What Will a Year Travelling the World Actually Cost Us?

Last week we showed you how we planned the route for our year-long trip around the world, but there is one number that we deliberately didn't tell you.

What we think the traveling part of the year is actually going to cost for the 2 of us.

And I will warn you now that it is a really big number when you look at it on its own. Our current planned spending is £72,689.66, and on top of that we've got another £3,000 set aside purely for emergencies, which we really hope we don't need to spend.

Fingers crossed! So in this video, we're going to show you exactly where the money goes and why we've already spent more than £16,000 before we've even left the UK, and what we'll do if the spreadsheet turns out to be completely wrong.

Now, we know some people will think that that amount is a ridiculous amount of money and they could do it for way cheaper, and others will probably think that we've underestimated it, but we want to be open about the real numbers because that is exactly what we're going to do while we travel as well. We're going to share with you the real costs, the things that go over budget, and hopefully the things that come in under budget.

And if you're new here, or if you've only just found us, we're James and Rob.

We are a British couple in our 50s and 60s, and in a month's time we're leaving the UK to spend more than a year traveling around the world.

On this channel, we share practical, honest side of travel— what it really costs, what works, what doesn't, and what we learn along the way.

So if this sounds like your kind of thing, well, welcome aboard, and let us start with the number that everyone is absolutely going to focus on.

The first thing to explain is what that £73,000 actually covers. It is for both of us, not each, and it covers the traveling part of the year from the day we leave the UK until we reach Cape Town.

And it works out at roughly about £6,160 a month or £202 a day for both of us. That's just over £100 each per day.

But that absolutely does not mean we wake up every morning with £202 to spend.

No, some days we might be relatively cheap, we might cook in the apartment, go for a walk, and barely spend anything, yet on another day it might include a long-haul flight, a train journey, or something expensive that we booked months ago.

So the average is really just a way of understanding the scale.

The actual spending will be very uneven, And the most important word here is budget. At the end of this, the number that matters is not what the spreadsheet predicted, it's what we actually spent. Now here is a number that surprised me more than the overall £72,000, and that is that we've already spent over £16,000 before we've even left.

That is more than a fifth of the planned spending gone before the first suitcase leaves the house.

Although to be fair, gone makes it sound like we set fire to it, and a lot of that money has bought things we already know we need.

We've used the money to buy flights to New Zealand, accommodation for Christmas and New Year, basically high ticket numbers like Milford Sound over our Christmas and New Year, Machu Picchu. We're going to Machu Picchu, we have to go to Cusco during Inti Raymi, so we needed to secure those in there.

So it's a fine line between spending the whole budget before we've even left versus booking things that we know we want to do, and if we leave it too close to the time we probably probably won't even be able to book them. So it's really important. So yeah, seeing £16,000 already spent does feel slightly alarming, but I'd rather know that we've already got a seat on the plane, we've got somewhere decent to sleep, and the key things we really want to do are planned rather than leaving everything to the last minute and to chance.

And in some cases, booking earlier also meant getting a better price. So spending early is not necessarily the same as spending more. So let us break down the £73,000 because the biggest category is probably not the one you would expect.

Yeah, our biggest category is our day-to-day living and local transport costs at £26,000.

Then travel between places is at £17,000.

And accommodation is £15,000.

Activities, day trips, tickets are £9,000.

And the official costs, which include things like the boring things like insurance, vaccinations, visas, and some other travel-related costs, are £4,300.

Then we have £900 for medical, toiletries, and prescriptions, and £800 for replacement or clothes and gear.

What surprised me actually is that the flights are not our biggest cost. They're not the biggest part of the budget.

The biggest cost is simply living day to day for almost a year.

So that £26,000 covers the stuff that doesn't look very exciting on a travel video: eating, drinking, groceries, tips, taxis, Ubers, buses, the trains, and all the little bits of local transport that happen every single day.

But it does not include excursions or general shopping. Those sit elsewhere. This is really our everyday living pot.

And obviously the same amount of money doesn't buy the same thing in every country that we're visiting, so what we budget in New Zealand or Japan is going to look much higher than what we need to budget in Laos or Vietnam.

Yeah, so we've done a lot of research on loads of different websites about the general living, um, in each country. So for example, New Zealand came in $4,400, Thailand nearly $3,000, uh, Japan $3,500, Mexico $4,500. So it does fluctuate massively. So we looked at food, drinks, tips, everything and anything to do with living on the ground. You've got low, mid, or high range budgets. We've gone for a mid-range budget to kind of fit in.

Yeah, and, and just as a side here, we used AI a lot to help with It's not just asking AI questions, but actually setting up agents to go and track things for us. So if you're interested to know how we've used AI to plan this trip, do leave a comment and let us know, and then maybe we'll record a video on that in the future. Now, if this were a two-week holiday, we'd probably eat out much more often, probably every night. But over a year, we need to live much more normally.

But equally, we do not want to travel halfway around the world. We then spend 12 months saying no to local food, a glass of wine, or taking a taxi when we're exhausted because we're trying to hit a backpacker budget.

That is really what the £26,000 represents— ordinary life, just in a lot of different countries.

The next biggest chunk is actually getting from place to place. We budgeted £17,000 for travel.

About £12,000 of that is for flights, then there are buses, vans, car hire, ferries, trains and transfers.

And because there are 55 stops in the itinerary, those smaller journeys add up very quickly.

Yeah, we're also going to make some choices that are not the absolute cheapest. If taking a flight or a faster train saves us an entire day of traveling, sometimes that will be worth paying a little bit more for.

Especially because a 12-hour journey does not only cost 12 hours. If it leaves you exhausted the following day as well, you effectively lost more of the trip.

Although I should point out that I really don't like flying, so I also was very keen that this didn't become a year where we got on an airplane almost every single week.

Cheapest is not automatically the best value for us. Time and energy are part of the equation too.

Accommodation comes in at £15,000, which is actually lower than I expected when we first started talking about doing this.

And that covers the traveling period before we reach Cape Town. We are not paying for accommodation once we get to Cape Town because we'll be staying in our own apartment.

And also I want to emphasize that we're not staying in hostel dorms. We're just too old for that. We're not trying to find the absolute cheapest room in every single city.

For longer stays we're generally looking for apartments or comfortable private accommodation. Somewhere where we can cook, do laundry, work on the channel, spend a day indoors without feeling as though we're trapped in a tiny hotel room.

This is one of the areas we're traveling at 51 and 62 looks different from how we might have traveled at 21.

We could make this number a lot lower, we just do not want to spend nearly a year living in accommodation we actively dislike.

And I think the quality of the accommodation is going to have a direct effect on the quality of the whole experience, especially on days where we are not out sightseeing. We've allocated one day a week to work on editing the video, so if we're sitting in some ganky small tiny apartment sitting on the bed to work, it's not going to be much fun.

And then there's £9,000 for activities, day trips, and tickets.

That is deliberately a meaningful amount because there's no point traveling all this way and then refusing to do things that we actually went there to experience.

Peru is a good example. Machu Picchu is something we knew we wanted to do, so that has already been secured as it'll be interrail in Cusco while we're there. Rather than treat it as something we'd book on arrival and find out we can't, Or if we could, we can't get the route that we would have preferred.

Yes, Inti Raymi is what, a big festival, isn't it?

Yeah, a festival of the sun god.

Yeah, and then there are less glamorous costs. So our official cost in this category is £4,500.

And that includes £2,200 for travel insurance, as we mentioned, £1,200 for vaccinations, £300 for visas, and some other specific travel costs.

And then we've got another £900 for things like toiletries and prescriptions, and £800 for New clothing and gear.

None of these individual numbers look as dramatic as a long-haul flight, but together they become thousands of pounds.

And they are exactly the sort of things that can make a travel budget look unrealistically cheap if you forget about them or leave them out. I mean, who would have thought that it's costing £1,200 just for vaccinations?

We should also be clear that we're not trying to prove how cheaply 2 people can travel around the world. There's plenty of those on Yeah, exactly.

And we're not student backpackers anymore. We're 51 and 62. It's not old, but there are things that we're consciously prepared to spend more money on just for a little bit more comfort.

Like we talked before, a nice apartment, little hotels as opposed to hostels or dorms.

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to be staying in a hostel, even if we've got our own room, if it turns out to be a party hospital.

Hostel.

Still, we'll end up in hospital. And, uh, Just, you know, we save £20 by staying there.

Yeah, we want a good location. We don't want to have to get a taxi to places. We want to be in the city centre or near all the different places.

Yeah, I mean, there's no point staying somewhere cheaper, but then you find you spending the same amount of money to get into the centre of things.

Exactly.

And obviously we want to make sure that we've got enough budgeted to have a decent meal rather than just eating noodles every day.

That's why I've been keeping an eye on the average spend in all the locations. I've been doing it monthly. because they have been shooting up since we started this. We are not trying to travel as cheaply as possible.

Yeah, we're trying to make one year affordable for us without spending a year traveling in a way that we would end up absolutely hating.

That is a very different question from asking what is the lowest possible number we could get this down to.

Yeah, and as James said earlier, there are lots of YouTube videos talking about low-cost travel, how to live on $100 a day, Or there are lots of travel vloggers that don't share any of this, which is exactly why we're going to be completely transparent and position this as a sort of mid-tier travel year. Now there's one important boundary around this £73,000 figure. The travel budget actually stops when we get to Cape Town, so that will be after about 10 months of travel.

We plan to spend at least 3 months in Cape Town afterwards. But that part is being funded separately from the rental income we've accumulated from our apartment there.

And because we'll be living in our own apartment, there's no accommodation costs while we're in Cape Town.

Then there's £3,000 emergency contingency.

Now we've kept that separate because we do not want to mentally turn it into another £3,000 for nicer hotels or extra dinners.

It is there for the things we cannot sensibly predict: an unexpected flight change, Extra accommodation, replacing something essential, exchange rates moving badly against us, or needing to get back to the UK in an emergency.

If we come home having spent some or all of it, then that doesn't automatically mean that the budget failed.

That's exactly why we've created this contingency pot, but hopefully we do not need it. And if it's still sitting there at the end, we can put it towards whatever trip we decide to plan next.

Now the spreadsheet isn't going to disappear once we leave. We're going to track what we actually spend against what we planned, and we're using an app on our phones to do that.

But the important thing is not to panic because one week or one country is expensive.

Japan might come in over budget and somewhere else might come in under. We need to look at the cumulative trend rather than getting upset because one dinner was £20 more than we expected.

Yeah, so we'll be adding all our figures into that for every day, putting in our drinks. Coffee, food, and then that will come off the budget so we can keep a running tally of what's going on.

And I guess if we start to see a trend of overspending rather than a one-off, then we would need to think about what we would do and where we can cut other things like lowering our accommodation costs or eating in a bit more often.

Or activities budget.

Yeah, and we want to make it really clear that that £3,000 pound contingency pot isn't for overspending, it's for an emergency.

That's only for emergencies.

If we spend hundreds more than we planned in Japan, then the answer is definitely not to stop enjoying Japan.

Just to understand why, look at what is coming next, and decide whether something later needs to change.

And the spreadsheet should absolutely help us make decisions.

It's not there to make us feel guilty every time we buy a coffee And we're going to track the real numbers as we go and share them, because one of the most useful things we can tell you at the end is whether this budget bore any resemblance to reality.

But I think based on the amount of research and updating that James has been doing over the last couple of years, that hopefully this budget should be pretty accurate. But we'll see, and of course we're gonna share all this in an open and honest way with you guys. Now listen, I know £73,000 is a lot of money. lot of money, and we're not pretending that it isn't.

But there's one comparison that is easy to forget. If we stayed in the UK for a year, our cost of living would not suddenly be zero.

Yeah, the latest ONS— that's the Office of National Statistics— family spending figures put an average UK household expenditure at around about £677 a week. That's roughly £35,000 a year. Now, in a normal year, we would typically take 2 holidays as well as a trip to Cape Town, and that would probably add another £9,000 onto the budget for those trips.

So for a simple comparison with the life we would actually be living, we add that £9,000 to the £35,000 average household figure. That gives us a rough normal year benchmark of around £44,000.

Now this isn't an official ONS figure and it's not perfectly like for like, but we're using it as a rough personal comparison.

Against that rough benchmark, our £73,000 round-the-world budget is about £28,500 more than a normal year for us.

Now that still is a lot of money, but it's very different from saying this trip is costing us £73,000 more than we would normally spend if we were at home for a year, because staying at home and taking normal holidays would cost a substantial amount anyway.

Somebody could absolutely travel for a year for much less than this, and someone else could spend much more.

And that is why that we don't think there is one useful answer to the question How much does it cost to travel the world for a year?

The better question is, what does your version of that year cost?

We want private accommodation, not hostels. We want to do the experiences that matter to us to really experience the culture of that country. We will sometimes pay for comfort or convenience, and we want enough money in the day-to-day budget that the whole year doesn't become an exercise in saying no.

So for us, this is something we've deliberately chosen to prioritize. We both value experiences more than buying more things, so this is where we have chosen to spend a significant amount of money.

Now we get to find out whether 2 years of planning and a truly ridiculous number of spreadsheets have produced a realistic figure. So our planned spend is around £73,000 for traveling the world for a year, plus £3,000 held separately for genuine emergencies.

And from the day we leave We'll be filling in the actual column and tracking what it really means.

And by the end of it, we'll know whether all this planning produced a realistic budget.

Or a very expensive spreadsheet.

And as we travel, of course, we're going to share the real cost country by country with you guys, including where we got it right and where we got it completely wrong.

So if you want to see whether we actually manage it, subscribe and come along with us.

And let us know in the comments, does £73,000 sound more or less than you expected? expected for 2 people traveling the world for a year.

Otherwise, thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you next Sunday!