When we first started considering The Trip, my first thought was: how much will this cost? And my second thought was: even if we could afford this, is it a terrible financial decision? Now that we’ve started planning in earnest, I have rough answers for these two questions.

First, I should acknowledge our privilege. We have built up enough savings over the years to even consider an experience like this. We bought our house in 2013 and have aggressively paid the mortgage down while fixing it up. We plan to rent it out while we’re away to have some money coming in. And we’ll sell a bunch of stuff: my car & many belongings. But mostly, we’ll be dipping into savings.

How much will it cost?

I’ve searched the internet high and low to find similar posts for how much people spend on extended travel, but they are hard to come by. So I’m starting from scratch and doing some very rough math on how much we’ll spend for our year of adventuring. Here’s how I’m calculating it:

• A daily average for lodging, food, and activities: ~$73k (somewhere between $100 & $300 a day)
  • Coming up with an average number isn’t been easy. We aren’t luxury travelers by any means, but want to make sure we stay in clean and safe places for the sake of Millie. We realize that regions like Europe and Australia and going to be drastically more expensive than Southeast Asia or East Africa.
• Flights: ~$24k ($2000/month)
  • If you reference our ambitious itinerary and are anything like me, you’ll see every destination change and hear the “cha-ching” sound of money falling out of our bank account and into the pocket of an airline. Like lodging, these prices vary widely depending on where we are and how well we plan ahead.
• Misc non-negotiable expenses: ~$10k
  • This bucket includes things like travel insurance, vaccinations (turns out it’s expensive prevent Yellow Fever), new luggage, etc.

We’re looking at about $110k for the whole trip. We’ll make about $50k on rent and selling a car. So in total, we’ll spend roughly $60k for the year of travel.

This estimate could be completely off-base. Over the next couple of months I plan get more granular (I love spreadsheets) based on our itinerary to get to a more solid number. Through this process we’ll likely tweak both the itinerary and the final budget.

Is this a terrible financial decision?

Maybe. But, in the words of poet laureate Justin Bieber, Life is worth living. I’m rationalizing this as borrowing money and time from our future selves. When we’re older, will we wish that we had waited until retirement to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip like this? Or would we be glad that we did it while Millie is still little and our legs still work properly? I’m willing to bet the latter.

The book Die With Zero introduced me to the concept of “Memory dividends”. Building memories earlier in our lifetime gives us more time to reflect on them. I know I’m going to look back on this time with a fondness that is exponentially greater than if we stay in our weekly 5-days-on, 2-days-off, rinse and repeat routine of early parenthood.

Lastly, this trip aligns with our values as a family. We didn’t have a wedding. We aren’t interested in moving to a bigger house. We don’t buy each other gifts. Our love language is time together and life-expanding experiences, and this trip is an investment in just that.