Around The World - $193.82
So you want to know how much a trip around the world costs? Then you’ve come to the right place! We accounted for every dollar, dime, and penny spent over the past 392 days to keep track of precisely where our money was going. Beyond simply needing to keep track of our spending and try to stay on budget, we also wanted to know every detail about where everything ended up to see if, in the end, we’d been overspending on anything. Additionally, it would give us an idea of how much we had saved in total for this trip, as we never got a clear understanding of that before we’d left. We were still making more money on interest during our trip, and had begun spending months before we left, so the final numbers only materialized at the end. When we returned home on January 21st, 2025, we had $2.70 left in our travel savings account, meaning we stayed under budget and did a pretty damn good job of keeping ourselves honest to our bank account for nearly 400 consecutive days!
Let’s start at the beginning, where did our money come from? When we started to seriously plan this world trip, we already had about $16,000 in travel savings set aside to use as our base. Then the vast majority of our financing came from savings we put aside across 2022 and 2023. In those two years we were able to save an additional $57,500, taking us up to about $73,000 in total. We were largely able to put this much money aside because we left New York City and took up residence with Jackson’s parents, allowing us to automatically save what we had been paying in rent. Our next method for accruing this travel bank was through generous engagement, Christmas, and birthday gifts from our close family, totaling a little over $7,500 between December 2022 and December 2024. Finally, we earned another $3,000 in interest from our high-interest savings account at Citibank, N.A. Unlike most savings accounts in the US which offer interest rates below 0.01%, our account at Citi topped out at 4.75%, throwing in several thousand “free” dollars before our departure. All together, this added up to $84,255.96 or $193.82 per day across 392 days, after accounting for $8,274.83 in pre and post-trip expenses.
We would also be remiss if we didn’t mention the immense value that we got from credit card, hotel, and airline points this year. We’ve already written extensive articles on the immense value you can get from well selected Credit Cards and Airline Miles & Points, but we can summarize it here. The points we used were valued at over $22,000 ($15,360 AAdvantage Miles, $2,880 Marriott Points, $2,330 AmEx Points, $750 Lufthansa Miles, $680 BA Avios), but we think the utility we got from them was actually much higher. For example, our AAdvantage miles were able to pay for twenty seven of our flights, including several long distance business class flights, easily topping the $15,360 valuation from NerdWallet. Having this massive bank of miles and rewards helped us to stretch our budget much further, and to travel in a much more comfortable manner. Before embarking on a long trip like ours, we highly recommend loading up on points and miles to help you go farther.
A few notes on our accounting practices before we get into the numbers – while we tracked every purchase, there were a few things that didn’t count against our trip budget bottom line:
Souvenirs - We decided early on that if we were buying anything for ourselves or friends & family to keep after our adventure ended, these were personal expenses and would come out of our own pocket, rather than the trips. Some of our biggest souvenirs were a piece of Aboriginal art, some small spears from Peru, and a high-end knife from Japan. All of these things, plus gifts, do not count against the $84,000 we spent on this trip.
Luxury Activities – There were a handful of times that we decided to upgrade our experience out of our pocket. In these cases, the amount we would have paid for the replacement travel or experience was charged to the trip and then the difference came out of our pocket. For example, we went on a luxury 2-night trip in HaLong Bay in Vietnam, but only charged the trip what a standard 2-night trip would have cost. Jackson then paid the rest out of pocket as a replacement for our planned expenses at Tomorrowland that he didn’t end up having.
Travel with Parents – There were a few countries that we had lower than normal expenses because we were traveling with our parents (Japan | Part 1, Switzerland, Tanzania, and the United States). In these places, we still tracked everything coming out of our bank account, but it was simply lower than it would have been if we had been on our own.
Refunds – There were several times this year when we were refunded some of our original costs because we did not receive what we had paid for. Naturally, these refunds worked themselves back into our calculations, reducing the overall costs in the country we received the refunds in.
Looking back at our year, it’s clear to see that two categories of expense really dominated our spending: Lodging and Food. Together these categories accounted for over 50% of our total outflow. While we probably could have lowered each of these by choosing to stay in more affordable accommodations or eating out far less, we’re glad we did it this way. We were able to experience some truly incredible hotels and eat some unbelievable food, all while keeping our overall budget in line. We know this isn’t the balance for all travelers, many prefer to stay in the cheapest accommodation and save their money for other activities, but this is what worked for us! We view these stays as part of our experience in a country or region.
Our next largest expense was Flights at just under $8,000. Ironically, this is the category we used points for the most, but much of this cost came from the beginning and end of our trip. Our flight to kick off the travel year was our single most expensive connection at just under $2,000, eating up 25% of this total flight cost on its own. We also had our second and third most expensive flights to end the year, with $650 to fly home to the US over Christmas, and just over $1,100 to fly back to Japan for our final three week stint. Taking just these three flights out would nearly halve our total Flight cost, but by saving so much money on flights across the rest of the year, we were able to afford these without any stress.
Our general transportation costs were also quite high for the year, eating up about $34 per day when combining Rental Cars and Other Transportation. Much of this cost came from our campervan in Australia and rather expensive rental SUV in New Zealand, both extremely early in our trip. We only rented cars in nine countries though, meaning in the rest we were reliant on public transportation, taxis, trains, and buses. We can also lump in our Overlanding Trip here, which although it only covered a short four weeks of our trip, accounts for 6.5% of our total trip cost at nearly $5,500. Keep in mind that this type of rental kept accommodation costs down with just campsite fees to consider. These are all costs that involve significant refunds on our Overlanding Trip and rental Campervan in Australia. Without these issues and their subsequent refunds, we would have been out of money much sooner.
Activities cost us about $13 per day over 392 days, less than we had expected when embarking on this adventure, but still a significant sum in the rearview mirror. Luckily, Activities were fairly cheap in many countries, but there were of course outliers. For example, our Discovery Pass in Jordan cost about $100 each, but included entry to several historic sites and architectural parks we had planned on visiting anyways.
In terms of pre- and post-trip expenses, these were primarily in the form of Vaccinations, Health Care Coverage, and Visas. Together, these cost us about $6,000, with over half of that cost coming from Vaccinations alone. While we think we would have been perfectly fine without most of the vaccinations we received, we decided it was better to be safe than sorry! For our healthcare, we decided to buy plans through WorldTrips which covered us around the world for twelve months and cost us $554 each. While we didn’t use them to their full potential (thank god!) they came in handy for our few medical incidents, even if their customer service wasn’t always the best!
Finally, we had a little over $6,000 in Miscellaneous expenses for the year - though I wouldn’t be able to tell you what each came from if my life depended on it! Generally speaking, they came from cash we used for small purchases in many countries, our phone plan, laundry, pharmacy runs, and other uncategorized expenses. We were surprised to see this category was this high at the end of the year but again, since we were under budget its all water under the bridge!
Alright, now let’s talk a little about how we did in each country. The chart to the left shows our average spend per day in each country compared to how long we spent there. What jumps out to me first is the absolutely terrible job we did in so many of our destinations in staying under budget. Luckily, if you look a layer deeper, you’ll find that in three of our six longest-duration destinations we were exactly at or slightly below budget. This is most notable in our twenty-seven day stay in Switzerland with Sarah’s parents. Originally we had only planned to stay here for a week, but after extending it for both personal and geo-political reasons, it turned out to be the key to keeping our adventure almost exactly at budget. Looking at our cheapest countries, most were in Southeast Asia (which is not a surprise), but our total cost for Oman was a big surprise for us, coming in as our fourth cheapest destination. Here we were pleasantly surprised by the cheap cost for food and accommodation, as well as the astronomically low price per liter for petrol.
Flipping it around, our most expensive destinations were largely the ones we expected to make a big dent in our budget. Our priciest per day destination was the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, famously an expensive place to spend a few days. Don’t get us wrong, we were equally surprised by the quality of food and culture, especially in Qatar, that we found here. Our second most expensive destination was Southern Africa, unfortunately one of our longest-duration destinations. This was almost completely from the cost of our Overlanding trip, and that’s even accounting for the $1,200 refund we received from the company for their horrendous performance. Our other high-cost destinations were spread across the world, but are generally already known as more expensive places to travel, including Australia, New Zealand, and Patagonia.
Taking a look at how our expenses grew over time, it’s interesting to note how some types of expenses grew fairly consistently over time, like Lodging, while others grew only in a few locations, like Car Rentals. While, of course, we needed to pay for a place to stay almost every night of our trip, we only needed some things in certain countries. Perhaps the starkest example of this is that 79% of our Rental Car cost across the entire year was already spent by the time we left Australia, our second destination. On the flip side of that, our Food & Groceries cost grew at a faster pace than Lodging once we left Southeast Asia, as food got both more expensive and the proportion of meals eaten out grew to almost 100%. Of course, the ratio of our expenses varied from country to country, but we were surprised by how narrow the range of variance was in most destinations.
Conclusion
When we left home nearly fourteen months ago, we had a loose idea of what our budget was, but had no clue if it would be enough. With memories to last us a lifetime and $2.70 left in the bank, we think it’s safe to say that planning about $200 per day is more than enough to have the trip of your dreams. Of course it helps to supplement the cash in your bank account with credit card points and airline miles! Not only that, but consider having some sort of savings buffer outside of your travel account in case of emergencies or unexpected access issues. When we look back at the year, we spent nearly half of our budget on Lodging and Food, with the other 53% spread out pretty evenly across Flights, Transportation, Activities, our Overlanding Safari, and Healthcare. Quite the impressive spread!