Long-term Travel Planning

Planning for the next 3+ Months

When you start off on your adventure, we recommend that you have some type of plan on where you are going to go. Alternatively, you could just blow around like the wind from place to place and see where you end up. However, in either situation, you will have to maintain your budget. Some places of the world are more expensive to live in than others, and planning for the expenses that come along with these places is usually a more stable approach.

We have met some travelers who have started out on 3 month (13 week) adventures but were broke and basically homeless at the end of their 5th week. They simply overspent in every place that they were in because they didn’t account for exchange rates or differences in customs. Additionally, they probably also lived like super-vacationers during the first 5 weeks.

To prevent yourself from causing this type of grief, it helps to plan ahead and even to pre-pay for some things. We don’t necessarily recommend pre-paying for everything, but it does make sense to pay for a place to stay for a month, or even up to 3 months in advance. You should also pay for your transportation to each location that you have booked at the same time. Pre-paying will at least guarantee that you’ll have a place to stay and transportation to get there ahead of time. As time moves forward, even if you are running low on cash, you will still be all right. Additionally, you will begin to feel the affects of your decreasing budget well before you arrive at the point where you no longer can fix your situation.

It helps some people to create a separate bank account prior to traveling and to set up a bi-weekly transfer to the account that they will be using during their travels to keep them in check. This way, as long as they don’t touch the other account, they should feel the effects of overspending sooner and they will learn to adjust earlier on as well.

That being said, we also recommend not to plan too far out as your circumstances may change unexpectedly (see below) or you may become more interested in a different location because of something you learned during your recent travels.

Keeping Yourself Flexible for Unexpected Events

So, we planned ahead a bit too far a few times already. Once, we thought it was better to lock in some really great places before the deals were all gone. We had planned out 9 months in advance. Actually, it just so happens that Jenny became pregnant and the last 3 months were going to be in Egypt, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. Well, it is quite difficult to move around central Africa while in the last trimester, and a bit worrying for us considering that central Africa is still prone to the Zika mosquitoes. Additionally, what if Jenny went into labor early or there was an emergency of some sort? We didn’t want to have to investigate every decent hospital in the area to be readily prepared, so we decided to cancel one, and rearrange two, of the central Africa locations. So, we only ended up going to Egypt and then spent 3 full months in South Africa, where we were able to find an amazing Maternity Hospital. Anyway, it ended up costing us 50% of the reservation that we canceled and put us on the hook to find a way to come back to central Africa in the future for the other two. Plus, we lost the cost of all the flights we booked because those flights weren’t on our travel insurance package.

TIP: Unexpected events do happen, so we don’t recommend planning out more than 3 months into the future.

Changing Destinations Due to Budget Shortage

When your bank account starts to dwindle because you’ve been visiting too many expensive countries - or because you have simply been overspending - remember that there are a considerable amount of affordable countries that you could visit to reduce your spending and bring you back on track. Among them are Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, India, China (Guilin, Guangzhou, or Shenzhen), Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Morocco, Mexico, Nepal, Laos, or the Philippines. If your budget is really hurting, try traveling to one of these places for a little while.

When we were traveling through Europe, we ended up spending quite a bit more than we had budgeted. Luckily for us, we planned in Egypt for a month because it seemed like a great place to go for not too much money. Boy did we need it! Anyway, it still was an amazing experience because we were able to do so much with so little money, plus we caught back up with our budget! It was a great plan.
TIP: Plan to stagger your expensive countries with your affordable countries and your budget will thank you for it!

ACTION ITEM: If you only have expensive countries on your 90-Day Travel Itinerary, try planning in some more affordable countries in the 90 days after that. Alternatively, consider starting off your adventure in the more affordable areas to see how well you do first. Who knows, it could help prevent you from going broke in your first 5 weeks!

Planning in Time for Relaxation

Even if you are not religious you should consider taking a “Rest” day. If you are, then this would be a great day to visit a local church, mosque, synagogue, or temple and experience service in a different country. Alternatively, you could simply pull up a digital feed from one that you are aware of back home.

Apart from religion, it is still vital to relax every now and then. It keeps you balanced and refreshes everything - your health, your body, your mind, your soul, and your productivity. Consider this passage from BecomingMinimalist:

Ask any physician and they will tell you rest is essential for physical health. Ask any athlete and they will tell you rest is essential for physical training. Rest is needed for muscles to repair themselves and prevent injury. Ask many of yesterday’s philosophers and they will tell you rest is essential for the mind. Ask most religious leaders and they will tell you rest is essential for the soul. Ask many corporate leaders and they will tell you that rest is essential for productivity. Physicians, athletes, philosophers, poets, religious leaders, and corporate leaders all tell us the same thing: take time to rest. It is absolutely essential for a balanced, healthy life. (BecomingMinimalist)

It is possible that you will feel like the work absolutely needs to get done and that you don’t have time to rest this week. And then you feel the same the following week… and the following week, and so on. But, you must make time for rest or you will completely burn yourself out and give up on your traveling lifestyle.

Research shows you'll do better work if you take more downtime. (Inc.)

While we can only tell you from experience that rest is necessary, “Mental Health America” also recommends a regular amount of Rest, Relaxation and Exercise. One way that we measure our quality of rest is by wearing a fitbit that monitors our steps, our heart rate, and our sleep. There are a number of devices that can do this, but we have found it to be quite helpful - especially when we aren’t getting enough quality sleep!

If you are in a great beach area, perhaps you should just take a day to go to the beach. If you enjoy going to a wellness resort, sauna, or spa, perhaps you should look for one that is in your area. Alternatively, if you want to just lay back and catch up on your favorite Netflix show - tell yourself it is honestly for your health and then go and do it!

ACTION ITEM: Check your 90-Day Travel Itinerary and make sure that you have at least one Relaxation Day planned per week.

Planning for Other Things

Planning for Travel Days: Depending on how frequently you travel, your actual travel days may take a toll on you. Travel days are not relaxation days. They do require packing up all of your things, checking out of your current place, making it to your flight/train/bus on time, potentially transferring to another flight/train/bus, checking in to a new place, and unpacking. It can take a lot more out of you than you might expect. These days should not be combined with your relaxation days, but they could be combined with your errand days if - when you arrive at your new destination - you then go out for groceries and start up a load of laundry.

If you want to do a little work while you are on the plane, train, or bus - we have found that it is possible for us to write a little for our blog or even plan for future trips while we are sitting idle. Alternatively, if we need the rest, we have also been known to pull out a Nintendo Switch for a little while and get in a little relaxation while on the road (or in the sky).

Planning Time to do More Planning: As strange as it sounds, you may need to plan in some additional time simply to continue planning! As your journey will keep on going without end, you may find that having time to plan for your future trips requires a dedicated time-slot as well. We typically combine our planning days with our errand or travel days, but you will have to find time to fit it in somewhere!

Planning can be more tedious than you initially expect. After all, was it easy for you to create your 90-Day Travel Itinerary? Researching and reserving your accommodations, transportation, and entertainment is usually necessary before you arrive. And you never know if something you’ve already planned will get canceled at the last minute - we just had a cancellation just 2 days before we were supposed to check in! That suddenly turned one of our “work” days into a mandatory “planning” day. Be flexible!

ACTION ITEM: Check your 90-Day Travel Itinerary and make sure that you have some time allocated specifically for travel and planning days. Once you feel like your 90-Day Travel Itinerary is all set, feel free to reach out to us for a free review. It is our goal to make sure that you succeed. We don’t charge you anything, but we appreciate it if you let your friends know about us!