Starting to Save

Tomorrow is a landmark for my wife and I. We've talked about an RTW trip for about 2-3 years now and the plan has always been that she needed to graduate college (happened in May) and then work for about 3 years so that she settled a bit into her profession.

Well, she started working in June and with all the craziness of the marriage (end of May), honeymoon (end May/beginning June), her starting work, the graduation, getting her moved in etc, we are finally settled.

With this, tomorrow our first transfer into our 'RTW Account' will occur. With this came a VERY surprising feeling for me... some level of trepidation. We've been saying '3 years after she graduates' for a long time and now, it's 35/34 months. The countdown has started! Who would have thought I would have any apprehension. Anyway, I'm still very excited, the unexpected reaction just makes this more fun for me.

For those interested:
Where: ING Orange Savings - 1.4% APR - Money Market Account
How much: $1670/month for the next 35 months
Total Savings: $61363.83 (assuming the above rates stay the same)

We are also saving in a different account a 'return fund'

Cheers to making it all happen!

Congratulations. I couldn't imagine saving for three years. It's hard enough for me to save for one year. But I've been ambitiously saving for the past 7 months and I hope to depart early 2010. I've been sacrificing all of my material desires for the "big trip" and now I'm putting away nearly 90% of my net income. It feels damn good inside everytime I transfer into the RTW account because I know the sweat, blood and tears will pay off the day I get on the plane.

Good luck. Besides your return fund how much would you like to reserve for your trip? If you don't mind me asking.

We are hoping to get the most out our trip and will likely end up doing many tours and the like, plus plan to stay in single rooms (in hostels), on the trip.

As such we are targeting $60,000 total for the trip with a $20,000 - $30,000 return fund.

We're aware that this is likely much more than will be needed (I'm expecting it to cost about 45/50k) but I'd prefer to be able to do things like the African safari, fly out to the Galapagos islands, and take the tour of Chernobyl for example. So I prefer safe than sorry.

While you may not be able to fathom saving for so long I can't fathom socking away the 90%! Best of luck to you. Just goes to show there are many ways to get there.

congrats! best of luck to you two!

i also can't imagine saving for three years. i'm too flightly and three years to a twenty-something is a lifetime. whenever i'm determined though, i can put away huge sums every month and live off of beans and rice for lunch. i have a one track-mind i guess.

61k is more than enough for a great rtw trip with some cushion to get back on your feet when you return...if you return.

I'm trying to save as well, my target's 35-40k in 3-4 years. Feels like a lifetime away

Good luck to you and your wife!

K2 wrote:I'm trying to save as well, my target's 35-40k in 3-4 years. Feels like a lifetime away

I recommend the auto deductions to an entirely different account. I find I adjust my spending to how much money is in the accounts. This way I never miss it.

I plan on traveling around the world for a year in 5 years. Yeah, I know it's ages away and I know that no one knows what the future will bring. But you know what? It's having the plan, the goal, the dream that sustains me, that gives my life meaning. I will of course take smaller trips, but I just love the planning stage (and 5 years certainly is a long time to plan). I love learning languages, getting in shape, hosting others, really getting to know my local area, researching, seeing my savings grow, being frugal, reading blogs, realizing what's important to me....I'm not waiting for life to happen in 5 years, it's happening now and it's really good.

dove wrote:I know it's ages away and I know that no one knows what the future will bring.

Keep it up, we've been thinking about/planning the trip for a long time and it is still 3 years out for use. Once we get going with will have been 5-6 years since we started thinking about the trip.

You can do it, we love the planning as well. Best of luck!

dove wrote:. But you know what? It's having the plan, the goal, the dream that sustains me, that gives my life meaning.

Totally agree with you 100% on that one.

dorofino, congrats! We began saving 2 1/2 years ago for our long trip --- and in exactly 1 month we will be leaving. I have two pieces of advice for you: (1) when you buy things from now on, remember that everything you buy will likely end up in storage; and (2) to keep yourself motivated, read RTW blogs and start dreaming about your trip and take some short trips too.

I think putting the money into its own fund is a great idea; we did the same thing and it helped us keep track of our goals. When we first started planning this trip, we projected the same amounts that you did: 60,000 for the trip + 24,000 for when we come back. In reality, we have been able to save much more than planned because we just stopped buying things after we realized that everything we bought would end up sitting in storage.

The Road Forks wrote:We began saving 2 1/2 years ago for our long trip --- and in exactly 1 month we will be leaving.

CONGRATS!!!! That's a LONG time you've saved up there my friend. Care to share your itinerary and monthly/country budget, if you don't mind?

I think this is a great thread.

HOWEVER, don't completely strip down your life to save up. I know how it is to save up for one of these trips. I've done it. I think that I would have done it a little differently now. I wouldn't have deprived myself of so much to make it happen because the current situation is just as important as the one you are working towards.

Dorofino, maybe you aren't living like paupers. But with three years to go, that's a lot of forgoing things for a distant goal. My no means am I belittling it. I think this is fabulous. But, the present is just as much your life as the exciting future life you want.

Good luck!!!

PhotoChick

Best of luck for both of you!

I'm thinking of doing the same...

Thanks! It's hard to believe that we are leaving in two weeks. Our itinerary is located on our site here: http://www.theroadforks.com/worldtrip

We didn't create a country-by-country budget. Instead, we looked at a whole bunch of other RTWers who did similar trips and decided that we can comfortably do our trip for about $5,000 per month. So, our goal was to save $60,000. However, once we started saving, we built in a travel cushion of $12,000 (not including our "return" money) so if we end up spending $6,000 per month, we're not too worried. We are going to some expensive countries --- like Japan, Australia, and New Zealand (and potentially South Africa for the World Cup) --- so we wanted to have the money to go to these places. We are planning on using frequent flier miles for several of our legs so that should also help us save money (we both travel for business so we have a lot of ff miles).

Those seem like serious budgets you all have! My husband and I got back from travelling for 2 years just before last Christmas. We had just under $35,000 when we left.
We spent a month in Scotland, 4 months in East Africa, about 8 months in SE Asia, a few months in Australia (where we got jobs very easily in Perth) which allowed us to save for the last leg of our trip in NZ, Tonga, Samoa & Las Vegas, and then driving back to Toronto through the states.
You can easily get by in SE Asia on less than $1000 per month. Way less when you are a couple. And that wasn't sacrificing anything.
China was a bit more costly, but we still didn't miss out on anything we really wanted to do.
In NZ we Wwoofed which helped us to spend basically nothing the entire time, but we had the BEST experience and still saw a lot of the country. Our hosts all rocked and really showed us their areas. We splurged on a couple things - (If you are there when "WOW" is happening go see it in Wellington it is awesome). If I went back to Australia I would wwoof there too for sure.
Tonga and Samoa, again were cheap - they seemed even cheaper coming from OZ and NZ!
East Africa was pricey, and we were lucky enough to have people to stay with for 3 months. But still, You can get by on less then $60ooo for sure.
We skipped Japan because of how pricey we heard it is and we're saving for it now. We figure $11,000 for a month there + now we'll have a 14month old with us (an awesome surprising souvenir from our RTW trip!! Anyone have any info about budgeting for Japan it would be much appreciated. A lot of people say it is $$$$, while others say it isn't really. From what I've looked at in Guidebooks it is pretty money.

Anyway, Good luck on all your trips. It was the absolute greatest experience and I can't wait for us to take our little guy on many more of them!!