The Big Announcement

Blake and I aren’t going on the huge 1-year RTW trip. After careful consideration (behind the scenes type of stuff that you don’t get a chance to see on the blog postings,) we decided that with our addiction to travel, we needed to adjust some things. Some of the plans that we’ve discussed are outlined as follows:

The “1 Year RTW” Plan:

Most of our readers are familiar with this plan. This plan would require Blake and I to save about $40,000 USD in 12 months. We would then use this money to not only support our vagabonding lifestyle, but our stable lifestyle at home. Blake and I own a condo, and to make it appealing to a renter, we thought we’d rent it for a decent price. Having a solid renter and offering our condo at a great price meant that we would have to “pay in” a bit. We were accounting for $400 per month to offset our HOA fee, property tax, homeowner’s insurance, etc.

The bottom line is that Blake and I have been scrounging for every penny, and though we are on schedule, it’s been kind of difficult these past few months. We haven’t gone out once, we hardly have any time together during the week, etc.

The “2 Year – or However Long – RTW” Plan:

Blake was a large proponent of this plan. This is similar to the first plan mentioned, but rather than going around the world and traveling nonstop, this plan would fuse traveling with working. I don’t exactly know how long we would have been gone, but it seems as thought we would travel until we found a cool place to stay for a while. At that point, we would rent a room and work in order to supplement our daily budget allotment. We might teach English in one country while working as farmers in another.

The “Postpone the Trip So We Can Save More” Plan:

This is the one option we may still use. Blake has always been a proponent of saving for two years rather than one. This way, we would lead a stress free life on the road because we would have enough money to not only do all of the things we would want to do while traveling, but we would also have enough money to keep up the condo. If there were a few months between renters or if the water heater busted, we would have enough money to pay for it. Not to mention, the trip could be for as long as we’d like.

The “Do What We Want, When We Want” Plan:

This is the only plan in which we wouldn’t have to quit our jobs. Currently, this is the plan we have switched to. There are quite a few places Blake and I still want to see and yet, we still want to have a house and a family one day. In an effort to bind these two lifestyles together, we came up with an idea that allows us to do what we want when we want. We don’t want to quit our jobs. Especially because they are decent jobs and they are allowing us to save so much in the first place. We will simply keep on saving and do small trips throughout the year while saving the larger ones for the summertime.

For example, we went to NYC for a couple days over the holidays. We’ve booked a trip to Paris, and later this April, we will head to Peru. In June, we have plans to go so Spain so that Blake can finish up his masters program, and since we don’t need to worry about renting out our condo for a year, we will be able to leave the day after school gets out. Since we will be in Madrid about three or four weeks before Blake’s school starts, we will stay in Madrid for a few days before going to Portugal and Morocco. Then, we will travel from Gibraltar back up to Salamanca.

This is probably the plan that requires the least amount of stress, and it seems to be the most flexible. We will spend less per year on traveling, which will allow us to also save for a house in the future.

The Bottom Line:

When we did a RTW trip in 2005, we came back and had to deal with the travel depression. We spent practically all of our money on that trip, and it took a long time for us to recover. Ever since we’ve gotten back, it has seemed like the only way we would ever be able to really travel and see everything we want to see is if we take the same kind of trip – one where we quit our jobs, spend a ton of money that we saved up, and just “go all out.” The only problem is that it’s like dumping all of your eggs in one basket rather than spreading them out over a period of time. I guess it just became apparent to us that we want to spread out our trips so that we always have something to look forward to and we can still have a life during the saving process.

No matter what, we’re happy with the new traveling path that we’ve chosen. It may change a bit in the years to come, but at least we have a few trips planned for the immediate future!

Tags: traveling plans, trip planning, ways to travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 11:18 am and is filed under Lindsey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.