Money – how do we finance the trip or where do we get the money?

Money – where are they comming from? this is one of the most popular questions which we are asked by the people following our trip. However, the same we are questioning other long-term travellers we meet on the road.

It is really an interesting topic, so we have always been talking about this openly and without any tabu.

Before bringing all the details, worth to mention that we do not invest our savings into a purchase of a car, an appartment, flat screen TV, good fridge or similar touchable object. In other words, our material property is very poor. And it is like that, because every cent we invest into travels.

Alright, let’s start with the concrete numbers:

In 2005 for 8 months Augustas was working at Aalborg University in Denmark. The salary after taxes was roughly 2000 EUR. After covering all the debts (which were caused by the trip to Africa in 2004), following the advice of one friend, the rest of the money we have invested into Investmend Funds managed by a Swedish company “East Capital“.

From July 2005 to January 2006 we have invested about 6400 EUR. When we started the trip, we also had some savings in our personal bank accounts. This amount was near to 1500 EUR. To sum-up, we had around 7900 EUR ($10’000) when we started the trip in January 2006.

When the personal bank accounts were running out, we started to withdraw money from the investment funds. We were “sucking” money from the funds for two years, till March 2008. Now this source is dry. Total amount withdrawn was 8360 EUR. It is not difficult to calculate that in 2 years invested “money made money” by 30%!

Our primary savings will be supporting us till mid 2008. Besides that we are earning few dollars by other means as well.

Already during the second month of our journey, in Mexico we got to know Kathy, who is a co-owner of the CoolWorks.com job portal. She has heard our story and immidiately offered to start writing $50 blogs for their page. We certainly agreed! Since then every 6-8 weeks we are posting a short story from our trip to the “Cool Works”. The articles for this portal most of the time are written by Katja. And here is the link to the cool works blogs: http://www.coolworks.com/blogs

Augustas is time to time working on different website programming (PHP + MySQL) projects. By the end of 2007 the total 2-year income from such projects reached almost $4000. The most intensive project he is working on is personal finance portal. Working with this site allows us partialy support our trip.

Since July 2007 we have one more source of income. It is a Lithuanian travel magazine “Kelioniu Magija” (“The Magic of Travels”), where Augustas periodicaly publishes 4-pages stories from our trip and gets almost $95 per article (210 LTL).

To summarize, during the first year of our life-journey (2006) our daily expenses were 5 EUR ($6.50-$7.00) per person per day. Actually it is a lot, as initially we planned to fit into $3-$5 per day budget. More about our expenses read here.

Links to the articles which have been published on the CoolWorks blog you may find here.

Income 2007 (total $5700):
$600 – Writing articles about our trip
$3700 – Programming websites
$1400 – Other

About carying the cash?

We started our trip by having lots of cash money, which we have hid in a few random places: in backpacks, neck pouches (here also we keep passports), narrow EagleCreek money belts with an inside zip where we place dozens of folded banknotes. During the trip in Africa we had a lot of hidden places in the stitches of the trousers, where we pushed lots of banknotes rolled into a piece of plastic. Of course, besides the cash we also have couple of credit cards, which are very usefull now, when we do not carry much cash anymore.

We always try to keep bunch of dollar banknotes with small nomination ($1 and $5). They sometimes help when crossing the border and having no official money exchange place (we try to avoid money changers on the street) for the first day or so. However, the most convenient is to have lots of $20’ies, as higher nomination banknotes would bring more suspision for beeing fake, as well as not everybody will have a change for that (if it is a country, where US dollar is an official currency, e.g., Panama, Ecuador, etc.).

We do not have traveler’s checks, as the commissions for the operations related to them are too high, sometimes reaching up to 13% (yes, that was the rate somewhere in Southern-East Africa). Moreover, it is sometimes very difficult to find a place, which would cash your traveler’s checks… Finally, we are not so rich yet for having so much money to carry.

Do not hesitate to contact us or write comments if you have more additional questions or suggestions.