In the following report, you’ll see a breakdown of our income and expenses over the past year, as well as how we managed to travel for a full year for just under $10 000.00 for two people.

One WHOLE YEAR of travel!? We can’t quite believe it! Well, it’s been a bit more than a year now. It took quite a lot of time to go back and painstakingly look over our finances for the past year. But it will all be worth it if this report can inspire others to take the leap like we did.

When we left South Africa on the 18th of October 2020, we were nervous to say the least. Although it was a risk, we saw our window of opportunity to still travel in 2020 and jumped at the chance to make our travel dreams come true after dreaming, planning, and saving up for years.

In case you don’t know much about South Africa’s currency (the Rand), it’s not a very strong one. So when we first started planning our travels, we knew we would need some way of keeping our expenses low and making our money last as long as possible. That’s when Marek found Workaway, which is pretty much the reason we have been able to travel as long as we have, with some amazing cultural experiences added to the mix. Workaway is a platform that connects ‘hosts’ with ‘workawayers’ and you volunteer in exchange for food and accommodation.

If you haven’t heard of Workaway yet, you can check it out here:

https://www.workaway.info/invite/1X783BD5

This past year didn’t go quite how we had imagined it would because, of course, the pandemic had changed travel so much, just like it changed so many other things. But it was still one heck of an adventure, and we loved every moment, ups and downs included.

We’ve been very strategic about how we spend our money during our travels and used a number of budget travel hacks to keep our expenses as low as possible. For example, volunteering through Workaway to help cover our food and accommodation expenses, cooking our own food instead of eating out, choosing budget friendly countries to travel in, finding the cheapest means of transport available whether that’s a bus, train, plane or boat (most of the time walking A LOT). Having said that we do splash out, sometimes specifically when we make videos for our YT channel because we have the potential to earn back what we spend.

So, after using all of these hacks and trying our very best to keep our expenses as low as possible, how much did we actually spend?

Let’s get into that. 

I just want to mention that these numbers will be a rough estimate, unfortunately we didn’t have a solid way of keeping track of our finances over the past year (which we are definitely regretting and correcting now). It is also quite difficult to keep track of expenses when we are constantly converting our Rand into other currencies with our ‘Wise’ bank account. If you’ve never heard of Wise, it is basically a borderless account in which we can hold multiple currencies, which is very useful whilst traveling but I will say that it was challenging to go back, track expenses, and narrow them all into one or two currencies (especially when exchange rates are constantly changing).

We highly recommend looking into Wise if you intend to travel, we’ve had great success using it and it offers a very competitive exchange rate compared to mainstream banks. You can take a look at it here: https://transferwise.com/invite/aed/sarahk1365

Having said all of that, I did my best to get as close to the exact amounts as possible. So here they are:

EXPENSES:

TOTAL: $9 900 | R158 000 | €8 700

BREAKDOWN OF EXPENSES:

Accommodation

$ 1 400 | R22 000 | €1 200

I think it would be interesting to note how many days we spent at workaways versus how many days we spent paying for our own accommodation. Roughly I would say about 279 days out of the 365 were spent at a Workaway, staying with friends/family etc. Meaning we didn’t pay for accommodation for roughly 76% of the year. Which goes to show that our accommodation expenses would have been more than tripled if it wasn’t for Workaway and our very kind and generous friends and family.

Transport

$3 000 | R47 300 | €2 600

We always look for the cheapest transport option from one country to the next whether that’s a plane, bus, train, marshrutka (in Georgia and Armenia), you name it. Having said that, transport costs were our biggest expense. We haven’t figured out a way of offsetting these costs yet. Most travelers talk about having travel credit cards that you can earn points on and some of you may have heard about these as well, but unfortunately most of those deals apply to citizens of the United States and we are yet to come across a rewards program or credit card scheme that we would be eligible for and would help us to offset some costs. Having said that, if you know of any schemes similar to the ones we’ve mentioned, that would be applicable to South African citizens, we are all ears!

Food

$2 200 | R34 600 | €1 900

Similarly with the accommodation, our food expenses were covered for about 76% of the year. Hypothetically food should have cost us around $6 250 but instead we saved $4 750 because we primarily used Workaway to travel and of course our friends and family helped us here too. We definitely splashed out on food every now and then especially when making our food tour videos. No regrets though, the food has always been delicious and our food tour videos tend to be our best performing videos to this day.

Travel Insurance

$1 100 | R 18 000 | €1 000

Our travel insurance was an expense we paid for before leaving but I included it because it forms part of our travel expenses. The company we purchased it from was Satam Limited through a division of the company called Travel Insurance Consultants. Unfortunately, this company only offers travel insurance to South Africans.

Covid expenses

$400 |R6 700 | €400

I think it’s important to specifically mention expenses related to Covid since, pre-pandemic, these expenses did not exist. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at how much extra cost the pandemic added to our travels. The costs included here, are mostly related to PCR tests that were required before a flight etc. 

Camera Equipment

$800 | R13 400 | €700

We reached an exciting step in our YouTube journey when our channel was monetized earlier this year, which means that we have started earning money through ad revenue. In all honesty we are hoping to grow our channel to the point where it can financially sustain more travels and so we decided to invest in a new camera that has really improved our videos. If you would like to find out more about what gear we use, you can check out the ‘our gear’ page on our website. On that note, if you support our YouTube channel (subscribed to our channel, watch our videos, comment on our videos) thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts. We really appreciate you!

Miscellaneous

$1 000 | R16 000 | €900

This category consists of expenses that didn’t fall under any other categories. For example, clothes, toiletries, extra activities, admission expenses, etc.

In case anyone is interested, these are countries we visited during this year in order England, France, Poland, Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Poland, Greece, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia (whilst in Slovakia we hit one year of full-time travel). The countries you visit make a huge difference to your budget. The most expensive country we traveled in this year by far was Germany. We were so grateful to be hosted by our very good friends otherwise we would not have been able to visit this beautiful country.

INCOME:

TOTAL: $5 111 | R81 300 | €3 794

BREAKDOWN OF INCOME:

Teaching English online

$1 100 | R16 900 | €900

We are super grateful I was able to keep this job going on the side whilst traveling, because it really added a significant amount to our income for the year. Having said that, I should mention that the amount of days in this year that I was actively teaching online was no more than 30 days. This work was very on and off. I personally couldn’t manage to teach whilst at Workaways, so the only time I did manage to teach some lessons was when we were traveling on our own expense and staying in accommodation suitable for teaching (good WiFi, a white wall for background, not too loud, etc.).

YouTube

$310 | R5 000 | €270

We are SO proud to finally be earning some money from our videos! We were in the YouTube game for a full year before our channel was monetized and we finally started to earn some money. Just to clarify, we only got monetized in June 2021. So we were earning from YouTube for about 5 months of this 1st year of travel. It definitely started out quite slowly and if you look at our earnings in relation to our other sources of income, you’ll notice it isn’t actually much. However, we are still working hard and hoping to turn YouTube into a bigger earner so that we can financially sustain more travels. If you support our channel, thank you so much! You may not realize it, but you are contributing to this nomadic travel lifestyle we are trying to build.

Workaway Job Opportunities

$640 | R 10 400 | €570

Most Workaway opportunities involve a volunteering arrangement in exchange for food and accommodation. No physical money is exchanged. However, we have had a few opportunities to do some extra work on the side at one or two Workaways in the past year. The main work opportunity we had was in France working with children.

Buy Me A Coffee

$61 | R1 000 | €54

About two months ago we started our Buy Me A Coffee page which is basically a way for our viewers to financially support our channel (similar to Pateon, just a different platform). It’s amazing to finally be earning some money from our videos, but this revenue is very inconsistent. Our Buy Me A Coffee (BMAC) page is a place where our supporters can contribute towards our videos and keep us going. We also use this page to post extra behind the scenes content and give extra perks to our BMAC members.

The idea behind the platforms name “Buy Me A Coffee” is that contribution amounts start from $1.00, the amount you would pay for a coffee (in some cases even less than what a coffee costs) but instead of buying a coffee you are supporting our work. We are SUPER grateful for the support we receive through this! If this is something you would be interested in, you can find it here:

https://buymeacoffee.com/sarahandmarek

And that’s a wrap on our first year of travel! If you’re still reading, thank you! I hope this report has been useful or at least interesting for you 😉 We are hoping this report can inspire others to follow their travels dream, especially those thinking travel is out of reach financially. In all honesty, we have been surprised by how far we’ve managed to get on our budget and we are so grateful to still be traveling! 

If you found this useful and would be interested in seeing more reports like one this as we continue to travel, drop us comment below so we can gage interest. It took a lot of time to put this report together, so if it’s not useful or there isn’t much interest for future reports we would rather put this time and effort towards something more useful 

Thanks again for reading! If you have any questions feel free to comment them below or contact us, we would love to hear from you!