How to Travel the World Without Blowing Your Budget

It’s a bit unbelievable that between the global pandemic and travel bans, we still managed to travel to five countries this past year and come in on budget. Undoubtedly, 2020 was a very challenging year to be a traveler. Yet, despite the pandemic, we were determined to keep up with our plan to explore the world slowly. And even though we’ve had to adjust our plans along the way — sometimes on a weekly basis — for the most part it’s worked out. 

We’ve been able to visit a couple of the countries on our bucket list and, and of course, we’ve been tracking all our costs along the way. With 2020 now completed, it’s time to share all the  details of what we spent for a full year of travel. And that includes which categories came within budget and which ones totally blew our budget and then some. 

International transportation

When we first planned our 2020 journey, we saw ourselves slowly traveling across Europe. We planned to spend a month or two in each country and then hop on a train to get to the next one. Of course nothing happened the way we planned. Here’s how our journey actually looked…

We started the year in Fethiye, a small city on the coast of Turkey. A month later, we flew from Fetihye through Istanbul to our final destination of Rome. We were still in Italy when the pandemic hit and we found ourselves in the middle of a strict national lockdown. After sheltering in place for a month in beautiful Lake Como, we took an emergency flight from Milan through Frankfurt to our hometown of Toronto. 

When Europe began to re-open in August, we made our way from Toronto to Athens. After two months in Greece we flew from Athens to Dubrovnik in Croatia. Finally, our last flight of the year was from Zagreb, Croatia to Istanbul.

We planned to spend $1400 USD for all our international transportation in 2020. It was a relatively small amount because we envisioned ourselves taking romantic train rides across Eastern Europe…not flying across the Atlantic a couple times. 

So what we actually spent was $2,270 USD. We did offset the cost of some of our flights with points but largely paid full price.  

Accommodations

Another area of our budget where we spent way more than expected was our accommodations. We had planned to spend an average of $950 USD each month and, who knows, maybe that would have worked if we stuck to low-cost countries.

What we actually spent was an average of $1,272 USD per month. There are two reasons why we went over budget. First, we ended up spending more time than expected in high-cost countries like Canada and Italy. Second, we realized that we simply had to spend a bit more — or occasionally a lot more — to get what we were looking for in an Airbnb. 

Now $1,272 USD was the average, but the range between highest and lowest priced apartments was quite significant. The lowest price per night was in Kas, Turkey where we spent just $20 USD per night to be there during the low season.

And the highest price was Toronto at $57 USD a night. So it’s your call if you want a view of the Mediterranean for $20 USD or a view of a very average neighbourhood in Toronto for $57 USD.

We thought it would be interesting to compare the price we paid for our Airbnbs with the local price for long-term rentals in those cities. We did expect that the rates would be higher for our short-term furnished rentals but would the markup be consistent across countries?

In fact, it was not. In some cases we paid three times the local price. In other cases, such as the high cost of living cities of Toronto and Dubrovnik, we paid less than the going market rate. Certainly COVID had an impact on the prices we paid in those two cities.

Entertainment

For entertainment, we surprised ourselves with a low average monthly budget of just $63. This includes all the activities and attractions in each of our destinations plus our regular monthly subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify.  Our most expensive activities were both in Dubrovnik. Gillian had a morning of scuba diving for $80 USD and we both did the old town wall walk for $62 USD. 

Generally we kept the cost of entertainment fairly low by not relying on guided tours. Instead we used a lot of free audio tours, like those from Rick Steves and Izi Travel. We also like a lot of activities that just don’t cost any money, like when we toured the local street art in Athens or our epic hikes along the Turquoise Coast.

Food 

We love eating well; it’s one of our absolute passions in life. For that reason, we always expect to spend a generous amount on food wherever we go. However, we take a flexible approach with our groceries and dining out. When we’re in low cost-of-living countries, we might eat out at least once a day. In high-cost countries, we do a lot of cooking at home with good quality ingredients. 

There was one country where we could eat out as much as we wanted to and still didn’t come close to hitting our budget: Turkey! We were here in January and couldn’t help but come back in December to finish out the year. During our visit to Fethiye on the Turquoise Coast we spent just over $418 USD on food including dining out and groceries. 

And where we paid the most for accommodations was also where we spent the most on food: Toronto. We spent $935 USD — and that was mostly just groceries. There was basically no dining out because of the lockdown. 

So we planned to spend $800 USD each month and, in fact, we came in just about on budget with an average of  $807 USD.

This chart breaks down our food spends in all the places we spent a full month and further illustrates how we enjoy our fill of dining out in lower cost countries and cook more at home in higher cost destinations. There were two outliers: 1) Toronto, where groceries alone put us above our budget, and 2) Fethiye, where we just couldn’t eat out enough to reach our budget maximum.

Local Transportation

Local transportation refers to any transportation we take within a country. In 2020, this included getting around by train in Florence, public transit in Athens, car rental in Dubrovnik and subway rides in Toronto.

On average we spent $163 USD per month but there was a lot of variation based on our destination and circumstances. When we were in lockdown in Lake Como, we used our feet to get around and spent zero dollars on transportation. Meanwhile, in Greece we rented a car for a whole month which allowed us to explore some amazing sights in northern Greece. The total cost was $635 USD and a surprising amount of that was made up of road tolls. 

We have other regular costs from our life on the road that we share every month. The first is data, which averaged $14 for our global data from Flexiroam. This was a lot less than we expected but we found that we can get pretty far on the wifi included at our airbnbs. And for health insurance we averaged $129 a month. 

Out-of-Pocket Medical & Dental

The next category is out-of-pocket medical and dental care. Whenever we talk to fellow nomads and travellers, a topic that always comes up is how to manage routine medical visits while on the road. 

We were able to get all our routine check ups done in a variety of countries and the total bill came in at $793 USD. This included a full physical and multiple dental cleanings, all with great standards of care. Plus we had a couple COVID tests as well. 

The grand total for all of these categories is $33,010 — right within our budget even with all the extra spending on flights and accommodations. 

The only things not included in this total are personal expenses, like clothes, toiletries, beauty products and technology; gifts and donations; our storage locker, which we finally emptied this year; and any expenses related to our dogs. 

What’s new for 2021

What are we doing differently with our budget in 2021? First, we’re planning to budget more for international flights. With COVID as the new reality, our destinations will be dictated by which countries are welcoming Canadians…and they might not be neighbouring countries that we can easily get to by train or ferry. This means a lot more travel by plane than we would ideally plan. 

We’re also increasing our monthly accommodations budget to $1,250 USD and we’re even willing to go higher as needed. We’ve learned that we really like to be comfortable in our Airbnb and we’re willing to pay more for a better space with all the amenities that we look for. 

Finally, we’re putting aside a much larger emergency fund than we had when we first set off in 2020. We blew through our fund pretty quickly last year and ended up dipping into our personal allowance to cover all our unexpected costs. Normally that allowance is intended for clothes, technology or other personal expenses. In 2020, it was quickly absorbed by paying for Airbnbs for four months in Toronto.

If you want more on how we budget for long-term travel, you can check out our monthly budget download.

All amounts in USD.

Travel Categories	2020 Spend	Monthly Average
International Transportation	$2,270	$189
Accommodations	$15,264	$1,272
Entertainment	$762	$63
Food	$9,684	$807
Local Transportation	$1,964	$163
Data	$168	$14
Insurance	$1,548	$129
Out-of-Pocket Medical & Dental	$793	$66
Airline credits	$557
Total	$33,010	$2,703