I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, I’ve already been on the road for a year (I started this trip in Chiang Mai, Thailand in October, 2014.) Putting together this budget report (which only took about 15 minutes), I kept looking at the columns of numbers thinking, “is this it?” “aren’t I missing a month somewhere?” But no, there are only 12 months in a year, and yes, I really only spent money on a very few different types of things, so it was easy to keep track of my budget, and that was mostly because there wasn’t much to keep track of!
If you’ve been following the monthly budget reports, this YIR will come as no surprise; I spent an average of $422 per month, including EVERYTHING, even visa expenses, permits, and all the beers. Not bad, eh? Subtract the visa expenses, and I only spent $384 / month. If you only include living expenses, and exclude visas and bike maintenance, the monthly average drops to $350. However you calculate it, this past year was DANG CHEAP.
The coolest thing though, is that even though I spent $5000 this year, I actually broke even as far as total net income/loss. My meager savings, most of which is invested in mutual funds, raked in enough interest to cover most of my costs. I also sold a few of my photographs from my website, and made a bit of money there. Finally, I did a few hours of casual web design work, which took care of about a month and a half of travel expenses.
It looks like I also spent most of my time in hotels / paid accommodation. This includes the time we camped on the roof of a hotel in Myanmar for $2.50, and all the $3-$5 bed bug hotels in India. I wish I could’ve camped more, and now that I’m heading west and out of the most populated part of the world, I hope the opportunity will present itself more often.
Oh and the total mileage for this year was about 5200 miles, or 8400 kilometers. Haha, that means I spent about a dollar per mile!
Really, this just goes to show how fiscally feasible travel can be. I talk to a lot of people who express some amount of disbelief regarding my bicycle adventure. They think I’m getting funding from somewhere, or that I’m independently wealthy, or that I’m spending way more than I’m letting on. But to tell you the truth, what you see above, that’s it. All I have to do is trade material wealth for experiential wealth, and this is what happens automatically. I don’t even have to try that hard. I still drink coffee and beer, go see movies, and have a ton of fun. I do benefit from the favorable exchange rates when I travel through developing countries like this, but to be honest, if I’d spent a year traveling around the US by bike, I doubt I’d spend much more. Of course, I would have to couchsurf and camp a lot more, and would almost exclusively be eating out of the grocery store, but that’s all fine by me.
Even if you aren’t really interested in cycling around the world, you can still do most of what I’m doing right in your own home and give yourself the financial freedom to do whatever it is you really want to do. If you’re lucky enough to have a job that you really love and want to do it all the time, more power to ya. But I think that the vast majority of people, even those who do have a job they love, would like to have more free time to pursue hobbies and other passions, spend time with family and friends, exercise, whatever; things that have value other than economic. To make this possible, all you have to do is what I said above; replace material pleasure with experiential pleasure. Don’t work to buy things; instead, work to buy freedom to do things. And start valuing experience and frugality over comfort and convenience. Sell the car, ride a bike; if you’re renting an apartment, live in the cheapest box you can find until you can afford to buy your own home. If you have a home, sell it and buy a smaller one. Get rid of the TV and build a robot, or go camping on the weekends. Dumpster dive for food, go to farmer’s markets etc. etc. You already know what to do, but if you read this and think, “well but it’s one of my life’s goals to have a big house and nice car and gigantic TV,” then I think you may have missed the boat. Consuming and possessing more things never made anyone happier. It's called hedonic adaptation, and it's why people in economically developed countries often rank lower on the happiness quotient scale than people in supposedly 'poor' nations. It's why GDP is a seriously flawed measure of quality of life, and GNH (Gross National Happiness) is an appealing national policy goal.
Well well, so what great experiences did you have this year then, Chris? In answer to that, I’d say, I got in shape, learned everything there is to know about bicycles, went camping more than I had in the last 10 years, visited 6 new countries, had a fling with a nice lady, learned Thai massage, transported myself from sea level to 14,000ft under my own steam, tried all kinds of new foods and even learned how to cook a few of them, learned a bit of several new languages, developed my photography skills, my web design skills, my coding skills, raised enough money to rescue a North Korean refugee, got a tattoo, learned how to build from mud and bamboo; made countless new friends and professional connections, hugged a bunch of Tibetan kids, picked peppers at 10,000ft, bathed in a river with Laotian ladies, watched dozens of sunsets and sunrises; the list goes on and on.
And I’m not stopping. Check back often to see what happens this next year.
If you’ve been following the monthly budget reports, this YIR will come as no surprise; I spent an average of $422 per month, including EVERYTHING, even visa expenses, permits, and all the beers. Not bad, eh? Subtract the visa expenses, and I only spent $384 / month. If you only include living expenses, and exclude visas and bike maintenance, the monthly average drops to $350. However you calculate it, this past year was DANG CHEAP.
The coolest thing though, is that even though I spent $5000 this year, I actually broke even as far as total net income/loss. My meager savings, most of which is invested in mutual funds, raked in enough interest to cover most of my costs. I also sold a few of my photographs from my website, and made a bit of money there. Finally, I did a few hours of casual web design work, which took care of about a month and a half of travel expenses.
It looks like I also spent most of my time in hotels / paid accommodation. This includes the time we camped on the roof of a hotel in Myanmar for $2.50, and all the $3-$5 bed bug hotels in India. I wish I could’ve camped more, and now that I’m heading west and out of the most populated part of the world, I hope the opportunity will present itself more often.
Oh and the total mileage for this year was about 5200 miles, or 8400 kilometers. Haha, that means I spent about a dollar per mile!
Really, this just goes to show how fiscally feasible travel can be. I talk to a lot of people who express some amount of disbelief regarding my bicycle adventure. They think I’m getting funding from somewhere, or that I’m independently wealthy, or that I’m spending way more than I’m letting on. But to tell you the truth, what you see above, that’s it. All I have to do is trade material wealth for experiential wealth, and this is what happens automatically. I don’t even have to try that hard. I still drink coffee and beer, go see movies, and have a ton of fun. I do benefit from the favorable exchange rates when I travel through developing countries like this, but to be honest, if I’d spent a year traveling around the US by bike, I doubt I’d spend much more. Of course, I would have to couchsurf and camp a lot more, and would almost exclusively be eating out of the grocery store, but that’s all fine by me.
Even if you aren’t really interested in cycling around the world, you can still do most of what I’m doing right in your own home and give yourself the financial freedom to do whatever it is you really want to do. If you’re lucky enough to have a job that you really love and want to do it all the time, more power to ya. But I think that the vast majority of people, even those who do have a job they love, would like to have more free time to pursue hobbies and other passions, spend time with family and friends, exercise, whatever; things that have value other than economic. To make this possible, all you have to do is what I said above; replace material pleasure with experiential pleasure. Don’t work to buy things; instead, work to buy freedom to do things. And start valuing experience and frugality over comfort and convenience. Sell the car, ride a bike; if you’re renting an apartment, live in the cheapest box you can find until you can afford to buy your own home. If you have a home, sell it and buy a smaller one. Get rid of the TV and build a robot, or go camping on the weekends. Dumpster dive for food, go to farmer’s markets etc. etc. You already know what to do, but if you read this and think, “well but it’s one of my life’s goals to have a big house and nice car and gigantic TV,” then I think you may have missed the boat. Consuming and possessing more things never made anyone happier. It's called hedonic adaptation, and it's why people in economically developed countries often rank lower on the happiness quotient scale than people in supposedly 'poor' nations. It's why GDP is a seriously flawed measure of quality of life, and GNH (Gross National Happiness) is an appealing national policy goal.
Well well, so what great experiences did you have this year then, Chris? In answer to that, I’d say, I got in shape, learned everything there is to know about bicycles, went camping more than I had in the last 10 years, visited 6 new countries, had a fling with a nice lady, learned Thai massage, transported myself from sea level to 14,000ft under my own steam, tried all kinds of new foods and even learned how to cook a few of them, learned a bit of several new languages, developed my photography skills, my web design skills, my coding skills, raised enough money to rescue a North Korean refugee, got a tattoo, learned how to build from mud and bamboo; made countless new friends and professional connections, hugged a bunch of Tibetan kids, picked peppers at 10,000ft, bathed in a river with Laotian ladies, watched dozens of sunsets and sunrises; the list goes on and on.
And I’m not stopping. Check back often to see what happens this next year.
