When we started planning our year long adventure, we could not find the data we were looking for – data that would give us greater insight and confidence into how a travel year may look day to day and month to month. It was not out of a desire to replicate someone else’s year (an impossible and fruitless task), but to get a feel for how the details pan out over time.
There were no thorough examples online of what day to day finances or budgeting may look like, nor what usual distances were travelled, nor what extent accommodation types were being utilized. Hence this ‘365 Data’ page was one of the main reasons we created our website. After our adventure, we conducted an in depth analysis on: Costs by Country, Accommodation and Activities, and Transportation.
The data we present below has the following context:
A) We are a middle class family who saved heavily and sold our house to enable this adventure, aiming to end living in a different country. We started saving as two working parents with secure jobs living in an average house.
B) Our goal is to travel frugally NOT cheaply. For example, we go to the occasional theme park and do occasional must-see expensive day trips in the areas we visit. However, we always balance these with minimal cost days. We consider lower cost ways to do things even if it means more groundwork (i.e. trip to Patagonia). See our Instagram feed @cakesncampfires for more examples of places we’ve been!
C) We are not sponsored, nor have we been enabled to do this by any ‘jackpot’ (inheritance, lottery, killer app etc,). We are not earning significantly, but some money did flow in after we started, from refunds and items we sold later.
D) We aimed to travel for one year, budgeting $USD50 per person per day. Read the book and background about this target – we are testing it!
Regardless of how you came to the decision or the ability to plan your own adventure, take a look at our numbers. We know the data below answers the questions we had – it may answer yours too. If you have further questions about what is on this page, please ask us in the comments below, that way other visitors can benefit from the discussion.
How much do we utilize each type of accommodation?
There was no way we could afford this trip if we stayed in paid accommodation every night for 365 days. We utilized the generosity of family and friends, and camped when we could to keep accommodation costs lower. We are a family and stay in places more than a few days usually – if we did not have a child and were faster moving we’d use CouchSurfing a lot more!
How far are we traveling on most days?
Depending on the region this graph changed a lot. While in North America we had a car so drove almost daily for considerable distances. On other continents (without a car), our distances were much shorter on most days because we walked or used public transportation.
How often are we under budget or over budget?
Our target spending is $USD 50/person/day, or total daily budget of $USD 150/day… or less! How many days are we actually achieving this goal? Remember, we are not going to avoid paying for experiences if it means going a little over our budget. We want to experience the world by seeing and doing as much as we can, not just tick places off a list. If you click on a pie section it will show the number representing the percentage of days in that category.
Month by month, how does everything vary with spending, travel distances, cost per km, and percent of days under budget?
We expected variety, and that’s what you see here! South America is meant to be cheap and Europe expensive… right? If you click on the colored boxes below the chart, it will hide that color line, making the graph easier to read.
What single point data do we monitor frequently as we travel?
We have a really messy but colorful spreadsheet that has a lot of interesting stuff on it. Some of it is graphable and presented above, but some of it is singular data.
Day to day, what does it look like as we travel?
Were we busy daily or not? How did we schedule routine or special things in? HINT: Turn your phone so you are viewing in landscape mode, and click on “+” to expand data. This spreadsheet is fully searchable and exportable for your inner nerd. See our post on how to navigate this spreadsheet.
If you cannot see the export options for the spreadsheet, click here.
Steve
June 18, 2019 at 5:48amI love this type of data but I have a few questions. Did your $150 budget include all expenses, flights etc or were these seperate?
Your month statistic chart seems to show you were over $150 for the majority of the trip (blue line) but the pie chart and summary state you were in the budget for 68% of your time. Am I missing something?
The final spreadsheet breaks down the costs by day but where you booked flights or accommodation the costs are attributed to the day you booked right? This doesn’t help us to analyze the data to see which countries were the most expensive.
Apologies if i have misread the data.
Admin
June 18, 2019 at 4:44pmSteve, great questions!
The $150 included all expenses from day one, but not before day one. For example, all our immunizations are not included, nor is our travel health insurance (two big expense examples that were purchased well before we left). All flights are included – if you search the spreadsheet using the term ‘flight’, you will see when those were purchased. You can also expand to see the comments by clicking on each green ‘+’ button for each row. Keep in mind, we used $50/day/person as a rough budget. The goal was not to travel cheaply and tick places off a list. We wanted to experience things like Machu Picchu, Patagonia, Greek Islands Tour, Legoland, and other region specific attractions that are expensive.
The blue line shows the average for the MONTH, this being total cost for the month divided by number of days. This is to give actual spending for each month over the course of the year, regardless of region, and is skewed by things like future flight tickets or future accommodation. We intend to publish a region by region cost summary that reflects the cost to travel in a region and not just by time frame. We haven’t had time to put this together yet. If you read our monthly BUCKETED posts on this website, you will see the discussion for each month on these particular numbers. The line chart is better for looking at long term gross trends rather than region costs.
The pie chart shows how many DAYS on the whole trip we were in a particular cost bracket. On 68% of days we were spending less than $150/day as a family of three. We were below $200 per day on 80% of our days. On 31% of days we were over that amount for whatever reason (usually tickets for ‘must see’ places, car repairs, Airbnb bookings, transport tickets). As you can see on the spreadsheet when we went over $500 (about 7% of days) we spent as high as $2500 on a day. Ouch! But that’s a reality you have to plan for. Because of these outlier days we tried to spend well below $150 on most other days (46% of our days we actually spent less than $100) to offset the ‘blowout’ days. We published this as a percent, as it is probably a better measure to plan a budget for a longer duration adventure.
Yes, when we booked a flight (or future accommodations) we put it on the day expense for that day of purchase. We were hesitant to document it on the future day because we were afraid we would mess up the calculations (we also wanted to see how much over budget we were so we could adjust spending accordingly). As mentioned above, this skews the region costs in most cases. We have a very colorful and weird spreadsheet which grew as our data accumulated which shows a bit better detail (this is not published). Until we crunch our data for regions, the best way to see the usual costs in a region is to look at how many days we were under budget in a month, and where we were that month. If you look at the Monthly Statistics line chart and toggle off all colors except black, you will see we had >80% of days under budget in October, November and April. This corresponds with our time in South America and in Eastern Europe.
Our country data is in the works and will be published. We have to pick through our expenses and bank records and emails to get the numbers correctly attributed, so some countries are particularly complicated.
Thanks for your questions and interest! Hopefully this sheds some light on the numbers – if there is something else that needs clarification let us know!!
Admin
July 14, 2020 at 2:49amIt has taken us a while… lots of months… but we now have information in our three latest posts that may answer your questions related to countries costs. Thanks for asking such a question – we certainly had the information to answer it, but it was very interesting to answer it! Hopefully it answers some other questions as well.