The Harsh Reality of Running Out of Cash While We Travel

We want to let you know that if you don’t have money coming in while you are traveling and you are running off savings, you will soon notice the pace of money disappearing. So let’s talk about it … disappearing money.

The world is abundant, with so many opportunities, yet if you aren’t working to gain cash you are limited to your options. But options are exciting! We are really starting to understand that there’s a flip side to the saying “Money can’t bring you happiness.” Although it’s true, money alone cannot bring you happiness, we’ve found it sure does bring smiles, great food and freedom to experience new things. These are some of the luxuries of what we left behind to experiment on this trip.

We agreed that our budget for the entire trip would be a $100 per day for two people for one year which turns out to be $36,500 CAD in total. That seemed like a lot of money starting out but when you include flights across the ocean, currency exchange rates and fulfilling our daily basic needs, it quickly disappears.

Let’s give you an example in beautiful Amsterdam.

We were arriving from Berlin to meet our friends in Amsterdam on a
Saturday night.  They were working at a great Workaway in a kitchen where they marry the idea of social activist and fair food kitchen; so they had their accommodations already set.  Us on the other hand, came to realize that the cheapest hostel available on a Saturday night in Amsterdam was about $130 CAD for the two of us – and that was in a standard, six-bed, mixed dorm.  There goes our budget for the day, I guess we won’t be eating.

Luckily we were recommended to check out Camping Vliegenbos which was $30 CAD for the two of us since we had all our own camping gear.  YAY, we could eat bread and butter tonight!  But everything comes at a price, since we saved on accommodations we obviously had to compensate and were away from the heart of Amsterdam, so we needed to rent bicycles to get to and from where the action was – another $35 CAD per day.

So you can see how just our basic needs of accommodation, transportation and food are barely met by what we thought was a really healthy budget of $100 per day in countries like the Netherlands. That definitely leaves no fun tickets for museums, adventure tours, dinner and drinks or cruises down the river.

However for a brief history in time, long ago when we started this great adventure in Asia, we were ballers! Some days we would spend more and others we would spend near to nothing – at least we thought – sharing $1 CAD dinners between the two of us. But, nope that wasn’t the case!  It was difficult throughout Asia to find a kitchen in our hostels so eating out was our main option and it was fun! It gets you excited when you have so many unique foods to try, so we would always do tasting tours everywhere we went. We fell into the trap of how cheap Asia was and we ended up eating a lot because it was cheap, partying a lot because it was cheap, and traveling everywhere because it was cheap.

    WARNING!  When you are having a lot of fun, check the bank account. You may notice why you are having so much fun.

We’ll end it here and fill you in on our next post on the 5 BIGGEST Money Mistakes We’ve Made So Far in our journey. We’re 250 days into our trip and this is the first time we are feeling the crunch of having no money coming in.  That’s okay, bread and butter is starting to become our favorite date night dinner anyways.