We get asked this question a lot; How we’re paying for all of this travel? To put it simply there’s budgeting, paying for things with savings and making money (working) while we travel. If only money fell from trees! It doesn’t, so you have to get creative.
I think Alice talked a lot about what we had to do to prepare for this trip, one post is here going into that effort and planning, and once all that prep was done, selling stuff and packing it all up to ship to Blenheim for storage, we could focus on our lives on the road.
Budgeting
Travelling can be very expensive. Our first stop in Oslo, Norway was very short because the Kroner is one of the most expensive currencies in Europe! Three days equaled almost a month of living in Latvia (in rent). So the best thing to do to make this last is to spend your money wisely.
Stay in less expensive countries
We search for countries/cities with these things going for them:
- Great internet
- Moderate cost of living
- Great transport system
Many countries like London, Paris, and Berlin don’t fit into one or more of these three categories, but others like Riga, Tallinn and Bucharest do; so that’s why we’ve covered most of the Baltics and Balkans, Spain and Italy. We have stayed in Belgium and the UK because we have housesits there. But that’s another blog post!
Some sites we use a lot for long-term accomodation:
There are more sites but these are the biggies.
Do not go out to eat – this saves heaps of money!
This is a hard one for some, but for us it’s a no-brainer. Between Alice being celiac and my lactose intolerance, we pretty much can’t eat out anywhere unless it’s a meat/veggie joint. But, as always, this makes us creative. We eat a lot of chicken and I’ve even created a “Daddy Chicken” recipe:
Daddy Chicken
- One chicken bouillon cube diluted in 1/2 cup boiling water
- One clove of garlic
- One half onion chopped and diced
- Salt and Pepper
We started this trip with savings
People ask us where the money comes from for us to pay for our travels. Well, really we’ve simply shifted our stationary lives for mobile ones. We don’t have to pay for car maintenance or insurance (left our one car in Blenheim) and other bills are non-existent like school fees and other miscellaneous events. We do liken leaving NZ as a rocket lifting off; NZ is so far away from everything it takes thousands of dollars to leave!
The first month after we moved from Auckland to Blenheim my in-laws so kindly let us stay with them. My father in law set up a room for us and even put in a retractable desk for us to use!
We stored our stuff there and this freed us from having to buy a house to put our stuff in and rent out the rest; we heard trying to run a rental property while on the road is a major pain.
Over the years we have made some small investments that have paid off, not going to say what but will say we made some good tech investments in the early 2000s that have paid for several of our big moves. These investments are mostly “untouchable” long-term investments so the bulk of our travel is paid for by our savings, some of which we’ve had since we married 15 years ago.
I call our trip a “pre-tirement” meaning we are retiring now and will probably work into our golden years. Ha. Nah we have other ideas on that too. There are so many options for retirement these days and not depending on any benefit is a good place to start.
I left a good job on good terms and that meant for about 6 months I had projects to finish off and support work on other sites, my job was curious to try out remote working and while I think it’s been pretty successful, the work has indeed dried up.
That’s why I’m a tireless networker. 🙂
Remote work is possible these days, but many companies still don’t trust it so before you plan your nomadic lifestyle, try to arrange either to be independently wealthy, to have savings, be running a product business or be working remotely, or some combination of those.
No post here on Where’s Your Dunny would be complete without a photo of a dunny in Blenheim, we took this about a week before we started our trip:
Nathaniel Flick
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Nice work man.
I was indeed wondering how you were managing to pull this off 😉
Eating out definitely costs, but I’d venture to say it’s a lot more expensive to eat out in NZ than it is in Europe (at least that is my experience).
What are your plans when you come back to NZ?
How much longer is your trip?
Hey Jason! Yes, food is more expensive in NZ until you start to have to pay for things in Euros and British Pounds. Ouch! NZ dollar is about 20 cents lower than it was 2-3 years ago so we try to pay for things in US dollars as much as we can. Plan to come back to NZ May 2018.