We have just finished two years as full-time travelers and as I continue making a series of videos about frequently asked questions that we get,
I thought this would be the perfect time to answer the question
We traveled in South America during our first year of travel, and then went to Southeast Asia for our second year.
In this video I'm going to break down our spending category by category so that you can see just how much we've spent as full-time travelers.
Our spending on housing and accommodation has averaged $658 per month.
We are slow travelers and we usually stay in an apartment somewhere for about a month before we move to our next destination, although sometimes we do shorter stays or longer stays.
But we save quite a lot of money by getting a monthly discount when we rent through Airbnb, anywhere from 20%-40% off by doing this kind of long-term rental.
We generally rent one bedroom apartments, but sometimes we'll stay in a studio and sometimes a two bedroom or rarely even a three bedroom depending on what's available and the cost.
Our most expensive apartment was in Lima, Peru, which was our first destination when we first started our world travel adventure.
This one bedroom apartment was $770 per month, but it was in a nice upscale neighborhood.
And by the way these housing costs that I'm giving you include utilities, internet, and the Airbnb booking and cleaning fees.
Our least expensive apartment was in George Town, Malaysia, where we found a big discount on a two-bedroom in a historic kind of traditional building.
We paid only $344 for a one-month rental there.
We have averaged $349 per month on food which is actually a little bit more than what we spent living in the U.S., but i used to get free lunch for my job.
But as travelers we do most of our own cooking in our apartment with food that we buy from the grocery store.
We do go out to eat in a restaurant maybe once or twice a week and I should also say that we are not big eaters.
We usually have a full lunch but breakfast and dinner are very light if we even have breakfast or dinner at all.
We do like to try the local foods and we know that this is a part of the travel experience, but we are not super adventurous when it comes to eating things that would be really bizarre to us like bugs.
The $349 per month that we've averaged on food breaks down into about $228 for food that we cook ourselves from the grocery store and $121 dollars per month from eating out in restaurants.
Our transportation expenses have averaged $217 per month.
We prefer trains and buses over flying, but we also don't like overnight bus trips so we'll take a flight if we need to in order to avoid a very lengthy bus ride.
At last count over our two-year travel adventure, so far we've taken 11 flights, 26 buses, 5 trains and 3 boats to get from place to place, and I'm probably a little bit off on those numbers.
Next is healthcare and this might sound like a lot to some people but to us as Americans this is like nothing.
This $208 dollars breaks down to $183 per month for our insurance coverage, which would be at least five times higher if we were paying full price for insurance back home.
And then $25 for things like doctor's appointments and medication although we did pay for some of our appointments using our HSA account, so that $25 would have been a bit higher otherwise.
We are most impressed with the health care in Thailand and Malaysia, excellent quality and so much cheaper than what we'd pay back home, I mean it's not even close.
Next we have all the other expenses for things that don't fit into other categories like clothes.
We don't buy a lot of clothes because then we have to carry them.
But also for things like toiletry items and toothpaste we have a mail service back home that we use to handle our mail, maintaining our snailtravelers.com website,
and I did buy a new camera while on the road, also a new backpack, and these are just for all those miscellaneous extra type things.
We do feel like we don't just need to donate but it's something that we enjoy doing.
We like to help out when we can not just through financial giving but also donating our time and volunteering as well.
And our last category is for things like entrance fees to tourist sites, an occasional guided tour, shows, concerts and things like that.
Our most expensive activity was the fabulous hot air balloon ride over some of the thousands of temples scattered around Bagan in Myanmar which cost $700 for the two of us.
Our second most expensive activity was for the amazing lantern festival in Thailand at $300 for two.
And by the way if you want to see our favorite activities and experiences over the past two years,
you can check out a video that we just made of our top adventures by clicking or touching the little link that you see in the top corner of your screen there.
Alright so there's a breakdown of every penny that we've spent since we left home.
And when you add up all these categories together we have spent an average of $2014 per month.
And by the way those numbers are pretty much evenly balanced between South America and Southeast Asia, they both cost about the same for us.
Now another common question that we get related to this is "How are you paying for all this if you don't have a job?"
Yes we did quit our jobs, but we lived very very frugally for many years and saved up every penny that we could so that we could have this big travel adventure now.
And one more thing that I'll say is that our goal as we travel is not to travel as cheaply as possible.
We could do this much more cheaply if we really wanted to and still be comfortable, but that's not our goal.
Our goal is to stay on our budget, which we've been able to do this entire time.
So thanks for watching this video, please check out some of the other videos that you see here,
and also be sure to take a look at our website at snailtravelers.com to find out more about our world travel adventure.