How to Budget for a Round-the-World Trip

Since Robin and I are going to be speaking at Meet Plan Go‘s San Francisco event in mid-October,  I thought I’d finally get my act together and and write this post. Robin’s specialty, as everyone who’s ever met her already knows, is planning. She’ll be speaking in breakout sessions that focus on proper planning for long term travel. My breakouts will be about budgeting and saving for an extended break from work (my experience has come in handy these past few months!), and I plan to provide my audience with something useful.

I’ve put the finishing touches on my patent-pending long term travel budgeting tool and will now proceed to share it with the world:

Budget spreadsheet for a Round-the-World Trip

Click the image above to download the Excel file, or click on this link: TRAVEL_BUDGET if the image doesn’t work.  The tool’s premise is rather simple: you’ll need the same basic things in all countries (food, lodging, transportation) and those items are proportional to the country’s cost of living.  Other costs are not scaled by the country’s cost of living (airplane tickets to the country, internal flights that are purchased before arrival, and big expenses (wildlife safaris, treks, etc.)) and are most likely known ahead of time.

So, to obtain an accurate total cost for a long-term trip, simply choose your countries, enter the number of nights & class of meals & class of accommodation, estimate the COLA (an intelligent, well-researched estimate will suffice), and voilà: a complete budget. There are a few other things that you’ll need to figure out, but it’s all explained in the Excel spreadsheet. Let me know if you spot any errors.