We are still several days away from leaving for our 10 month trip, but over the past few days we’ve had many conversations with friends, family, acquaintances, strangers, and even a few news outlets about our plans. The most common reaction is “wow, that’s amazing!”, and the most common question is “how are you able to do this?” After chatting for a while we usually end up getting to the heart of the question which is “how can you afford to do this?” Here’s a little bit about how we prepared so we are able to pay for 10 months on the road.
Before sharing some of the specifics, I must say that it will be an expensive trip, so it certainly required some planning and changes in lifestyle. We will be gone for 299 days, and we will be traveling around the world, so we need to budget for (1) 299 nights of accommodations, (2) 4 plane tickets from Halifax to Paris, Rome to Phuket, Thailand, then to New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Easter Island, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, Belize, and finally back home to PEI, (3) transportation on the ground, (4) food for 299 days, and finally, (5) whatever we plan to do for activities, and we need some money set aside for the unexpected.
We started planning this trip about two years ago. It seems like a long time, but it certainly went by in a hurry. During some of our first discussions we were reminded of something a friend once told us…..he said “if you want to see what is important to someone, look at their cheque book.” We no longer use cheques, but we took that idea to heart. We looked at where we were spending our money and tried to find areas where we could save.
Frankly, we realized that we spent a lot of money at restaurants and we could likely save if we ate at home a little more often, but this wouldn’t even come close to paying for the trip. Our largest expenses were related to our home. It became obvious to us that we couldn’t afford to keep our large house while taking a year off, and honestly, the only way we could pay for a 10 month trip would be to sell the house and downsize. So that is what we did.
In 2017 we sold our two story home and bought a lovely little one-level that is about 1/3 the size. It was a big change after having spent over 7 years in our previous home, but we have no regrets. It meets all of our needs, and we now have the flexibility to chase a dream.
Selling the house in the Summer of 2017 allowed us to save a little more money every month as our insurance, property taxes, mortgage, electricity and oil bills were all reduced. That, combined with eating out a lot less, is how we did it. It wasn’t overly complicated, but it did require some big life changes.
From time to time our kids tell us they wish they still lived in the old neighbourhood, but we remind them that our move is what is allowing us to take the big trip. It is a good lesson in “give and take”……realizing that as blessed and lucky as we are, we can’t have everything. We have to make choices.
Oh ya, I almost forgot, we also cashed in two investments that we had (about $25K). We never really did much in terms of saving for retirement so we just decided to pull that out and use it now. We can worry about retirement when we get home.