How Much Did We Spend Traveling the World？

From September 3, 2025 to July 26, 2026, we spent a total of $83,327.

To be honest, we’re not exactly a typical RTW (round-the-world) trip—we didn’t travel continuously in one direction and eventually end up back where we started. We came back home a few times along the way to see family and friends, take care of some life admin, and deal with other things.

All together, we spent 304 days traveling to 20 countries. That works out to about $274 per day for the two of us, or $137 per person per day.

1. If I Want to Do Something Similar, How Much Should I Budget?

I know this is probably the number you’re actually looking for—a reference point. So here are two ways you can estimate your own budget.

1.1 Look at tour operator prices

From what I’ve seen, group tours and private trips are generally more expensive than planning everything yourself. But they can still give you a useful ballpark.

For example, if I were planning to spend a month in South America, with destinations like Medellín, Bogotá, and Cartagena in Colombia, plus Santiago and Patagonia in Chile, I could look at tour packages that visit similar destinations and offer a similar level of accommodation.

Then, very roughly:

Your estimated budget ≈ Tour price ÷ Number of days × Your number of travel days × 0.8

The 20% discount is my rough attempt to account for the premium you’re paying for the convenience of having someone else organize everything.

Our trip ended up being cheaper than this estimate because we tend to travel fairly independently and book our hotels, Airbnbs, and tours ourselves—often using deals from Hotels.com, credit card offers, and other discounts.

1.2 Use the tool below

You can also use the tool below to estimate your own travel costs based on your destinations and travel style. We also provided our expenses (for 2 travelers) by category for your reference.

2. We’re Practical Travelers Who Spend Where It Matters

When it comes to spending, our priorities are basically:

Activities >> Accommodation >> Food

For accommodation, we mostly stay in practical Airbnbs. The biggest advantage is having more living space for less than the price of a hotel, plus a kitchen and a washing machine.

The downside? We have to do more cleaning ourselves, make our own breakfast, and deal with the classic problem of arriving somewhere before check-in and figuring out where to leave our luggage.

For food, when we arrive somewhere new, we usually eat out for the first couple of days because, well, we just got there! After that, we start cooking more for ourselves. As much as we love trying local restaurants, eating restaurant food every day—often high in oil and salt—eventually gets a little exhausting.

Activities are where we’re much more willing to spend money. If a place isn’t particularly convenient for driving ourselves, we might hire a private car. We’ll find a local guide, or pay for a guided tour at a museum in Europe. There’s a reason for that: some money is easy to save, but once you leave a place, you can’t go back in time and experience it again.

We’d rather spend the money and come home thinking, “That was expensive, but I’m glad we did it,” than save a few hundred dollars and spend years thinking, “I wish we had just gone.”

3. Was Traveling More Expensive Than We Expected?

Actually, no.

It ended up being much cheaper than our original budget.

We initially planned for $100,000 over six months. That number was relatively high partly because we had Antarctica on the original itinerary, which obviously would have added a pretty significant chunk to the budget. We ultimately didn’t make it there.

So spending around $83,000 over 11 months was honestly a pretty pleasant surprise.

Of course, there’s always a catch: comparison is dangerous.

While writing this article, I looked at what other travel bloggers had spent and realized that, compared with some of them, our number actually looks pretty high. But at the end of the day, the only number that really matters is whether you can comfortably afford your own trip.

4. Where Did All the Money Go?

China was by far the cheapest at around $102 per day. And honestly, we probably could have spent even less there. Because food, accommodation, and transportation were so affordable, we fell into the classic trap of thinking:

“It’s so cheap. We might as well enjoy it.”

So we ate what we wanted, upgraded when we felt like it, and generally stopped worrying about the budget quite as much. After 49 days in China, we had still spent around $5k.

5. What Was Worth the Money—and What Wasn’t?

Our biggest spending lesson came from Africa - We traveled during peak season because we wanted to see the Great Migration and hopefully catch a wildebeest river crossing. That meant paying close to a 40% premium.

The problem?

When we actually got there, we realized that a river crossing is incredibly unpredictable. And despite all that planning and spending, we never saw a full crossing. The animals were there. The migration was happening. The experience was still amazing.

But we paid a huge premium for a moment that was never guaranteed to happen. If we did it again, we probably wouldn’t pay that much extra for one specific event that depends so heavily on luck.

Another expense we regretted was hiring a private car in Morocco. We originally thought paying more would buy us convenience, flexibility, and a deeper local experience. Instead, we happened to end up with a driver who was difficult to deal with, and unfortunately, that affected our mood during those days of the trip.

That doesn’t mean private transportation isn’t worth it in Morocco. If we had gotten a professional, friendly, knowledgeable guide who could also tell us about the local culture, we might have thought the money was incredibly well spent.

On the other hand, there are some big expenses we would happily pay for again. Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, hiking in Patagonia, and trekking in the Dolomites were not cheap. But they delivered experiences that were far beyond what we expected.

6. So… How Did You Afford All of This?

The answer is actually much less dramatic than you might expect. We didn’t suddenly get rich, and we’re not travel influencers whose brand deals paid for the entire trip. We simply decided fairly early on that we wanted to do this, and started saving specifically for it. During the trip, our money came mainly from three sources:

• Savings we had set aside specifically for travel
• Passive income from bonds and interest from our high-yield savings accounts
• We also had a small amount of rental income coming in.

None of these cash flows were enough to let us spend without thinking, but they did slow down the rate at which our savings were disappearing—and, perhaps more importantly, made it feel much more financially comfortable to spend nearly a year traveling.