Travel Support Thursday

travel Thursday. Come on, get into it. Travel Thursday. Oh, man, that jingle's just got to go.

Okay, so welcome back to Travel Support Thursday. This is number two of our series of Quit Your

Job Travel the World. Between the two of us, we have quit our jobs to travel the world five

total times. Once for me, four for him. Yeah. And, you know, we're pretty good at it by now.

It's a thing that we're pretty good at. Is that a good thing to say we're good at quitting our

jobs? I'm also not sure. I'm also not sure. But what we can do is we can help you out there.

Do the same thing if that's the thing that you're into being able to like leave your job

for a little while, whether it's sabbatical and go and see Europe for three months or go on a big

crazy one-year trip around the world or just free up enough time to be able to do whatever

you want to do in your life that isn't work. And that's all that we're going to be talking about

for the foreseeable future of this podcast channel. And the hope is really just to share

our experience in a way that feels transparent and attainable for anyone just trying to make a

big shift in their lives, even if it isn't to go and travel the world or even if it isn't to

quit your job and burn your nine to five. And also, it's a little bit because we need to use

these microphones for our podcast. They're really fun. We bought these fancy microphones. We've

got to use them. We've got to get our money. And a little bit so that I could sing the jingle.

Oh, yeah, the jingle. So in last week's episode, we talked about the why. Why would someone quit

their job and travel the world, which generally breaks up people into two camps. Camp one is like,

why wouldn't you? Of course you're going to do it. And that's probably you if you're listening to

this thing. And camp number two is like, that sounds crazy and like it's going to be way too

expensive. And also seems like it's going to ruin your entire career and everything else.

Yeah. So we talked a little bit about like our personal motivations, what got us to the point

of saying we have to do this. Got a little heavy last week. I don't know that it will this time.

But today, we're talking about the logistics. We're getting into the logistics. And I think

when we first quit our jobs to travel the world, I think our first inclination was to ask,

how much is this going to cost? Because we needed to save for that.

Yeah. And I think that that's one of the very few questions that you have. And I think the

question that we got asked the most from everyone else around us as soon as we announced to our

friends and family, like, hey, we're going to go quit our jobs, travel the world. They're like,

how much does that cost? And that's what we're going to answer. And we're just going to get

right to it a little over $40,000 for the two of us to be able to travel for a full year. I'm not

a big fan of just like hanging out numbers and just like waiting till the end of the episode.

You're not a big fan of pausing at all. It's just like straight to it. $40,000.

True story. On our fifth date, Josh gifted me a book about financial planning. What was the book?

It was Ramit Sates. Yes. Yes. I will teach you how to be rich.

I mean, it was relative to what we were talking about.

She had talked about it, but it was not totally unprompted. I didn't just present you this random

book. We talked about it and you were like, I'm worried. I don't know very much about finances

and it was the best finance book I could find, okay? It was a great book. Okay.

So if you're new here, either on audio or on YouTube, thanks for joining us. We make travel

YouTubes. YouTube. We make travel YouTube. And we're so freaking good at it, as you can tell.

We make travel YouTube videos, but specifically on a budget because we're very, very, very budget.

Yes. Very thrifty. Absolutely. Very thrifty. Love a good deal.

And what kicked off this whole thing was we decided to quit our jobs to travel the world

and take a honeymoon, a very long honeymoon, a one-year honeymoon that has since evolved into

this, where we now travel the world on a budget and we now make a living off of it

on YouTube. Long story short, in 2021, we took our one-year honeymoon, documented it all on

YouTube. And when we came back, we summarized and broke down all the expenses for that one-year

trip in a YouTube video. You can find it in the link in the description.

Definitely, link down in the description. But yes, all of that is to say we spent,

the exact number was $40,064.96. This was in 2021, so 2021 to 2022. So mind inflation

because eggs and stuff has been rising like crazy. Am I right? We didn't buy a lot of eggs on the

trip. No, almost none. So let me give you just a real quick overview about what this trip was.

So we started off the trip by flying to Rome in summer of 2021,

and then we bought a three-month-long year-rail pass and just went to all the big cities in

Europe that you can think of. We just tooled around on this year-rail pass going everywhere.

Eating all the pizza, all the pasta, all the delicious breads, having the most amazing time

in Europe during the summer. We got to the Camino de Santiago.

Yes. And then right after that, we started our Southeast Asia leg of the trip, which I think

we kicked off in Singapore first. And then up to Thailand after that, traveled around there for a

couple months between Thailand and Malaysia, and then eventually made our way down to Australia

a couple months later, drove a camper van, even though it was like flooding to basically as

far as we could for like 20 days across Australia, which was amazing. We went to Bali, and then I

think we ended in South Korea almost a year later. Yeah, 351 days later, the end of our

trip in South Korea. That was our last day before we came home after that. And by came home, I mean

like we'd arrived back and then immediately made plans to go and travel some more as quickly as

we could. Because we were living on other people's couches. Yes, and we were totally out of money.

So we needed to solve a couple other problems. And that trip in itself was amazing, and I would

say totally unexpected for us at that point in time. We had been saving up for it, but our plan

to go on this trip, we came up with and we literally quit our jobs a month before COVID hit.

I mean, and that seems like eons ago. And honestly, I know it's a tough spot to think about,

like COVID was just a rough time for everybody and their moms. And yeah, we're looking at our

spreadsheet and our plans for when we intended to start the trip, or like before we knew what was

going to happen in 2020, right? We were planning to get married in 2020, and then start our trip

in 2020. And then we didn't end up going until 2021. Anyway, a lot of our plans ended up changing

because of the pandemic and where we could go and could not go. But that number, $40,000 is

pretty representative of like, I think what we were intending and what we were planning even

before we knew about the pandemic. Yeah. And I actually re-ran all those numbers

in preparation for this podcast of what it costs today in 2025. And hold on, let me bring that up.

So you can tell I'm a bit of a numbers person. So starting today, like if you left on your

one year round the world trip today, and you did that exact same thing three months across Europe,

another like three to five months across Southeast Asia, and then another couple of months across

Oceania up to South Korea and Japan, et cetera. And then all the way like even back adding a

little bit more on top of that, which was our original plan, coming back going to Vancouver,

going to Machu Picchu, going to like Rio de Janeiro for a little while. I'm like, I want to do this

trip. Yeah, basically a full year round the world trip to all the places that a lot of people go

costs about $48,000 for two people. So that means $24,000 per person. That's the most recent numbers

that I have after literally re-running every single number for every single flight based on the day,

every hotel, every hostel, every blah, blah, blah, the whole thing. And is this still taking

to account the fact that we are cheapo? Yes. So this is yeah. And I think it's, I think it's

worth describing like the type of trip that we have. Yes. Because we weren't doing like the most

budget thing. We could have saved a lot of money by staying in hostels, probably in sleeping in

bunk beds everywhere that we went, but that just wasn't the type of trip that we imagined for our

honeymoon. I mean, we definitely did stay in a lot of hostels, especially in Europe, where hotels

and private rooms were just way more expensive. And I remember staying in a lot more hostels in

like, I remember staying in a lot more hostels in Portugal, in Spain, along the Camino de Santiago,

and where else? Yeah. Japan, South Korea, those were very expensive. But that's true. That's a

good point. We tend to, if you don't watch our channel, please do. But if you don't watch our

channel, the way that we kind of approach traveling is we're there for the experiences we love being

in a place like just getting to be in a country, in a new country, in a new city is generally like

good enough for us. It feels amazing enough. And then when we think about accommodations,

we're usually on the budget side, but we do like to spend a little bit more, spend a little bit

more to have a private room. And then for food, I think we tend to be way more cheap than most people.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you round out this number, right, this $40,000 or $47,000 as it is

today, break it down per day. Hold on, I'm good at math. Hold on. It's like between $125 and $150

per day. We'll get you a hotel and like two meals out a day and then one meal eaten inside of your

hotel like from a grocery store or something like that. All the flights that you need to get from

place to place, all the buses, all the trains, all the whatever. All the visas. All the visas, yes.

And then also like one major activity per day. If that's like your thought process, that number

is going to be pretty much dead on for what you're trying to do today. And I would say in general,

like when I look back on that one year trip and still to this day, we're generally not people

that splurge on tours or activities as much. We'll try to do one every few days in a new

location. But we try to keep things generally pretty budget. Yeah. Yeah. And there are ways also to

cut this number down, but we're going to talk in depth about that in future episodes.

There are ways to cut. There are definitely ways to splurge. For sure. Way more ways to splurge.

We probably don't know them that well though. So when we first put this plan together was like

2019, something like that. How did you feel about the initial number that came out and how did you

feel about our chances of actually saving that amount of money up? Well, if I'm remembering

correctly, I actually think we predicted that we were going to spend $35,000. Yeah, about 100 bucks

a day for just under a year. And then so like we were close, but $5,000 over. But I remember

we were aggressively saving just in case. The initial number felt very large. Yeah. Because like

We were at zero. Outside of, I mean, no, that is the most money I've ever spent on anything. Granted,

it is over the span of a year, but it is the largest number that I had seen for anything that

we were going to pay for. At this point in time, we didn't really own anything. The most expensive

thing that I owned was maybe, no, I didn't even own my laptop, it's for more. Yeah, we had like a

$4,000 car that we needed and ended up selling to go on this trip faster. We rented our apartment,

which was pretty expensive, but we didn't own it. Yeah, it was a big number. And for a lot of people,

$40,000 is a salary, a year's salary. For sure. For sure. And I think at that point in time,

we had just like both you and I were at $0 saved. We had started at zero, which I think is a

privileged position to be in these days for sure. We weren't in debt. We weren't in a mountain of

debt when either of us had student loans. We pay them off. Yeah. Yes. But it is still possible to

do this with student loans. In fact, I've gone on round the world trips with people who were

actively paying off student loans. There's ways to like restructure them to make that easier.

Rameet set these books. Sure. That's a good place to start.

He actually was, that book actually helped me make a plan to aggressively pay off my student loans.

Anyway, I digress. I think for us, coming up with this goal, this plan, this number,

just having that in our minds as something that we were working towards made it so much easier,

because without it, you're just saving for something. Some amount for who knows how long.

But having this pretty clear idea, which we're going to go through in future episodes of exactly

how we got to this number, and we're going to literally build a trip step by step

and price out everything. But having this number, this goal, this $40,000 or $47,000 that we've

now told you was how much it costs for two people to go on a pretty nice stay in hotels most of the

time, eat at restaurants a decent amount of time, fly basically anywhere you want,

round the world trip, still on a budget. Having a goal seemed like it locked something into our

minds where all of a sudden, everything else that was happening in our lives just took a backseat

to just make this number happen. That is, I think, the type of mindset that you need to have to

really go on a trip. Yeah, it almost felt like the quest to go on the trip to go backseat once we

had this number, because then it became quest to reach this number, then we can take the quest

to travel around the world. And I think, I mean, it's interesting because in the last few years

of doing this, we've met so many kinds of travelers, we've met some travelers who've done this exact

same thing. But I will also preface that we are the kind of people that generally like to have

more planned than none. We've met people who say they just did it, they just quit their jobs and

left, they just quit their jobs, traveled the world until their money ran out, or they just

quit their jobs, traveled the world and worked until their money ran out, and then like to kind

of go with the flow. I would preface that we are just not that good at going with the flow in that

regard. True. And also our intention was to not work at all during that entire year, that to have

zero income for that entire year. And that might be also what you're hoping to do, but I think for

a lot of people, they're going to come up with some sort of plan to still be making money or have

some sort of income as they're traveling. Yeah, I think it's, and I say this only with no judgment

or no, you know, like opinion one way or the other, but mostly just to say that we tend to be the

kind of people that like to have that cushion. Yes. Like, I don't know that I would have been able

to just quit my job and travel the world with no idea if we would have enough money. To me,

that's just not secure or safety, but I wish I could be that breezy and brave, but I'm not.

All right. So let me give you some other numbers real quick. Three months across Europe for two

people, I just added this one up as well, and we're going to go into each of these in detail in

future episodes, but I just want to give like an overview, a goal, a number, and then we'll show you

how we got there later. Josh loves the numbers. So this is like flying to Paris,

train to Brussels, off to Amsterdam, through Germany, heck, why not just go to Oktoberfest,

Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Santorini, Athens, fly to Switzerland, do the whole Italy thing,

Rome, Venice, Florence, off to Portugal, up through Spain, Madrid and Barcelona, over to Bordeaux,

I mean, why not do a little bit of wine tasting, up to London, Dublin, and then fly back home.

And this is a three month, three month thing, which I think a lot of people dream of this

like three month backpacking across Europe. And that for two people is $12,200. So that means

you and your partner, whoever you're going with, if you are going with somebody else,

you each need to save up about six grand to be able to do a backpacking trip across Europe together.

And if you're doing it by yourself, it's about $9,000. So you do save it.

So it's not half, but it's the accommodation really.

The accommodations, yeah, the 100% accommodations. And the flights.

So different one, three months across Asia, flying to Tokyo, go to Osaka, go to Kyoto,

fly to Hong Kong, over to Taipei, why not? Hey, let's go hang out in Bali for like a week and

then do a little Singapore trip and then might as well keep going up from Malaysia all the way

up there, Kuala Lumpur to Langkawi, Thailand, Siem Reap for a little while, take a train all

the way across Vietnam for a bit, fly to Seoul to finish up the trip and then back home. That

experience costs about the same as three months in Europe. It's about $11,000.

What about Central and South America? I have not added those up yet, but I'm going to.

I don't know what the, what do you think is a typical three months long tourist path

in Central and South America? I don't know. We have traveled through

bits and not a ton, but we have traveled through Central and South America a little bit,

pre-YouTube and Mexico, but we've never done like a chunk of like three months there.

Yeah. I bet that would be easy to figure out.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll, we'll solve that in one of the future ones. So there's all sorts of different

like scopes of these trip, right? Like you don't have to go on this like gigantic granddaddy like

year trip away to like five different continents. There's a lot, like three months across Europe

is awesome and such a good break. And I think a really good chunk of time for a lot of people

who want to make like a big shift in their life, but don't necessarily want to like

leave the entire old career behind, which I think is kind of a cost that you can have

if you take a whole year away depending on like what job you're in.

And I also think it's important to state too that there are all different kinds of

travelers as far as pace goes. Yes. Like speaking on terms of pace, like slowing

down your travels significantly lowers the cost. Yes. And we are not slow travelers.

And that is also a thing that I think we, we, we recognize and we are aware of where

ABM will always be moving. But pace also matters, I think in this budget.

Yeah. By the way, if you want to see all these spreadsheets and like poke through them

yourselves, you just got to go to Lisa and Josh.com, our website. And we're going to put

the link down in the description. And there's a travel budget planner in there. Just like

go there and download it and you can page through all these numbers.

Play around with it. Yeah. Yeah. So you can see what we're talking about. But

I think knowing, okay, so three months somewhere with me and somebody else is going to cost about

$6,000. Somebody else. No, like, you know, I'm talking as the viewer.

You said me. And pointed to yourself.

You know what I'm saying, you know. And then, so cost between $5,000 or $6,000 per person

to be able to do a trip like that. And then two people going on this massive one-year thing is

going to cost about $24,000 per person. And then scaling that back even a little bit

of just doing one month. Let's say that all you wanted to do was take off one month and go to

Europe. That's about $3,500 to $4,500 depending on which countries you go to for just one person.

And then if you scale it up to two people, it's like $7,000. And then Southeast Asia,

it's a little bit less expensive than that, but you end up paying more in flights. So it

ends up to be just about... Depending on where you're coming from.

And I think those numbers are a lot more realistic for a lot of people to get into,

to try this out. Because honestly, you might get three months into a trip and be like,

that's enough traveling for me. I feel like I did a lot, been changing cities every four

or five days for the past three months. And I'm just a little tired. Maybe it's time to go back

home. And I think that's a perfect taster trip to just pick a continent and just do whatever

you're interested in that continent for a handful of months as your first trip.

Well, and I think most importantly, that number is just way more digestible. That number is way

more digestible than thinking about traveling for three months somewhere or five months somewhere,

a whole year somewhere. And it's certainly more digestible than a $40,000 trip.

And I think that one of the big reasons that we were comfortable with saving up for like the big

$40,000 that we ended up doing was because I think we both knew what sacrifices were required.

We both knew what it was going to take, how much we were going to have to cut back about everything.

And that was comfortable for us because we're both just kind of budget focused.

But I think to backtrack a little bit, one thing that was really helpful to also make this number

more digestible and the quest more feel like something that I could actually attain was us

regularly checking in on our budget normally, like our life budget. And I think this is,

we don't want to get too much into the finance part of life outside of travel.

But I do think something that helps me personally when making big purchases or even going on

trips like this is we regularly check in and look at all of our accounts, see how much we're

spending every month, what we're spending a lot on, what we're not spending a lot on,

rent, all of that, gas, all of that. And seeing that number in comparison to this helped a lot

because when we were living in the Bay Area at the time working our nine to fives, we were spending

$4,000 sometimes a month.

Easily, four or 5,000, it's just so expensive to live there. And I'm sure a lot of you out there

live in expensive places and even at the cheapest places in the US, you're still spending a couple

of grand a month. So then when I compare that $4,000 a month to $40,000 divided by 12, that's

like $3,000 to $4,000, like $3,000, I think, huh, oh, okay, I know what that's like then.

I know what to compare it to.

Traveling the world full-time is for sure cheaper than living at home in a lot of places in the

United States. For us, it was for sure. And that was a surprising realization.

Yes. Okay, so that's the numbers for like moving super fast, going like four or five days

into every single place, bop, bop, bop, jumping around. Now, if you slow down like what Lisa

was talking about before, if you slow down and you spend maybe like two weeks per place and

you end up going to let's say half as many places or one third as many places, you end up reducing

this flight cost by a huge amount. And then your overall trip for two people goes down to about

$28,000 instead of $47,000. If you just slow down and you rent Airbnbs for a longer period

of time that are cheaper, that cost reduces substantially. The thing that we wanted to do

was do like a sampler platter. We just wanted to see everything.

Of the whole world. And we were like kind of FOMO, just letting, driving us to go and like see,

but we're going to spend four days there and then we're going to quick run over there and then

we're going to go to Seoul and then we might as well fly from Seoul all the way up here.

It's that fear, fear slash excitement that we were talking about last week, that fear of missing

out and the fear of like, what if we can't go to these places? But I think to each their own.

To each their own. Yes. So just know that if you out there are more interested in slower travel,

which is generally not the type of travel that we do, that is like way cheaper, like 40% cheaper

than doing it this fast way than what we had prescribed before.

This is a good point for us to also write down, we should reach out to our friends who

slow travel and our friends who specifically we've, you know, the YouTube travel sphere.

It's kind of fun. You kind of know in the same way that you guys have probably heard of a lot of

the same travel YouTubers that traveling in different areas at the same time. I'd be curious

to hear from the travelers who are living in a place like we on this trip, we did stay in Thailand

for a month and that was the longest place that we'd ever stayed somewhere. We saved a bunch of

money by just getting an apartment for a month and traveling around from there. But we know people

who have moved to Thailand for like a year. This is just a note for us and also viewers out there

and listeners out there tell us if this is something you're interested in. If you'd like to hear

from other kinds of travelers that aren't the ABM like us. Always be moving. Yeah. I mean,

just to give you an example, that one month in Chiang Mai, food, transportation, motorbike,

everything all included was just under $1,000. It was $950 for that whole thing, which is crazy.

So if you can imagine like that sort of lifestyle where you're hunkering down in cheaper locations

for long periods of time, you really can travel for a super long period of time without spending

that much money. Yeah. There's a lot of different ways to do these trips and we are eventually

going to go through every single one of them in detail of how we would think about it.

Maybe we'll bring on some experts. We definitely will. Okay. So at this point in our story,

right, like we just, we had this number, this goal of we need to get about $35,000, so $40,000.

Okay. How the heck do you do that? And that's what we're going to be talking about in the next

episode is exactly all of the lifestyle changes that we had to make to go from honestly like

the way that we were living where we weren't saving anything on your average month to where

two months later, we were saving about 70% of all the money that was coming in and shoving

that directly towards this gigantic dream that we were trying to make come true. And there were a

lot of changes that we had to make. And some of those changes may or may not include $5 rotisserie

chicken. Oh man, we're going to talk about Costco chicken so much. All right. That is it for this

podcast. We'll see you guys next time. Bye. New shirt.