Expense Report - Year 2
It’s pretty wild that we’ve now been traveling full-time for two full years. This report is interesting because our total spend went up significantly, which I must confess is the opposite of how I expected it would turn out. As fate would have it, we ended up spending the vast majority of the past year in much more expensive locales. While our first year of travel was largely spent in Southeast Asia, our second year was mostly defined by two famously expensive countries: Japan and Australia. We spent roughly 70% of year two in those two places.
So, without further ado, let’s look at what that cost us!
JUST 365 DAYS, THIS TIME
budget overrun
That total is kind of tough to look at. The number is $16,785.34 higher than year one. Just about 42% higher, if you like percentages. On average, $155/day.
Anyways, let’s look at each category. All amounts are expressed in USD.
Accommodation - $18,984.17
Much like year one, the costliest part of traveling is finding a place to sleep each night. On average, we spent $52/day on accommodation. Costs in this area went up a little over $5,000 - total - in comparison to year one. I don’t find this terribly surprising. A budget Japanese hotel away from the city center is still often more expensive than a nice 3 or 4 star hotel in Southeast Asia. In Australia, we considered it a win when we found accommodation of any kind for less than $100 per night.
Much the same as year one, we found two beds in a dorm-style hostel was almost always more expensive than a budget private room. I anticipated hostels would come back in full force post-Covid, and that they would become our primary type of accommodation. But they continued to be an option that only makes sense for the solo traveller.
Interestingly, $52/day is still $3/day less than what rent for our 1 bedroom apartment in the United States cost us. It must be said, our apartment was nicer than most of the places we stayed this year. Still, I am surprised we managed to come out on that side of this particular comparison.
Food & Drinks - $15,715.01
This category came in $2000 higher than year one. $43/day. We spent much more on this category than was strictly necessary. We tried to eat healthier this year, with mixed results. Eating a consistent, healthy diet is difficult and somewhat costly when you have access to a stocked kitchen.
When you don’t, it feels impossible and is ridiculously expensive.
Truthfully, this is an area that is proving to be quite challenging to manage the longer we travel. Recently we’ve gone so far as to adjust our posting frequency on YouTube and the general speed with which we travel. The goal is to find a diet and exercise routine that works for us long-term. We’re making progress, but this is a tough nut to crack.
Transport - $12,886.72
$3000 more than year one! $35/day. Transport costs ballooned massively in our second year of travel. This comes down to not only which countries we traveled through, but also how we travelled them.
We spent 3 months traveling the full length of Japan, a country with exceptionally expensive transportation. A 45 minute airport taxi can cost as much as $200, for example. We didn’t ride in any taxis but that gives you an idea. The futuristic bullet trains, which we did experience, are comparable to a flight on a non-budget airline.
Australia was also expensive to traverse. It encompasses an entire continent, after all. And we nearly circumnavigated the entire thing in a little blue car…
Blueberry - $4,226.08
That’s the total cost of Blueberry, the Mazda3 we bought in Perth. After landing in Australia, we immediately decided the only way to see it properly was to buy a vehicle. Other transportation options were either lacking in freedom, too expensive, or simply nonexistent.
This figure includes purchase of Blueberry, registration, fuel, and maintenance (including tools). I’ve then subtracted the recouped funds from selling Blueberry. Here’s a breakdown, as I suspect some people are particularly interested in this area:
Car - $4,301.00
Fuel - $1,912.97
Rego (6 months) - $414.68
Tools & Parts - $253.43
The above leaves us with a subtotal of $6,882.08. We then sold Blueberry - in a hurry and at a loss - for $2,656.00. Grand total = $4,226.08.
That seems like a heck of a lot, right? Well, if you’re touring Australia with a vehicle… that’s actually a decent result. We drove almost exactly 13k miles in Blueberry (that’s 21k kilometers). It works out to 32¢/mile. The average in the United States, where fuel is significantly cheaper, is 58¢/mile.
No doubt Blueberry was a remarkable outcome, in terms of reliability and cost. That little blue Mazda suffered zero mechanical complications. I have owned over 40 second-hand vehicles in my life, so experience played a role in this process. But with a used vehicle, luck is ever an element.
Miscellaneous - $4,059.49
For year two I meant to pare this category down to something more specific, but I didn’t. Misc. includes things like cellular data, laundry, hygiene products, pharmacy visits, travel insurance, clothes, etc.
It’s $1,200 higher than last year. Our travel insurance premiums were upped - I assume due to a mixture of us aging, and inflation. Cellular data was never more than $30/mo per person. The biggest single-ticket item was probably two electric toothbrushes for $260.
Entertainment - $911.39
This covers tickets to things like parks, guided tours, museums, historic sites, and so on. Any attraction that’s purely optional when touring a place.
The first category where costs decreased! Down almost 25%. We’ve both grown more selective when it comes to this type of thing. Anywhere in the world, one can purchase a seemingly endless number of entry tickets to various attractions. These days we’re more likely to admire a temple from the street, or opt for the publicly funded museum over the private one.
Biggest single expense in this area was a boat tour of the Whitsunday Islands, which cost $253.
Covid Tests - $12.87
No mandatory Covid tests at all this year! Down from $920.96 last year. Obviously it has been wonderful seeing this category practically disappear. We bought a handful of self-test kits when the situation called for it.
Bribes & Scams - $0.00
Ha! I wanted to eliminate this category, and I did. Year one we were scammed for small amounts multiple times and Tia had to bribe two separate police officers. We dodged all that entirely this year. We can smell this stuff now.
closing thoughts
Our second year of full-time travel has been a complicated one. As this lifestyle has shifted into something more longterm, so too have our preferences and priorities. The path between two points has become increasingly more thrilling than the points themselves. The way we explore the world has changed.
YouTube, too, has exerted an outsized influence on our travel decisions. As our savings have dwindled to almost nothing, we’ve thankfully began making enough money from a combination of YouTube and BuyMeACoffee to fund our travels. We’ve managed to break even 4 out of the last 6 months. Still, that is a new factor we must consider when making decisions.
This is not an income report, though. So we’ll stick to expenses.
Moving forward, we aim to strike a better balance between expensive and inexpensive destinations. The goal is to move our yearly budget back to something more closely resembling year one. I don’t expect we’ll get all the way there, but I would be happy to split the difference. I think we’d have something somewhat sustainable in that case.
In any case, thanks for reading!
-Cheveyo