All About Budgets Week 4: Budgeting for Our Upcoming Trip (or how we tried to put all this preaching into practice)

Wrapping up our month long series on all things travel budgets, we’ve got our preliminary budget for travel later in 2013 and into 2014. If you missed our announcement late last week, Travis and I are excitedly heading back to Europe September 6th to explore it’s more Eastern countries and venture into Turkey and the Mediterranean!

Valetta, Malta – one of the many places we’re excited to be visiting on our upcoming trip (via)

After the decision was made in favour of more travel this fall, the first thing we looked at were our bank accounts and settled on a figure we were comfortable spending this time around. With this number in mind, the itinerary planning and research began and it has been a whirlwind of ideas and tough decisions these past two months. Now, with a rough itinerary and preliminary budget, the trip is becoming more real each day and the countdown has begun! (We’re now under 100 days until departure!)

As we should’ve/would’ve done before our last trip (if we were good travel bloggers), we have decided to post all of the boring financial details of our trip this fall before we leave instead of 4 months after we get back.

The savvy reader may have noticed that our overall budget this time around (of approx $17,000) is just under that of our last trip (at $20,000), however we are actually extending the duration of our trip by almost 35 days (and possibly more) – this is the type of math we like!

But it is realistic? Can we lengthen our trip and still trim more than $3,000 from our budget? Even though we are returning to Europe (one of the more pricey destinations for backpackers), our decision to visit less-expensive regions, including the Balkans and Turkey, looks like it should amount to large savings – at least when compared to our previous trip through much of Europe’s most expensive regions.

We are also working hard to save money using lessons learned the hard way during our previous trip last fall, which we hope to share with you soon!

And while we are uncomfortable spending much more on this trip, it’s also important that we remember it is only a preliminary budget. We understand that this figure will fluctuate during the planning process and it’s likely things will come up, good and bad, that push and stretch at our budget, once we’re on the road. Also, Travis hasn’t accounted for a single football game yet (he’s hoping to see a game in almost every country this time)!For now, with almost 13 weeks until departure, it’s comforting to have a rough itinerary and working budget – it makes the trip feel all the more real.

If you missed any of our four week series on travel budgeting, you can catch up on all the juicy details using the links below…