You can travel for a year with as little as $12,000USD if you don’t mind travelling on the cheap. If you don’t mind the comforts, then there are ways you can continue travelling around the world on a small budget.
This is the suggested budget for someone that decides to travel solo.
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What would the expenses be?
Your biggest expenses will be:
- Your one-way plane ticket from your country
- Visa costs
- Accommodation (Although you can opt to rent a room in a shared place, which may set you back between $100-400USD a month, depending on where you are based.
- Food costs – Groceries $30-50USD a week
- Entertainment
- Intermediate travel (E.g. Buses, trains, budget flights, etc
Travel cheaply by taking advantage of long-stays.
It is much cheaper to travel over a longer period of time than it is to travel to a place for a couple of days or weeks.
If you can, try to base yourself in one place for at least 30 days. This will allow you to get cheaper accommodation and possibly get transportation cards for public networks at discounted rates.
You will also find it much cheaper to rent a room compared to renting an entire house or apartment. However, if you are travelling with others (2 or more people), you can pool your money together to rent apartments or houses in different locations.
If you stay in a backpacker, you can get accommodation from $2-30USD a night, depending on where you are staying in the world.
You should be able to get a room from <$100 a week.
Depending on the place that you are visiting, you can hire an entire place from $400-2000USD a month.
If you decide to stay in a location for 6 months or more, you may find that it is cheaper to invest in a vehicle to travel.
How easy or difficult is it to make money while you are travelling?
Making $12,000USD a year shouldn’t be difficult if you sell services for your skills or your time. Even if you were to charge $10 per hour, you would need to work 100h per month to make $1000 each month.
You could easily divide this into 25 hours per week.
This is a bare minimum cost. You could decide to earn more, deciding on how much you money you want to have for your travels.
How is it like to manage lifestyle costs?
No matter where you go to in the world, you will need to learn how to manage the lifestyle costs so that it fits in with your budget and the experience that you want to have in the country or city that you are visiting.
If you enjoy eating out frequently, then you will want to head to a destination where the cost of eating out is less.
Otherwise, the cheapest option is to prepare your food at home and purchase your groceries from local markets or supermarkets.
If you are travelling solo, you should find that you should spend between $30-50USD a week, depending on the types of items that you buy.
Additionally, if you purchase items in bulk, you will be able to save more money over the long-term.
How can you get started with travelling around the world for a year?
I would personally advise the following.
Save enough money to travel for at least 6 months.
This will give you time to plan for and transition into the digital nomad lifestyle. It will take at least 6 months for your remote working activity to really get traction. So try to save $6000USD for travel money as your safety net.
Try to set up passive income streams before going.
If you are able to, get some passive income streams to help you with your travels. A passive income stream of $2000USD a month would allow you to travel comfortably around the world.
Start in a cheaper location.
Buy yourself more time by getting setup in a cheaper location initially. Consider destinations such as:
- Vietnam
- Thailand
- Sri Lanka
- Portugal
- Regional Spain
- Countries in Central and South America
Focus on one skill and then scale up the remote work from there.
You can get some direction by looking for digital nomad jobs here.
