Year around the world - Kickoff
In my last post, I teased our “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.” We want to take a year off and travel around the world with our family.
First, a little background. Travelling around the world has been a dream of Tory’s for long before I met her. I was never particularly interested in travel until our honeymoon trip in 2016. We went to Italy, and spent time in Venice, Florence, Verona, and the Dolomites. It was my first time out of the country, and I was floored. Like any big trip it had it’s ups and downs, but the ups far outweighed the downs. The tipping point, where I officially caught the travel bug, was our 7th night, where we hiked up to Rifugio Pradidali, our first stop in the Dolomites. We slept in a bunkroom, and broke bread with some climbers from Germany. At sunset we stood on the porch and watched the light show on the cliff walls across the basin. It was perfect, more perfect than I thought it could be. Since then, I’ve been hooked.
Rifugio Pradidali. Can you believe staying here convinced me I wanted to see the world?
The Goal
At this point, our goal is:
Travel the world for a twelve, more-or-less going around the world.
Take our family with us (including at least two children)
Spend a little time on each continent, including Antarctica.
That is about as far as we’ve gotten for the actual travel. Generally, we want to spend time in a handful of countries, while taking short excursions to other countries.
The Timeline
When do we want to take this trip? That has been one of the bigger points of discussion. The way we see it, our schedule is dictated by two factors:
Accumulating savings to afford the trip. I’ll expand on this in “The Cost” below.
We want to travel at a time that our two kids are old enough to remember the trip. We’ve generally decided that 6 is old enough, though under the right circumstances we might go earlier. Our youngest will be born in February, 2021, so that puts our earliest departure date, independent of budget, at 2027.
So 2027 is the goal. Now the hard question - what will it take to get there financially?
The Cost
So how do you budget for a trip when you don’t know when it will happen, don’t know how old your kids will be (or even how many you’ll have!), don’t know where you’re going or how long you’re staying anywhere?
Well, our answer is: take a big ol’guess, and round up.
More specifically:
Make a sample itinerary. Just an educated guess, and try to pick places that are “typical” for the regions you want to go. We picked countries in 6 continents (we’re almost to Anarctica), including United States, Peru, Argentina, Australia, Thailand, China, Uzbekistan, Isreal, Tanzania, Morocco, France, and Hungary. We tried not to overthink this. We’re just looking for an estimate right now. We have a loooong time to pin down the details.
That is 12 countries, and we are travelling for a year, so we assumed one month in each country. We plugged each country into the website budgetyourtrip.com and wrote down the budget for a couple for one month.
Total so far: $39,264
We want go to Antarctica. It seems the easiest way to get there is via a cruise, but man is that expensive. for a family of 4 it might be as much as $80,000. Yikes. No thank you. I read that if you stay in Argentina where the cruises depart from, you may be able to snag a cheap ticket from a cancellating. We’ll go with that for now, and say $15,000 for Antarctica. We have 7 years to figure out how to make that happen.
Total so far: $54,264
Finally, we added something for airfare. We used skyscanner.com to plot out a sample itinerary. The website wouldn’t allow us to put in all of our destinations, so we just picked a few. We also had to make up dates. And of course, we have little idea how much COVID-19 is affecting the skyscanner prices. But again, we’re just looking big picture here. Tickets came out to about $3,600/person - rounded up to a clean $15,000
Total so far: $69,264
And finally, round up. Our savings goal for our trip around the world is:
Budgetyourtrip.com budget for 1 month in Peru.
cost per country
| United States | $4900 |
|---|---|
| Peru | $2800 |
| Argentina | $2163 |
| Australia | $4319 |
| Thailand | $2431 |
| China | $4061 |
| Uzbekistan | $500 |
| Isreal | $2529 |
| Tanzania | $4401 |
| Morocco | $2588 |
| France | $4380 |
| Hungary | $4192 |
$70,000
Phew . . . that is a lot. That is about a 1-year salary at our current 2020 income. I’m . . . well, I guess it’s called a BHAG for a reason.
So what now? At the end of the month, we’ll provide an update on our savings. We intend to continue doing that every month, and share everything we try to do to put more pennies in the piggy bank. I look forward to seeing that big bold number up there get closer and closer.
At the end of every year, we will provide a year-end summary and re-evaluate our goal. As we get closer to 2027 and our plans come into focus, the goal will get more precise, and we’ll share every change we make.
Our hope is that this not only keeps us accountable and excited for our goal, but fuels the persistence and creativity of our readers (that’s YOU) to reach their big, hairy, audacious goals, whatever they might be.
Mark & Tory, writing from Boise, ID
