Doing The Math
I’ve written a lot about the logistics of our hobo lifestyle, but I haven’t really shared anything about the economics. Unsurprisingly, I keep a detailed spreadsheet of our expenses. I thought it might be helpful to share the granular specifics of what we’re actually spending. We haven’t seen anything like this level of budget information anywhere else, so if any of you are foolish enough to consider following in our footsteps this might be helpful.
I’m starting this out with a representative month each in Oaxaca, Mexico City, Chetumal, and Cuba. As we go further afield, I’ll add more exotic locales.
Recurring Fixed Monthly Expenses
| Item | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Software & Services | |
| NordVPN (Billed Annually) | $4.15 |
| Office 365 (Billed Annually) | $8.25 |
| OnePassword (Billed Annually) | $3.00 |
| BoardGameArena (Billed Annually) | $3.00 |
| iCloud | $2.99 |
| Global eSIMs (Amortized monthly cost for both our phones) | $29.67 |
| Subtotal | $51.06 |
| Subscriptions & Media | |
| Netflix | $19.99 |
| New York Times | $25.00 |
| Apple Music | $16.99 |
| New Yorker (Billed Annually) | $8.33 |
| Curiosity Stream (Billed Annually) | $1.67 |
| Subtotal | $71.98 |
| Health Care | |
| MedJet + (Annual Cost for global medevac insurance) | $74.92 |
| Medicare B | $329.80 |
| Meds (One year supply, purchased in advance) | $28.63 |
| Subtotal | $433.35 |
| Miscellaneous | |
| Capital One Venture X (Annual Fee, net of credits) | $7.92 |
| Chase Sapphire (Annual Fee) | $12.50 |
| Renter’s Insurance (Billed Annually) | $5.00 |
| Storage Facility in Chicago | $83.25 |
| Subtotal | $108.67 |
| Total Recurring Expenses | $665.06 |
Variable Expenses
This is what we’re actually spending every month on living: food, entertainment, housing, travel… A few notes about the categories.
- Artifacts = Rugs, ceramics, art… We’re not picking up souvenir trinkets, but we’re shooting for one signature piece from each destination.
- Blog = Mostly the odd developer hour necessary to solve a WordPress problem, but also things like Dall-E 2 charges and software licenses.
- Culture = Museum entrance, park admission…
- Entertainment = Music cover charges, movies, jigsaw puzzles…
- Gear = Anything that goes into our travel kit: Snorkels, sun hats, water bottles…
- Household Expenses = Anything we need to live comfortably in a new Airbnb that we intend to leave behind: saucepans, ice trays, hangers…
- Housing = The daily cost of our Airbnb, distributed monthly based on our location (not based on the month in which we incurred the expense).
- So a month where we were in, for example, both Cuba and Chetumal, there might be 20 days of daily Cuba costs, and 10 days of daily Chetumal costs
- This category also includes the cost of any overnight stays away from our main city. We took three overnights to different places in Chetumal, for example, which made our housing costs for that month super high.
- Shrinkage = The difference between the cash we actually have in our pockets vs. what I’ve logged as expenses, reconciled at the end of every month. It’s still money spent, whether I know where it went or not.
- Transportation = Local transportation: car rental, taxi, Uber, bus…
- Travel = The cost of getting to a given location, calculated on the same basis as the housing costs (amortized over the number of days we’re in a location, and allocated by day to the correct month).
| Category | Oaxaca | Cuba | Tunis | Chicago |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Artifacts | $36.61 | $337.00 | $156.50 | $0.00 |
| Blog | $0.00 | $27.57 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Classes | $59.99 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Clothing | $59.23 | $28.00 | $90.70 | 178.34 |
| Culture | $38.76 | $34.74 | $54.08 | $0.00 |
| Dining Out | $216.68 | $535.43 | $215.21 | $487.09 |
| Entertainment | $18.72 | $65.32 | $26.59 | $108.40 |
| Fees | $0.00 | $187.54 | $0.00 | $10.96 |
| Gear | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $121.04 |
| Gifts | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Groceries | $438.32 | $150.24 | $421.61 | $736.21 |
| Grooming | $6.46 | $7.09 | $43.80 | $55.64 |
| Health Care | $0.00 | $0.00 | $46.75 | $187.24 |
| Household Expenses | $0.00 | $26.65 | $10.34 | $0.00 |
| Housing | $1,147.28 | $789.26 | $1,233.57 | $1,316.23 |
| Incidentals | $0.00 | $39.12 | $5.70 | $19.19 |
| Laundry | $5.82 | $20.63 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Liquor | $0.00 | $35.29 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Shipping | $0.00 | $83.46 | $0.00 | $216.50 |
| Shrinkage | $26.71 | $2.43 | $16.22 | $0.00 |
| Transportation | $42.14 | $652.53 | $152.00 | $586.75 |
| Travel | $239.68 | $1,303.03 | $378.17 | $525.87 |
| Total | $2,336.39 | $4,054.27 | $2,851.24 | $4,549.45 |
| Monthly Recurring Expenses | $665.06 | $665.06 | $665.06 | $665.06 |
| Grand Total | $3,001.45 | $4,687.37 | $3,516.30 | $5,214.51 |
There’s obviously a lot of noise in this data. There’s no such thing as a typical month. Cuba had a very high travel cost because we had to pay for airfare twice, and we had high Fees to pay for our tourist visas. Dining out in Cuba was expensive because cooking ingredients were so scarce we ate out more often than in other places, but groceries were very low that month. There were no Household Expenses in Oaxaca as those tend to cluster in the first month of our stay, and the month I chose as an example was month three.
Tunisia was just cheap. We had our once-in-a-lifetime Sahara tour the month after this example, so the numbers are much worse, but the baseline cost of living is just low. Our travel expenses are so low because it was cheap to get there from Morocco and we amortized the expense over a full three month stay. Housing costs were high because we took multiple road trips and double dipped on Airbnbs. We spread those housing costs across the three month visit, so they show up every month. But generally speaking, Tunisia has been one of our least expensive destinations.
All our costs in Chicago were high, because USofA. I’ve excluded the costs of setting up our apartment for the purposes of this exercise. Buying vacuum cleaners and stoves and renovating a bathroom are all one-time outlays, and I wanted to compare the same classes of cost-of-living expenses. This experiment has proven, unsurprisingly, that it’s cheaper to live outside the US. Ta-da!
I also want to note that we’re not trying to do this as cheaply as we can. This isn’t a post-college backpack-toting wanderjahr. We want to be comfortable and have as much fun as possible. We’re actually trying to spend our income. Any one of these months could have been less expensive. Less eating out. More buses, fewer taxis. Not as many day trips/overnights. Also, for reasons that shouldn’t repeat, our first year involved more stays that were shorter than our three month target, jacking our Travel expenses up. That’s why the Travel expenses for Oaxaca are so low. We spread the cost of getting to Oaxaca over almost four months, as opposed to Cuba, where we were only there for one month.
Caveat emptor. YMMV.
I realize the level of detail here might look a little… pathological. And I wouldn’t necessarily argue about that. But it’s also pretty important that we’re able to do this out of income, and not have to spend down savings to finance this folly.
On the one hand, I’ve got almost two years of data, and we’ve been under budget almost every month. So I could stop. We’ve established that we’re managing the money well, and month-to-month fluctuations still don’t push us into the red.
But there will also be situations where we really want to splurge on something: a truly precious find, or a safari, or a camel trip to a desert oasis. In those circumstances, a general understanding that we’re under budget isn’t enough; we need to know by how much cumulatively. Is there enough left over in the budget to date to pay for that safari? The answer to that question matters, and will assure that we take as big a bite out of the world as we can manage.
And I’m a little pathological.
Always interesting to see other people’s budget breakdowns. I also log ours in detail, but ultimately summarise much more than you do in my breakdown.
I prefer to record travel costs separately as otherwise it becomes misleading when comparing the costs of different locations. It would obviously be massively less expensive to travel from Cadiz to Morocco than from Bangkok to Morocco, but I assume you would record both as Morocco costs.
Dave:
Thanks so much for the comments. One way around your concern would be to take the entire year’s travel expenses and spread them out by month. That’s probably the most understandable method. What I do instead is amortize the expense to get to a given location over the length of our stay. So if we’re 88 days someplace, I divide the travel expense across those 88 days and spread it out per month based on days spent/location.
That seems reasonable to me, lets me stay current on budgeting, and reflects the fact that while it might be expensive to get from Chicago to Marrakech, it truly is cheaper to get from Marrakech to Tunis. That calculus informs our decisions as to where to go next, so it seems fair to track it that way.
Ultimately, I track expenses so I can prove to my wife that we can afford our lifestyle. That and slightly more than the normal allotment of OCD.
Let me know if you have any questions. Obviously, happy to be transparent.