Travel with Kids: Budgets

Keepin’ it Real: Travel with Kids

Installment #2: Stretching the Almighty Dollar:
I recently read an article in the Huffington Post from a travel writer with the title “Why ‘Quit Your Job and Travel the World’ is the Worst Advice Ever.” Basically, the writer’s perspective is that you are going to either need to save up a bunch of money for a very long time or be able to earn money abroad in order to make long term travel successful and the idea to up and quit your job is asinine, actually, she says “a huge steaming pile of crap” and “The world doesn’t work this way. It’s not reality”.  At first read, my response was “why not? why can’t the world work that way?” Agreed, to quit your job without a plan or forethought is not a good idea but with planning it is possible to travel without working, at least for awhile.

The word “travel” has many different connotations. The kind of travel we are doing and the type the writer is referencing in her article, is not the 5-star luxury beach resort in every location, that kind of travel is more accurately described as “vacation” .

The kind of travel we are attempting to do is to peel away that top layer of tourism and find at least a taste of what really makes a place tick and the people who, in each country we visit, are winding the clock.

We want to do this in as many places as our money will allow and for this reason we are taking our time in each location (which also helps the girls), limiting our tourist excursions and doing our best to observe and participate in each culture. In this definition of travel the writer and I are in agreement. However I had to laugh when I read the title of her article, obviously, since that is exactly what we have done. Quit our jobs to travel the world.

The part I disagreed with is the notion that in order to make this adventure work we should have gone directly from our jobs in the US to a job abroad like teaching English as a foreign language. Right now, we are not working, on purpose. We wanted to detoxify our psyches from our hectic life. Our full time work and graduate school life. From the early morning crock-pot dinner preparation (on a good day), lunch making, working 8-9 hours then sitting in traffic cursing at the cars to move so that I can pick up my kid in time to make it to gymnastics then home for homework, dinner, baths, reading and collapse into bed to do all over again the next day: aka life.

I’m not saying we always felt stressed and unhappy or that we did not find fulfillment in such a life, we did. However, going back into a work environment, even if in a new exciting country did not sound appealing straight out of the gate. Now, might that change? Yes. We gave ourselves three months of detox before we started the “what next” conversation. Might we one day return back to that same lifestyle…. maybe, but I am hopeful it will look much different, much less hectic, much more balanced. Are we asinine for doing it this way? I don’t think so but others might.

In order to make this work for us, we took a close look at our resources.  One of the payoffs of working as hard has we have for as long as we have is that we had assets in places we hadn’t looked at as assets before such as our house and our stuff.  We realized we could take advantage of a hot housing market and seize the day, use that equity for something we both yearned for instead of more remodeling (which I can tell you is not fun to live in a house that is constantly being improved). We were, of course, mindful to leave some seed money behind in order to start up again at the end of the year. So, I guess in someways we did save up a bunch of money over 11 years, just in the form of home ownership and stuff accumulation.  Then, after knowing we had the money, the question became how do we make this money stretch?

Based on initial research of airline, food, and accommodation costs, we set a budget.   To make our money stretch the year, this budget needs to be fairly strict. We have to be cautious of the alluring adventure and cultural tours and any extras like souvenirs.  At the start of our trip, Jacob and I were at odds with each other on this quite a bit. We are constantly trying to find that balance of travel versus vacation; living life in the foreign country versus touring the foreign country.

I am the grasshopper; Jacob is the ant.

The way I see it, both have legitimate points of view for living the way that they do. Sadly, the grasshopper gets “left out in the cold” at the end of the story because he partied too much, which, legitimately Jacob is afraid will happen to us if we go nuts and do everything possible in a given location.   However, in my opinion not only does the grasshopper get a bad rap, the ant doesn’t enjoy the journey for fear of not having enough, something that causes me suffering too. Somewhere in there is the balance of planning for our money to stretch and enjoying each country that we visit so that we don’t go away from it saying, “I wish we would have”.

How do you do that and live within a budget without working to bring in money? We rent accommodations with kitchens and cook at home, a lot. Jacob, in his glorious research, figured out an approximate daily food and shelter budget in each country. If we buy groceries and cook at home, we typically stay well under that budget, allowing for a more spendy meal out at a later time. When we are really on it, we research the restaurant we want to try beforehand so we don’t feel like we just spent a bunch of money on just an ok meal. Obviously this doesn’t always work out. We struggled a lot with this while visiting Cusco, Peru. Our hostel there was not open to us using their kitchen forcing us to eat out more. Also, the internet was subpar, which made research a challenge.  The restaurant gems in Cusco seemed to be hidden away and we got trapped in the tourist machine more than once and paid for it with an overpriced, bad meal.

We do a lot of walking or public transportation instead of taking taxis. Not only does this allow you to get around more cheaply but also experience more closely the way of life in that place.   We use the amazing excel spreadsheet Jacob created to keep us in line, and enter EVERY penny we spend.  In this way, we have been able to stay within and even be a bit under budget, which is then how we can do extra “vacationey” excursions such as the zip-lining for Quinn on her birthday.

My inner consumer is desperate to buy the beautiful hand-woven wall hangings in Peru, paintings by local artists or clothing in Spain. Not only is it unrealistic to carry all that around with me for a year, it is very expensive to ship things home and if I choose to spend the money to ship stuff, then I am choosing to limit an excursion or beautiful meal later.  I am working to temper this grasshopper desire with the knowledge that we have some amazing photographs that will one day adorn our walls and the handmade woven bracelet I am wearing for $1 from Peru will be a reminder of the local craft. I’ll let you know if I am able to resist the clothes and shoes in Spain, ay yai yai!

Part of our budget juggle is the awareness that we need to balance the needs of the girls as well.  As we predicted, our travels in Peru would give us much information on what the girls can handle in terms of bouncing around from place to place in one county.  Our plan in Peru was to fly into Lima, stay for a few days before heading to the Sacred Valley, spend 2 weeks in the valley and then charter a bus to take us South to Arequipa (a 7 hour bus ride) stay there for a week before moving onto Puno, Nazca, Paracas and eventually back around to Lima.  All of this in the time span of one month.  However, after being on the move in the Sacred Valley (Urubamba, Ollantaytambo, Aguas Calliente, Cusco) we discovered that a. the girls get carsick very easily so buses were out and b. they are tired and long to have whole days at home for playing and resting.  Spending whole days at home is difficult when you only have a few days in each city.

For me, adventure awaits!  There is the whole world out there to explore and I will exhaust myself until I feel I have seen everything!

(There’s that grasshopper again)  For kids, this doesn’t work.  We knew that family travel would look very different from solo or couple travel so when we sat at our hostel in Cusco discussing our next move we chose to fly to Arequipa and spend 9 days there rather than visit the other three cities.  Is it a bummer that we missed Lake Titicaca and the floating islands in Puno or the amazing Nazca lines? Yes. But was it better for the girls and the sanity of our family? Yes. That is ultimately the best decision. You might think more flights sounds more expensive though, right? Wrong. Actually, the bus for all of us plus short term stays and eating out in all of those cities was about the same as staying in one place longer and flying around the country instead. This is where that spreadsheet comes in so handy, it allows us to compare prices and lay it all out before making our decisions.

We have been at this travel thing now for three months and so far so good staying within our budget. We have come to a point where we are talking about how we want our life to look like at the end of this and even ways we might start earning some money now, while we are on the road. We are looking into websites for people seeking house sitters or work exchange programs although I am yet unsure how these work for families. If we can offset our housing expenses then that allows us to allocate that money somewhere else. While I felt the author of that travel article was very absolutist and narrow minded about how to approach this kind of travel, I do think it is important to keep your feet on the ground and look at all angles of earning and spending money. Our goal is not to cross every item off the bucket list or pull up to the finish line dead broke but instead have the experience of assimilating into each new culture and new place; making it enjoyable for everyone, grasshoppers and ants alike.