I’ll just refresh your memories on where we went and what we did in our first travel year. Remember, we’re a family of four, our children are 7 and 9 and they eat more than me!
We’ve now been travelling the world for 2.5 years, these costs are just for year 1.
We left our home in Port Douglas Australia and took a budget flight to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
We spent around 6 weeks in KL and on Penang before flying to Bangkok ( my husband, Chef, wasn’t with us during this time, so things were a little cheaper).
When Chef joined us we took the train to Kanchanaburi before taking a mini bus back to BKK and catching the train to Laos.
We spent 6 weeks in Laos, from there we took the train back to Bangkok for a few days and the bus down to the south of Thailand.
We took the ferry to Ko Samui and from there to Ko Phangan.
Returning to the mainland 7 weeks later, we flew into Kuala Lumpur and took buses down to Malacca and Johor Baru for Legoland Malaysia.
We returned to KL and flew to London via Sri Lanka. Our flight allowed us a 1 month stop over in Sri Lanka.
By now it was November, we spent Christmas in the UK before taking a cruise trip to New York.
We took a road trip around the US and briefly into Canada, ending up in Florida.
We flew from Florida to El Salvador and took the bus into Guatemala.
7 weeks of Guatemala later we flew back to Florida, again via El Salvador.
A few more days in Florida and then another cruise ship to Barcelona via Madeira.
One week in Spain and then we flew to London, which is where we are now.
No, not really, not since leaving Asia, we just tried to spend as little as possible. We estimated that S. E. Asia would cost us around $40 to $50/day and that was achievable. We never planned on coming to the Western Hemisphere, so it’s been a bonus, a far more costly one.
We started out trying to travel as cheaply as possible but we became extremely lax with the purse strings as time went on. What the heck, it was fun!
Th cost of travelling the world evens out over time, some days, in London for example, are very expensive, we balanced those days out by travelling much longer and slower in lower-cost countries.
We stayed with friends on Penang and for some of the time in the UK.
We had a couple of free hotel stays through collecting reward points.
We had free use of a family car in the UK.
We had 2 discounted hotel stays in Malaysia, all other hotels have been paid at normal rates, no blogger perks at all.
We’ve had a lot of free admissions to theme parks and other attractions.
I’m not including the mortgage that we are still paying in Australia, our tenants are covering that cost.
I’m also not factoring lost earnings into our around the world trip cost. To us that is irrelevant.
A more detailed break-down of our spending is in our One Year of Travel Cost Breakdown post, we give more information there on what travel around the world cost. But you can get the final figure here first!
All money we earned through the blog ( and spent) is included in this figure.
Admittedly, we are slightly short of 1 year still and my husband is now working, so these last weeks are more than paying for themselves, the bank balance has stopped going down.
But we think it works out at $98 AU / day, that’s $92 US per day.
That’s roughly what it cost us to live in Australia per day during our 1 year saving period, no frills, including mortgage. Our mortgage on our very large house is only $35/day, so don’t take that as an example of typical living costs in Australia.
So same same, but so much more!
To see our travel highlights, click here, for all of our disasters, and there were many, click here, to see how the kids education happened ( our driving force) click here.
You can see the hotels we used in our cheap family accommodation section.
I’m really pleased with that.
What do you think?
If you enjoy posts on the different costs of living around the world, try this one from our good friends the Wagoners, comparing the cost of living in Spain for a year, with living their old lives in the United States
