Year 1 Nomad Travel Spend Report – Traveling the world for half of the cost of staying home

When we decided to get married and sell everything to travel the world, we knew that this new lifestyle was going to be fun, exciting but also cheaper than staying at home. What we did not know was how much cheaper it was going to be to live a very high quality of life where we would enjoy the local food scene, cook amazing meals, take regular getaway trips, spend time in nature, attend local shows/festivals and everything else you get the freedom to do when you decide to travel the world slowly.

As we are closing our first year of nomadic travel, I am digging into our finances to answer this question and the results are pretty exciting. In a nutshell in the last 12 months, we slow traveled to 10 locations in 5 countries for about half the cost of living in San Francisco. But more than reducing our spending, geo-arbitrage let us rebalance our expenses towards activities that we enjoy the most, spending more time with our respective families, living a less stressful life and exploring new places in the world.

So let’s dig into our spending report for our first year of nomadic living!

Did we break the bank in our first year of nomadic travel?

In our last 6 months in San Francisco (from January to June 2018) our cost of living was about $25,000 (or $50,000 a year) because we are super savers! For reference, the average household spends much closer to $80K/year (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics for the year 2016-17). Over the past few years, we got our spending under control by becoming aspiring minimalists and prioritizing experience over stuff. However, we mostly stayed in one place and traveled 4 weeks per year.

(Note: for more details about our spending pre nomadic life (in California), check out our 2018 Year End spending report).

So how much did we spend since we became nomadic? Well we share that number, let’s talk about what we’ve done so you have something to put next to that number. During our first year of nomad living, we got to live in wonderful places and see different parts of this beautiful world. We spent 4 weeks in Montreal, 3 weeks traveling with our family in Quebec, 6 weeks in Quebec City, 15 weeks visiting family in San Francisco, 1 week in Puerto Vallarta, 6 weeks in Mexico City, 4 weeks in Oaxaca, 4 weeks in San Miguel de Allende, 4 weeks in Aruba and 5 weeks in France. Not bad, right?

Because videos nowadays are worth more than a thousands words (ok I just made that up!), here are some for you.

In late winter of 2019, we stayed for a month in paradise on the Caribbean island of Aruba, practicing daily swim in the ocean.

In Spring of 2019, we saw a fantastic Superbloom in Southern California that was such a unique experience for the eye.

In fall of 2018, we visited the charming & magical little town of Tepoztlan during our 3.5 months in Mexico. This place was truly magical and should be seen before hordes of tourists take over it.

And here are a few selected memories for this past year of travel around the world

Ok so here we go! The cost for our first year of nomad living ended up being $28,628 for 12 months (or 373 days to be exact). This is about half of our cost of living in San Francisco while staying home!

Spending per category

Here is the breakdown of our budget per category:

Category	Amount spent
Accommodation (mostly AirBnB)	$9,131.05
Groceries	$5,070.91
Dining out	$4,182.82
Travel Gear	$2,662.21
Local Transportation	$2,540.26
International Transportation	$1,768.00
Entertainment	$1,188.51
Living Expenses	$642.70
Health Care	$555.30
Gifts	$525.72
Snacks	$352.78
Insurance	$8.00
Total	$28,628

Without much surprise, our top three categories remained the big three that most people have: accommodation, transportation and food. Our biggest expense for this first year was food (groceries + dining out + snacks for a total of $9,605) followed by accommodation (*$9,131) and transportation ($4,308). 

Our transportation cost was made up of local transportation ($2,540) and international transportation ($1,768). Since the two of us flew internationally 8 times, this cost is pretty low and can be explained by a solid travel reward strategy that helped us saved thousands of dollars. (If you want to know more about this, check our guide on how to fly the world for (almost) free with Travel Rewards.

After the big three, our next biggest expense category was Travel Gear. These expenses reflect the few adjustments we made to our carry on packing list for nomadic travel as we traveled to several countries. We don’t expect this cost to carry over into our second year and we feel pretty good with our latest acquisitions. 

Our Insurance category was pretty low ($8) as April 1st was the first day where we weren’t covered by an employer sponsored plan. Since we qualify for ACA Subsidy and were in California from April until early June, we subscribed for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and only had to pay a $1 premium (/ person / month) to get coverage in California for an entire year. We have since then purchased a worldwide travel expat insurance (via ING Global) that we will be fully integrating into our 2nd year of travel. The cost of our insurance is just under $3,200 for the two of us.

(*) Accommodation: we had a lower than expected accommodation expenses as we spent about 16 weeks (or 4 months) with our relatives back home. We are prioritizing spending between 2-4 months per year with our family, often staying with them.

Here is the same information in a beautiful doughnut charts, because who don’t like doughnuts?

Spending per destination

Let’s now take a look at all the destinations we’ve visited during our first year. We’ve put together the cost of living for each of the places we’ve been slow traveling along with the daily budget this cost of living represents per person so we can normalize the data across destination.

As you can see, slow travel (& geo-arbitrage) enable you to really enjoy the world at a very affordable cost. Even in Aruba (which is considered to have one of the best beach in the world) we spent less than $50 / day and per person for an entire month! FYI $50 / day / person would barely cover rent in a 1 BR apartment San Francisco!

Note: As we travel the world, we want a realistic index of cost of living based on our lifestyle so we can easily compare destinations. This is what we call “cost of living” in the previous graph and it integrates all the spending categories listed above except the following:

• International travel: this is basically the cost to get in/out of a destination
• Travel gear: these are one time purchases that aren’t relevant for the destination
• Insurance: while (health) insurance is critical for us to travel, we are not including it as part of the cost of living of a given country because we would expect to use the local health care system available in such country. For your information, the expat worldwide insurance we just sign up for our 2nd year of travel was less than $3,200 for year for the two of us (or $4.38 per person and per day).

And for consistency, we added at the bottom of the chart a line item called “Non living cost” that represents the costs mentioned above that got us to our $28K budget for our first year of nomadic travel.

What do we expect for our 2nd year of slow nomadic travel?

July 1st marked our second year of travel. We started it in Europe where we plan to stay for the first third of this new travel year. The second third of that year will be spent in South East Asia and we haven’t figured out where we will be going next. We are slackers, right? 🙂

Based on that, we are expecting the cost of our second year to remain about $30K. 

What do we expect to increase from this year?

• (health) Insurance cost as we need to purchase our own coverage for an entire year. We did a lot of research and already prepaid 12 months of insurance for the two of us (with ING Global) for a total of about $3,200. This provides us with worldwide coverage for any major catastrophic event (we are knocking on wood for none of that to happen). We will likely be writing more about this once we will have more experience and data about our coverage.

What do we expect to decrease from this year?

• Travel Gear cost as we feel pretty good about what we carry with us as nomadic travelers. 

What do we expect to stay the same?

• Accommodation cost since South East Asia is known to be really really inexpensive. This should nicely balance the fact that our accommodation cost for this first year was below our expectations due to a few months that we stayed with our families. 

What did we add to our budget from our last report and why? 

If you read our previous spending reports, you might have noticed that we added new categories to our expenses. So for full transparency here is what we did added to this spending report (from the previous one ) and the reason why:

• Dining out / Snacks: We split “Snacks” from “Dining out” as we realized that we have a pretty big sweet tooth when it comes to traveling to new countries and we are curious to keep an eye on how much “Snacks” we will be consuming!
• Gifts/Charitable giving: While this is a discretionary expense, we decided to add it because why not?
• Services subscriptions: The main subscription that we have are Google Drive storage ($2 / month), Traveling Mailbox ($150 / year) and Google FI ($50 / month). We are currently capturing these under our “Living Expenses” category.

Want more details?

If you are interested to get more details about the budget related to each place we’ve visited, please take a look at both our destination reports & weekend guides. We share detailed spreadsheets with both consolidated and line by line items of what we’ve spent. You can also look at our previous spending reports.

Our bottom line

Since we started our nomadic lifestyle, we felt less stressed and are having a lot of fun roaming the planet, one city at a time. This lifestyle gives us the freedom to spend our time on the things we care about like reading some life changing books, learning news skills, starting projects we are excited about (like this blog, our cost of living expenses series, our daily Instagram feed or some cool drone footage we are sharing on our Youtube channel).

As an added bonus, slow and nomadic travel can be much cheaper than staying at home! In our case, it was half the cost of staying at home! 

Don’t know what a slow travel life can look like? Then feel free to start by reading our destination reports and weekend guides. If you like what you are reading and want to take a dive (let’s say for a few weeks/months at first) you might want to learn how we handle our physical mail while being away from home for so long, how we got a very affordable phone plan anywhere we go or take a peek at our carry-on packing list for long-term travel. You might realize that this lifestyle can be more affordable that you thought and definitely fun! And if you think we are crazy people, you might want to read more about our origin story and how we decided to became nomad.

Have you been traveling long term? Then let us know what you think about our numbers. Do they align with what your experience has been? We would love to hear from you, so please leave us a comment in the comment section below. 

Until next time, happy, safe & slow travels!
Mr. & Mrs. Nomad Numbers