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In fact the financial part of our trip is the fuel to actually make things go.
Before 1998 we didn't save up that much, things got more real early in 1999
which was the period where we started saving and cutting back our regular expenses. Below we've written a few things about how we got the finance part up and running.
Making a finance plan :
One of the first steps we took was an expense calculation based on previous experiences. It took us about a month to get this into shape. The downside of this process was that the total costs didn't go down but went up and up. Essential input data was the length of our trip, when we planned to start our journey and which countries to visit. Making the trip longer in days lowered the average financial needs each day, postponing the trip made it possible to stay away longer because of a higher budget. In the end we reached the following coverage in costs:
- 25 % Preparation expenses
- 25 % Keeping our home to come back to
- 50 % Trip budget
We've set the length of our trip to 162 days (which is in fact 5,23 month)and made it the title this webpage. :-) Below a few major items in our budget
planning:
Mortgage :
In fact a pain in the ass. In an early stage we decided to keep our house, it made no sense to sell it for a period of approximately 6 months. Consequently we have to save up a few periods of mortgage making our preparation time a bit longer. We where lucky to fix our mortgage at a very low rate in the second half of 1999. This was an essential step in saving up enough money for the trip.
Carnet de Passage : A huge amount of money to chough up. See here for more about this.
Health insurance
: The monthly fee really adds up to a substantial amount of money for six months for two persons. No chance of cutting back on this.
Fuel costs : $2000 Diesel for approx. 30.000Km. Really cheap because of the incredibly low fuel prices in the Middle-East region.
Daily living : $4700 for 162 days for two persons. $15/person.day for food, supplies, everything to keep ourselves alive.
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