How will we survive $$$???

Some of our links are affiliated, we will earn a commission when you buy a service or product. This will have no extra cost for you. For further info please refer to our Privacy Policy

Even in an open plan travel you need to be organized. Especially with money! Here we explain how will we survive!

Said that let`s go straight to the point: we are travelling on a tight budget, everything needs to be as good, as nice and as cheap as possible.

During our research time we came across to several bloggers and writers that live as digital nomads and make  life earning money from websites and freelance work. Good, but it takes a while to reach this point. You have to be really well known, trustworthy and have to travelled a lot to have enough information  to run a quality blog. It´s hard but not impossible, and you have to know that you will not get lots of money from it, it can only be one of your incomes.

We are not experienced bloggers YET! We are working on it, and we hope that in a year we maybe get lucky with our Love&Road blog, but for now we have to plan and figure out how to pay our expenses. First we built a savings account, you probably already read about it. We saved as much as possible to pay the flight tickets, one-year health insurance and travel for some months. It´s Ok, but still not a perfect plan.

Back to our research we made a spreadsheet with costs of food, drinks, accommodation, transport and sightseeing. We look at innumerous websites to get to know about life costs in some countries we wanted to go and how much we would need to spend. I reached my first conclusion: I wish I was born rich, or at least married a rich guy. I failed twice…

Jokes aside, we came to a figure of $50,00 (US dollar) a day per person including everything, from a bottle of water till a night in the desert. That`s how much we could spend! And if we do it right we have money for a year travelling, if nothing unplanned happens.

The budget of $50,00 a day is not our invention: many travel writers talk about, one of our sources was the book “How to travel the world on $50 a Day”  Of course in some places is just impossible to live with this amount, but in others you will live like a boss. The secret is to balance your costs according to where you are and to make the most with a minimum amount of money.

So we have money for one year, and definitely we don’t want to go back home soon and broke. To help us along the way we rented our house and Rob`s apartment. We could have sold them and get a bunch of money, but we preferred to keep the properties and rent them. The rent we receive in Brazilian currency is not that much, but is an extra that comes every month and help us to reach Asia (our main destination).

To save more money we have to think wisely about our destination. The rule is very simple: as north as you go in Europe and America, more expensive it gets. Southeast Asia is an oasis for budget travellers, and Middle East is expensive as Europe. Than we have South and Central America with some cheap countries and Africa where you can save too.

As our flight was to Madrid we spent some time there, and then Portugal. We knew that we had to look after our money, otherwise we would end up expending too much in the beginning of the trip. To keep control we have been taking note of everything we buy, including bathrooms fee, coffees, hostel and bus tickets. With a daily control is easier to follow your plan: if one day you splurge, in the next one you make it in a low profile. The secret is to save without depriving yourself for some guilty pleasures.

So we decided to stay for a while in Europe, but not too much so our money won’t fly away. The idea was to travel a month in the old continent then go to Morocco, Turkey, and Eastern Europe countries where the life cost is cheaper band we also can have a great time. And maybe in September reach Thailand. But the truth is that has been two months and we are still in Europe, in France, a country that even wasn´t in our master plan.

When we get in Asia I’m pretty sure that we can live a simple life spending less money and extend our journey for more months. We have no clue how long we are going to travel, neither if we are going to settle in a different country, but we definitely don’t want to end our trip because we ran out of money.

Apart from our savings and the rent that we are receiving monthly, we are blogging and hoping that in a year we’ll be able to get some money through our Love&Road blog. For the moment this is like our journal where we can express feelings, post nice travel information and inspire people. Maybe one of our readers decide to sponsor us, who knows?! We are awesome people, and every little helps!!!

Rob is our financial manager, he does the accounting and let me know how we are doing. Of course I help him too, I’m not buying anything unless it`s extremely necessary. And that’s an extremely difficult task for a girl, especially when she loves shoes, bags and makeup like me. But once a while I get pampered with a nice dinner, a bottle of wine or like in Morocco where I got a nice leather wallet. You see, only super necessary things!

While we are in Europe and Africa we are spending money from our savings. As soon as we get to Asia, I hope the money we receive from the tenants will be enough for the monthly expenses, so we could keep our saving for the future. And if we need cash we can find a job somewhere. No problem at all to work like a tourist guide as we speak english, and Rob also speaks spanish. Or maybe in a coffee shop or hostel… every work is welcome as long as we are having fun.

Talking about money, Rob is seated beside me organizing our accounts and I just got a bad news:

– Love, we have to tighten the belt: we are spending over $ 50,00 per person, per day.

It means that no big spending for tomorrow, but it’s ok, we can cook a nice dinner with a great french wine for less than € 7,00.