation went the first couple of weeks.
For the trip, Sharon and I saved $50,000. Divided by 365, this gives us $137 per day. However there were some up-front costs that reduces this daily amount. Here’s the breakdown of all of our pre-trip expenses:
With all of the pre-trip costs accounted for, that leaves us targeting roughly $130 per day. Here’s how the first couple of weeks broke down:
And how things look overall:
Considering that Vancouver and Hong Kong are cities on the more expensive side of our planned trip, I’m very happy with how well we’re doing. In Hong Kong, we even had a $90 doctor’s visit for Sharon (not a big deal, just a lingering staph infection she wanted to have checked out – all cleared up now).
Now that we’re in mainland China, we’ve had days where we’ve only spent a combined $50 or less. $2.50 meals and $25 per night hostels sure are nice! This should leave our budget in even better shape for the next update.
If you’re interested, link to download my spreadsheet with all of the details.
Be awesome and help us share:
You didn’t budget for a return ticket? Or does the 700$ include round trip?
I really hope that the puppies, kittens, and other baby animals in your pictures were for sale as pets and not dinner:(
Burns — Good call. It’s $700 per person round-trip roughly..so you’re right, I need to double that.
Jennie — I said the same thing! But I heard people refer to the market as the “Pet Market”…so I’m going with those were all to be bought for pets
hi, jason! how about cost for flight when you go all those countries?
Amazingly impressive as always ! Thanks for sharing.
Hi Yeong,
Good point on the flights between countries. We’ll just have to work those into the $130 per day budget or so. When we’re going under the budget while we’re in China, that should make budget room for the flights. Right now though, I think we’re only planning on one or two flights.
Jason
Haha..thanks Michelle! I thought my old Finance colleagues would appreciate this stuff!
Thanks for reading,
Jason
Just thought of something. Is the plan to spend the 50K down to zero and then work and save again?
Ideally, no. We hope to start making money while we travel. But as a worst case scenario, yeah, we would go back to working and saving again. Would we go back to cubes? Hopefully not