How do you afford to travel the world for a year?
The question everybody is too polite to ask : how do you afford to travel the world for a whole year? It would certainly be the first question entering my mind. I have no interest in keeping you guessing, no interest in making anyone feel financially inadequate. We decided to book through a specialist travel agency Travel Nation. We had in mind around £5,000 per ticket, a bit less for the kids. Travel Nation were fantastic. They have access to so many flights and get great deals for bulk booking. The final adult ticket price was £3,610 each, £2,790 each for Aidan and Grace and wait for it... that includes all the flights through the following cites and countries:
1. San Francisco (USA)
2. New York (USA)
3. Montreal (Canada)
4. Managua (Nicaragua)
5. San Jose (Costa Rica)
6. Havana (Cuba)
7. Cancun (Mexico)
8. Mexico City (Mexico)
9. Los Angeles (USA)
10. Hawai (USA)
11. Tokyo (Japan)
12. Beijing (China)
13. Hong Kong (China)
16. Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam)
17. Nirobi (Kenya)
18. Athens (Greece)
Fact 1: As you can see, a round the world ticket is not as expensive as you might think. If you are with kids, you want to move around and do no want the stress of booking the next flight whilst on the road, I would definitely consider a specialist travel agency. Travel Nation are used to crafting family trips and whether you are considering 3 months or a year, they will help you, advise you and most importantly give you plenty of time to make those crucial final decisions when it comes to destinations.
Fact 2: We have not spent the last 10 years of our lives saving for this type of trip. We have savings, sure, but no where near enough to fund a whole year aboard. We have well paid jobs but live in London where nursery fees for Grace are higher than our mortgage. We did borrow money to fund the dream.
Fact 3: We borrowed the money against our house. We own our now 3 bed semi-detached house in Wood Green, North London. We bought it in 2012 for £315,000. We completed a loft conversion (forever grateful dad!) in 2014/15 (see before and after pictures below). The London property market took care of the rest with our borough, Haringey, even bucking the recent cool-down in the capital. When our mortgage came up for renewal at the end of 2017, the value of our house had comfortably increased so we asked for £80,000 in additional borrowing.
We are aiming to leave with around £55,000 for the four of us for 11 months. We think that is enough but honestly we are not sure.
So this trip started with a dream, but was funded by hard work and property luck.
Here are a few websites and blogs helping us calculate our family world trip budget: