Welcome back to our many-part series about the nuts-and-bolts of meandering minimally. If you’re not ready yet, we offered alternatives. We asked if you like travel. Then we encouraged you to think through obligations. We talked about potential travel companions, and then we talked about health and health insurance options. We covered having less stuff, theoretically and practically. After that, we encouraged you to think about how mobile your lifestyle is, especially in terms of fun, and then we urged you to think about the routines in your life and how they might become mobile. We discussed language anxiety. Then we shared our philosophy of financial planning for travel. Because we assume you’ll be able to envision your dream life without our help (the first of our recommended steps), this post focuses on the the second step: starting to budget your long-term travel expenses.

For a lot of people, thinking about money isn’t fun. But thinking about travel is fun. Considering this process as the latter instead of the former may help. Be honest with yourself and any travel partners, and remember that you do have some choices: you can lower your standards, make more money, or shorten your trip. Finally, as with all of the advice we offer, you will need to think carefully about what works for you and what doesn’t.

Know Your Current Budget

The first step to having enough money to travel the world is knowing how much money comes in and how much goes out, right now. You’d be surprised how many people do not have this information available. We suggest tracking your every expense for at least six months, keeping notes on which expenses are regular and which unusual. Putting a new roof on the house will cost you a bundle, but you won’t be doing it every year. Be sure to pro-rate your annual or six-month expenses, like car insurance or memberships. We find that when we do this kind of tracking, we automatically are more parsimonious; the very act of writing it down can help us forego an unnecessary purchase. Also, we assume you know your income, but if not, track this too!

Budget Categories

Once you’ve got a month’s worth of data, start sorting your expenses into categories. You can do this any way you like; here are some categories we’ve found useful:

• Rent/mortgage/utilities: all properties, and associated costs (condo fees, parking, etc.), home or renter’s insurance. You might create a category for home maintenance and utilities, or not.
• Transportation: car payments, gasoline, tune-ups, insurance, bus passes.
• Children: babysitters, school fees, extra-curricular activities, college funds, etc.
• Food: groceries, restaurants. If you eat out a lot, you might separate restaurants out.
• Health: health insurance, long term care, life insurance, doctor’s visits, prescriptions, therapy, gym memberships.
• Lifestyle/entertainment: concerts and sporting events, subscriptions, hobbies, travel (for us, this is its own category!).
• Work: parking, continuing education, union dues, clothing and/or dry cleaning bills.
• Family: special treats, visits, vacations.
• Savings/retirement: strictly speaking, this is not an expense, but it’s always smart to keep savings in their own account, and to add a set amount every month. (You might put college funds here as well.)
• Debt: student loans, alimony, child support, consumer debt.
• Taxes: tax preparer and the taxes themselves, if you regularly owe.
• Charity and gifts.

These categories need to make sense to you, so customize freely. “Transportation” could include family visits, or those might fall under “entertainment” or “travel”. Cable and internet might be “utilities” or “entertainment” or “family”. Haircuts could be “lifestyle” or “work”. Keep tweaking the categories until everything fits somewhere.

Dig Into Current Expenses (and Reduce Them)

After a few months, you’ll start to learn what your life costs. Are you surprised by how much you spend in particular areas? Without judgment, we encourage you to become curious about whether individual expenses add real value to your life. Investigate further! Could you renegotiate your cable or credit card bills, put on a sweater instead of the heat, or cancel the subscription to an app you don’t use? Or make bigger changes, like selling your house or car? Financial planners speak of nondiscretionary and discretionary expenses, but there’s often more flexibility than the former term implies.

Once you learn how cheap travel can be, you’ll realize that even the smaller savings add up. (Would you rather travel for an extra week or go running in the street instead of at the gym? We know what we’d pick!) This process is about getting more of what you want out of life. If that’s more travel, focus your energies there and cancel a few movie streaming services.

Estimate Travel Expenses

As you start to think about how your expenses would work for long-term travel (see our post on how this is not a vacation), you’ll notice that certain things will go down. For instance: we pay more rent than we used to, because we live in furnished flats. But we only pay for one place at a time (and have no mortgage, no utilities, and no home insurance). When the kitchen sink gets clogged, we call our host. The entire “work” category doesn’t exist for us. And our entertainment expenses are also down; we entertain ourselves by walking in our neighbourhood(s). We have low-cost international health insurance. Even travel expenses, surprisingly, are down. This is for two reasons. We don’t stay in hotels. And, instead of one or two airplane-based vacations a year, we take a one-way flight every few months (but now that flight sometimes costs as little as $100 per person). Also, once we’re in a place, we stay put for a while.

Estimating travel expenses involves guesswork. But once you’ve followed the steps in this and our previous money post, you’ll have a clear sense of what you’re spending now, and also where you can cut back. Talking about money is stressful: we all have different ideas about what is “worth it,” and it’s easy to think those with different priorities are wrong. But starting to pin down your travel expenses is the most important step to creating a life of long-term sustainable travel.