How'd this HAPPEN even

Moving on to Norway in a post in the next day or two while real-time Pat finally settles into America after a whirlwind bachelor weekend in Kentucky (technically also part of America). In the meantime, this is a post I started writing a few weeks ago after a family friend asked how I planned the trip.

It occurred to me that I hadn't gone through the logistics of the trip in this space, so that's what this post will be about. I'll use a later post to talk about how I handle my trip research (deeply uninteresting!) but this is just about how long-term travel was even a possibility. I guess the hope is for people to jump if they ever get the weirdly specific set of circumstances that made this a possibility? Slogging through these things after the jump...



Rules of thumb for not ruining your financial future with long-term travel

1. Keep a budget. Trip budgets can always be wonky, and sometimes that's good! You want to leave some room for the unexpected, but for long-term travel it's best to think of the trip as an extension of your normal budgeting routines. Break it down into housing, food, entertainment, whatever makes sense to you. Keep a slush fund. There will be expenses you don't think about that have to find room somewhere, and opportunities that you didn't foresee that require a bit of cash, so keep a little back every month for that.
2. If you don't have rent or a mortgage back home, life on the road starts making a lot more financial sense. This is especially true if your usual budget is scaled to the stupid rent levels of, say, the Boston metro region. Once I realized I could get out of my lease for the summer and move everything I owned into a storage unit for about $100/mo, it suddenly meant that I could look for accommodations on the road that matched my rent on a day-to-day basis (about $50/night).
3.  Going slow is easier than moving quickly. This is always true - plane and train tickets are a big expense and if you're moving between spots once every week or so, your costs will drop compared to a whistle-stop tour where you jump a train every other day. It's especially true in the AirBnB age thanks to long-stay discounts. It's not uncommon to get 15% discounts for weeklong stays, and 35-65% discounts for monthlong stays. That's how Vienna worked out to be half the cost of my Boston apartment, and how every other country worked out to be the same or slightly less.
4. Remote income is rare, but it happens. The real unicorn factor in this trip is that it timed out to right when my program provides a dissertation fellowship - basically funding to bridge the gap between your prospectus being approved and the fall in which you'll either be TAing for your last year or adjuncting while you write. Most annoying professional travel bloggers talk about how great it is to find a job where you can do your [graphic design/web design/assassinations] from anywhere on the planet, but for most of us it's never going to happen. This is the one time in my life that I lucked into that, supplemented with some long-distance tutoring via Skype/other chat apps.
5. Budget like a normal human. Most traditional vacations are: stay in a hotel, eat meals out, do fun stuff, take tours, etc. And the thing is, you can still do some of that stuff on a long-term trip, but you have to balance it. I cooked my own meals I'd say 80-90% of the time, which meant that - just like in America - I was eating out once a week for most of the trip. If you can stretch your dollar for the everyday routine stuff, you have more to use on occasional splurges - food tours, nice (rather than utilitarian) meals out, museums that cost a bit but are worth the investment, stuff like that. Juuuust like normal life, but in different places!
6. Follow the local scene. Most cities have free days for certain museums, and most cities have specific ways that residents save here and there. Sometimes that's about the fact that they still serve workers' lunches for 3-5 Euro, sometimes it's about the fact that the Italian government regulates the price of coffee when you're standing at the bar. But finding those patterns both feels like you're closer to the pulse of the life of a city and keeps your costs down. This also means take public transit or walk if that's what most people do - or rent a bike for a few days if you're in Copenhagen or Amsterdam. IT'S FUN.
7. Take advantage of being in Europe in general (if that's where you are). Public transit is pretty inexpensive depending on the city. If you have a phone where you can swap in European sim cards, you will save significantly over US carrier prices (in the UK you can get 12 gigs of data, plus talk/text, for $25/month). Grocery stores are as cheap (sometimes cheaper!) as in the States, but full of local products that give you variety as you travel, and again, the local scene will instruct you because what products everybody eats/drinks will be astonishingly cheap. I am ruined for cheese/beer/wine pricing in the US, and would be ruined for the price of tubes of fish egg paste if I had enjoyed that at all.
8. Pace yourself. Financially, gastronomically, emotionally, physically. I wasn't great at the last of these (my body is still recovering from 3+ months of 8-10 hour days of walking being more common than not) but it's generally the case that if you're moving slow, it helps a lot to give yourself permission to take a day to just sit at home, do your work, and zone out. This doesn't really explicitly impact the financial picture, but it does help to keep you from going into dazed-tourist spend-your-way-out mode, and that is a great mode to never be in everrrrrr
9. Friends are laid-back and fine and mellow and pro-fi-ta-ble. This is a no-brainer, but if you have friends who live in other parts of the world and those friends have been telling you to come visit them for forever, take them up on it. It'll be amazing, they'll be good for your heart, you'll get a little bit more into the veins of a place than you would on your own, and you'll save some cash on your crash pads. It's kind of totally beside the point, but if we're talking realistically about how I was able to pull this trip off, that's a part of it! (Same deal goes if you have friends who want to meet up on the road. Any stop where you're splitting an AirBnB between two folk suddenly gets way more affordable.)
10. Plan stuff in advance. I'll get more into this in that later logistical post, but it's good to do your legwork in advance to avoid the most frustrating of vacation expenses (see above re spending your way out of situations). Low-cost flights and long-haul train tickets can be crazy cheap if you book far enough in advance. That said, here again you want to balance stuff, because while your long hops want to be cheap and pre-planned, you'll be a lot smarter and better at handling the day-to-day planning when you're actually on the ground.

To me this all seems kind of obvious and maybe it is, but since the question has come up a few times as to how this was even feasible, I thought I'd leave the big-picture pointers as they made sense to me! On the whole, I spent 3 1/2 months in Europe and broke even on the trip thanks to a lot of these approaches. Which is insane. So again: gratitude and joy and acknowledging that this is never going to happen ever agaaaaain!