As anyone who’s planning an around the world trip knows, one of the most common questions that needs to be addressed during the planning stages has to do with your RTW trip’s budget. It’s easy for people who are unfamiliar with long-term travel to assume that such trips require enormous trust funds or winning lotto tickets, but a little bit of simple research confirms that traveling in certain countries will actually be cheaper than living at home.
Sure, you can spend a fortune on a RTW trip – and you can also travel around the world on $40 a day (or sometimes less).
RTW travel on a serious budget involves more than finding cheap tickets to India and just hoping for the best once you get started. Being budget-conscious means you’ve got to dust off the calculator (or, let’s face it, use the one on your phone) to work out some figures. How long do you plan to travel? What places do you want to visit? How much will you need on average in each of the countries you spend time in? You may not like the figures you find, but you’ll need to be realistic about them – and then start determining how long it will take you to save up enough money to get going.
Making the most of your travel budget is something you can plan for a little bit before you leave home, but it’s also a task that continues when you’re on the road. Every day you’ll be presented with choices, and your decisions could impact your trip. It could be something as simple as taking a more deluxe hiking tour in Peru rather than taking the more rustic tour, or it could be something more dire – like getting injured on said hiking tour and needing medical attention that ends up being expensive because you didn’t think you’d need backpacker insurance.
With a bit of careful money management and some good guidance, you can make your travel budget stretch much further than you probably could with the same amount of money at home.
What are your favorite budget-stretching tips?