Last Updated: March 9, 2023
Whenever we tell people about our Family Round-The-World Trip, on of the first questions we’re asked is. How do you budget for a family Round-The-World trip? And it is a hard question to answer.
Every family will have a different style and different goals of what they want to achieve when travelling. And so much depends on your kids likes and dislikes and with all kids being so different this variance can be limitless!
So unfortunately I can’t offer a magic sentence stating ‘it costs ‘X’ per head to travel the world’ (sorry). But… we have come up with a method that we’ve tried-and-tested and has worked really well for us and hope can be used by other families.
You will still have to do some of your own additional research and understand your own capabilities and circumstance. But we believe this can be applied to pretty much any family for many styles of long term travel, either RTW or otherwise.
The key thing to start is to understand it will only be an estimate. You can’t predict every eventuality and you will almost certainly need to adjust your budget as you go. Travel is a never ending learning curve and we’re still learning all the time.
One thing we always try to do when travelling is breaking things down into manageable chunks, before putting them back together again. When you’re dealing with a big trip it can get really overwhelming trying to do it all at once!
With this in mind, we broke our budget down into several categories. Some are pretty static others are pretty variable. Then, we looked at each one in turn, breaking some down even further, before moving to the next.
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Living Costs by Region
Living costs is the big one and most time consuming to look at, with so many variables involved it’s a bit tricky to no where to start. So the first thing you will want to know is ‘roughly’ where you are going to go.
This is important, because day to day living costs can vary drastically depending on where you are in the world. Having said that you don’t necessarily need to know every single country.
There are some areas, such as South East Asia, where the costs don’t vary that much. Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand etc. do have some variables, but they’re not to the same drastic extent as, say, India compared to Japan.
When we made our RTW plan, we bunched the countries we were interested in into regions that were both logistically close and financially similar to help with the budget. This generally works by default as the two parameters tend to be similar anyway.
It all depends on the sort of trip you’re going on. If you are just hitting one continent and you’re sure on the countries you’re visiting you could break it up by country if it suits you better. Which then means you can be much ore specific with your budget. But if you’re generally just heading off around the world, like we were, the region breakdown may be more for you.
Our region breakdown looked something like the below:
- India
- South East Asia
- Far East
- Australasia
- Latin America
- Middle East
- Africa
This way we bunched them means we could come up with an average day-to-day living cost for a region rather than each country. It doesn’t always work and there will be some exceptions that may skew the average, but it gives a good start without being too overwhelming.
Once you have this you can then come up with some basic day to day living categories, such as;
- Accommodation
- Food
- Transport (domestic)
- Spending
Then you can split that into your regions or countries and give yourself a realistic prediction of how much each thing will cost in that area. This is where you will need to do a bit of research on each category.
A lot will depend on you and your prerogative and style. You can get family rooms for under a tenner in India, but also spend over a ton if you want a 5* luxury hotel. Similarly if you buy your food from the markets and self cater you will spend far less than if you eat out in restaurants every meal. So be realistic with yourselves for this. Once you have an idea of your style you can start to look at each thing in turn.
Accommodation is pretty easy to gage. Do a few searches in some of the accommodation comparison websites for the sort of places you’ll be after and take a few prices. Mix it up so you get a good average, look at rural and urban stays, self catered and hotels etc. Enough variance to get a good average, but don’t go crazy, it’s just a prediction remember.
Food is a bit trickier, but a quick google search you will give you some reasonable answers. You can even look at restaurant menus or supermarket websites to get a idea.
Transport varies massively between countries. Some are geared towards trains, other coaches and some might be very rural and you may need a car to get about. So this can be more difficult to get an average. But the good news is most countries have booking systems online and so you can easily take a look to see how much things cost by cherry picking a few countries per region and then trying a few routes and methods to get the costs.
Finally spending money. This is definitely the hardest one go gage as one expensive tourist site can blow your spending budget out of the water! So just pick some of your ‘must sees’ and then see roughly what your costs are for seeing them on average.
If you read any of our Country Guides, you’ll be able to see the sort of costs we incurred for various countries, which might give you a starting point if you’re looking to travel in a similar way to us.
Once you have all your averages you need to know how long in each region you will stay. If you’ve already made a rough plan you’ll probably already know, but if not just estimate this.
We averaged about a month a country, but obviously this varies depending on the size (a month in India is probably too short, a month in Singapore probably too long) so you can adjust it slightly per region if necessary.
Then multiply the average costs by the time you intend to spend in each region and, hey presto, you have your day to day living budget! So ours looked something like this for our whole family;
| Region | Weekly Food | Weekly Accommodation | Weekly Transport | Weekly Spends | Weeks | Total |
| India | £35.00 | £105.00 | £35.00 | £105.00 | 6 | £1,680.00 |
| SE Asia | £49.00 | £140.00 | £70.00 | £105.00 | 22 | £8,008.00 |
| Far East | £105.00 | £280.00 | £105.00 | £210.00 | 10 | £7,000.00 |
| Australasia | £105.00 | £350.00 | £105.00 | £175.00 | 6 | £4,410.00 |
| Latin America | £49.00 | £175.00 | £70.00 | £140.00 | 24 | £10,416.00 |
| Middle East | £35.00 | £210.00 | £35.00 | £140.00 | 4 | £1,736.00 |
| Africa | £105.00 | £210.00 | £105.00 | £175.00 | 24 | £12,936.00 |
| Total | 96 | £44,506.00 |
You have to take it all with a pinch of salt as there will be many variables involved. But this will hopefully give you some idea and you can adjust it as you go once you get more used to the reality of the costs involved.
Gear
Next, you need to know what you are going to need. You can head to our Packing List page for a detailed outline. But again this comes down to you and your kids and the sort of thing you want to take.
Potentially this may not even be a cost if you already have everything you need!
We didn’t, so we had to buy some pretty expensive items like the backpacks. Our estimate came to roughly £1,000 for Gear.
Medical
A lot of people are often shocked when I tell them that medical costs were one of the most expensive bulk elements for our trip. So make sure you bake this in right at the start of your budget as otherwise it may come as a nasty surprise.
It all depends on where you go and for how long and the sort of activities you will be doing, but you may well need many vaccinations and, in addition, malaria tablets. Neither of which are usually cheap!
A lot of this depends on your home country, and the kind of the health care that exists. We’re blessed in the UK to have the National Health Service, so some vaccines are actually available for free through the NHS. But not all.
A lot are only available privately and they can really tot up. The rabies jab for example, is around £75 per shot in the UK, and the full course takes 3 shots. There is rarely a discount for children either. So if you are a family of four, like us, you’re looking at £75 per shot, with 3 shots for 4 people, equating to £900 just for the rabies vaccination! Scary, right?!
But don’t let it put you off. Travelling the world is the greatest thing we have ever done and having the peace of mind that you and your children are well protected whilst doing it is important for the enjoyment. So if you want and need them, the medical costs are worth it.
You’ll want to try to do everything to keep them low though. So start with your doctor and/or travel nurse to see what you can get on the health service. If you have insurance, see if anything is covered on that also. Then it’s just a case of deciding what other ones you want to pay for privately. There is lots of info out there about what is recommended depending on where you are heading so do plenty of research.
We pretty much got everything in the end and so ended up with a hefty prediction of about £2,500 for medical requirements (vaccinations plus malaria tablets)
Flights
Whether you are booking a RTW ticket or planning to book tickets as you go this will probably be your biggest bulk cost to consider when setting out. You really want to keep this as low as possible. We hate flying (although the kids love the novelty) so we try to avoid it as much as possible. But if you’re heading around the world you will likely have to take multiple flights.
When looking at it to begin with, we only looked at the long haul flights. It will be difficult to put in any short or domestic flights (if you really have to take any) at the beginning, so this essentially falls into our ‘domestic transport’ living costs.
A good starting point is to head to a travel agent that provides RTW flight tickets. You don’t have to necessarily book with them, but they will be able to give you a prediction of the costs. Make sure you’ve got a rough route ready for when you arrive and explain it to the agent. As they do this regularly, chances are they already have a quote for your trip before even looking, but they’ll also be able to give you more detail and possibly suggest changes to your route to make it cheaper.
Another good method is to use a flight comparison website and model your route on that. This will then throw you some prices and you can tot up and come up with your own prediction of costs. You can’t always be exact as sometimes flights aren’t released until 6 months in advance, but you can make a rough guess.
After we did both these methods we got to around the same result of about £10,000 for flights, for the whole family.
Insurance
Insurance is another pricey element that sometimes may slip your mind. It’s not essential of course, but we would always recommend getting insurance, especially with accident prone kids! We’ve always been very lucky and haven’t had to use it, but have certainly had some close shaves.
Most travellers recommend World Nomads, and we’re no different. The main reason it is such a good insurer is because of the flexibility. A lot of ‘normal holiday’ insurance companies won’t let you purchase insurance unless you are in your country of residence and ask you to be very specific about the countries your visiting and the time period you need it.
World Nomads gives complete flexibility on this. So you can book it whilst your already away (although you can’t claim in the first 24 hours and on anything that took place before you applied, so it’s a no-no to thinking you can trick the system and quickly set one up after you’ve already broken your leg!). You can also be very vague about the countries you’re visiting and basically just put ‘the world’ if that’s your intent, and you can extend the insurance multiple times.
This is perfect if you are using a plan-as-you-go method like we do. It means you don’t have to invest all the cash upfront. I just set up a policy for thirty days and then extend it at the end of each month. This means if we decided to come back earlier than our original plan we don’t lose out on the cash if we had booked insurance for a year!
But you can still estimate the cost for the entire trip by getting a quote for your time frame. Back then we were looking at just over £4,000 for insurance for the whole family for two years. Insurance is now a little more expensive and complicated since Covid so do some research to get some accurate costs for what you want.
Total Cost for a family RTW Trip
So now we have our day to day living costs, plus our more static bulk costs. Add them altogether and you have our rough budget for your travel adventure! Ours ended up looking something like this.
| Item | Cost |
| Living Costs by Region | £44,596.00 |
| Gear | £1,000.00 |
| Medical | £2,500.00 |
| Flights | £10,000.00 |
| Insurance | £4,000.00 |
| Total | £62,096.00 |
So all in for two adults one child and one toddler going around 4 continents in 2 years we were looking at about £62k.
You can spend a lot more or a lot less on this depending on how you do it, we were looking at budget to moderate accommodation, mainly taking public transport and self catering with our food.
Managing the Budget
Once you have your budget you then need to decide how you are going to manage it both before you go and once travelling.
Some like to save up before they head off so they don’t have to worry about money whilst they’re gone and live off their savings. Others like to work and earn as they go. So decide what is right for you and what you think you can achieve. We did a bit of both in that we saved before we went, but also worked to top up as we travelled.
You then need to decide how to manage the budget on a day to day, we used separate cards for separate things to ensure we knew where our spending was going. So we had a card for general spends and food, then another for transport and accommodation and another for the larger things such as flights and insurance. This way if we were overspending in one area we could usually pin point what it was and either curb our spending or adjust our budget.
It’s a good idea to have multiple cards anyway in case something happens to one of them, only having one way of getting money is a dangerous game!
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