As soon as we took Megatrip public last week, a lot of questions understandably came flooding in. Where are you going? How long are you traveling? What about being in the stall next to yours makes you think I want to hear about this? But after we responded to all those questions in full, transparent detail, the topic of budget usually came up.
Now, we’re not going to write too much about trip budgeting on this site, because A. It’s already very well covered in countless other travel blogs that are considered more “successful”, “articulate” and “unbad”, B. I really don’t find it very interesting to write about, and C. I think to focus on daily dollar amounts and alleys where you can sell bodily fluids for beer money is to limit your view of all that a travel budget really encompasses, and in doing so it skips over a fundamental question: What effect does the vector of your travel have on your spend? Have you appropriately mapped budget to geography? We’re talking about the space-currency continuum here. Shoestring theory. Schrodinger’s wallet.
When you have a fixed budget of X thoundred dollars, pace is a key variable in your spending equation. One week in Switzerland could easily buy 4 weeks in Vietnam and still have money left to go for 1 day shipping. So if you plan your trip to increase in expensiveness as you go (i.e. begin in Bargainesville before exploring Overpriceland), you’re more likely to pace yourself to still have a bank account by the end of your trip.
The notion of intentionally ramping up the priciness of a trip as you go might sound counterintuitive, but if we were to reverse Megatrip’s trajectory and start in expensive-ass Europe, we’d be setting ourselves up for a tense wallet/traveler relationship by the time we got to SE Asia. Passive aggression, abusive language, low intimacy levels; It wouldn’t be pretty, and no wallet deserves to be treated that way. The fact is that some locations are easier to budget than others, and for us at least, it makes sense start with those so that we’re already saving by the time we get to the pricey regions.
Wait, you say. Why don’t you just set a reasonable daily budget from the outset, stick to it, and not have to worry about spending yourself into an inescapable hole later in your trip? Well, fictional question asker, if we were responsible enough to do that, we probably wouldn’t have just quit our jobs to travel the world. So jokes on you. I think…
Budget is more than dollars, cents, and daily allowances. And looking at your expenses from a different angle can uncover new ways to stretch them further. Just don’t look for too long. Unless of course you take pleasure in witnessing them disappear before your eyes.
