Doing the Math: Expenses for Weeks 1-4

One of our goals in documenting our trip is to show what it takes to do something like this.  Whenever the topic of our trip came up last fall and people asked how we decided to do this crazy thing, I would say, “We figured out what our ‘lottery dream’ was and then did the math.”  That makes it sound easy, though, when in fact it was really, really hard to come up with a realistic budget.  There are a ton of blogs of people who’ve done yearlong trips around the world, but they usually go to a lot more countries and much less expensive places.  They also sometimes travel a bit rougher than we’re willing to.  All of this made it complicated to figure out what was realistic.  I’ll do a separate post on how I did it, but the purpose of this post is to document what our first four weeks actually cost.

Expenses for Weeks 1-4

• Airfare to Europe: $1,529
• Lodging: $1,332
• Groceries: $479
• Eating out: $351
• Household expenses: $28
• Transportation: $63
• Cellular service: $79
• Entertainment: $172
• Visa-related expenses: $22
• Health/travel insurance: $301

Total for first four weeks: $4,356

Total other than airfare to Europe: $2,827

Budget for four weeks in Spain (one of our lowest-cost countries): $3,165

We’re doing okay against our original budget, but we benefited from booking things way in advance before the exchange rate spiked.  When I created our original budget back in June, the numbers reflected what was then a 1.11 Euro-to-dollar rate, whereas now it’s closer to 1.24.  As I start looking for future lodging in our more expensive cities, I can tell that the exchange rate is going to be a problem.   We may have to adjust our plans accordingly.  Below are the details for each line item for those who would like to dig deeper.

Airfare to Europe

We wanted to book the trip back in April so that we could start planning, and we discovered that Icelandair offers fully refundable, fully changeable tickets at reasonable rates.  So, we went ahead and booked tickets to London without knowing for sure which city we’d be starting out in.  The downside of Icelandair is that you have to connect through Reykjavik no matter where you’re going, but the upside is that they let you do a stayover if you want (January seemed like not the best time for this for us) and also they hold the plane to the next destination if your plane is late, as ours was.  It worked out pretty well.   Once we settled on Madrid as our first city, I looked into other tickets but the Icelandair option was still the cheapest.  We booked British Airways from London to Madrid, with a four-hour buffer just in case our plane from Iceland was late (and it was).  It made for a rough 24 hours of travel, but at the beginning of a yearlong trip it was not a big deal.  For a shorter trip, I would not recommend doing it this way.  It’s best to book nonstop flights if you can, and with a single airline in any case so that they are responsible for complications caused by any delays.

Lodging, Groceries, & Eating Out

Staying at the Airbnb worked out well both for our budget and for our sanity.  It’s nice to not have to find a place for every meal, and it’s also nice to be able to eat lots of fresh vegetables.  Speaking of veggies, it’s awesome how cheap and good produce is in Spain.  At the same time, it’s nice to go out so that we can experience the local culture.  We mostly avoided having full meals out and stuck to coffee or drinks at bars, along with relatively cheap tapas.  This strategy might not work as well in other countries but it’s fantastic for Spain.

Household Expenses

This line item includes things that are not groceries but that we need to daily life, like a knife sharpener because the chef’s knife in our Airbnb was driving us crazy, paper towels and hand soap to replace what we used up in the Airbnb, plastic storage containers for soup we made to freeze, etc.  It’s probably a little obsessive to separate this out, but we’re finding it helpful to have food costs separate from this kind of stuff, and Craig’s mad Quicken skills make it easy for us to calculate this.

Transportation

Our transportation costs were low because we were only in one city and walked almost everywhere we went.  We bought 10-trip metro cards when we first got to Spain, but we ended up not using the subway or bus very much except for visa-related appointments and to get to and from the airport and the bus station (for El Escorial).  Our apartment was located close to a lot of things, and we enjoyed walking around the city.  Our main expense for travel was the intercity bus out to El Escorial.  Going forward, our transportation costs will be higher because we won’t be in the same city for a full month for a while and we’ll be taking buses and trains to get from city to city.

Cellular Service

For our cell service, we decided to take two different approaches on the assumption that it would increase the likelihood that at least one of us would have service most of the time.  Craig got a Google Pixel phone and is using the Google Fi service, which is $40-50 per month, depending on how much data he uses.  I kept my old iPhone 5S and got a Vodafone SIM card once we got to Spain for 15€ per month, or about $19.  It’s mostly for data, as I only get 50 minutes of international calling per month.  Other than getting annoying promotional texts in Spanish every few days, it’s worked out well, especially since I now have a Spanish contact number to give for our visa paperwork.  I paid $20 to park my old cell number at Google Voice because I’m a dork and don’t want to lose my 202 cell number.  #DCsnob

Entertainment

This category includes admission fees and audioguide charges.  We purchased an annual membership to the Spanish national museums, primarily for the Prado but it includes other museums as well.  At 36€ per person, it was a terrific deal, especially since we like to go to the Prado for short stints almost every day when in Madrid.  We also ended up going to small museums we would have ordinarily skipped, just because they were free with the membership.  The audioguides started to add up, though, so we’ll need to keep an eye on those “free” museums.

Visa-related Expenses

We are on a yearlong nonlucrative visa (which means we’re not allowed to work – que lastima!) from Spain, and there is a bit of paperwork involved with that.  We had to print passport photos in a different size from U.S. photos for our identity cards, and we also had to print and make copies of some of the documents we didn’t know ahead of time that we’d need.  We’ll have a few more visa-related expenses in week 6, but I don’t think this will be an ongoing line item for the whole year.

Health/Travel Insurance

We were required to get a certain amount of health insurance as a condition of our yearlong visa.  It basically required coverage for emergencies and to fly us back to the U.S. if we got sick.  We looked at various options such as continuing our old coverage through COBRA, getting insurance through the DC marketplace, getting just the minimum required by the visa, and getting true international health insurance, and we decided to go with the last option.  We got ours through Cigna Global, and it includes both medical and travel coverage (like trip cancellation and lost baggage stuff).  It doesn’t cover checkups and screening tests, but it covers just about everything else, from cancer treatments to organ transplants to broken legs to general illnesses.  We got a 10% discount for paying for the full year at once, which was great because we had to do show a full year of coverage for our visa application anyway.

Something interesting I learned while researching all of this: health coverage doubles in cost if you include coverage in the U.S.  That is, you usually have to select whether you want worldwide coverage, or worldwide coverage other than the U.S.  If you include every single country in the world (literally!) except for the U.S., the cost is half what it is if you have every country including the U.S.  We have coverage if something happens while in the U.S. for a short stint, but in general the U.S. is not included.  Since we’re not planning to be in the U.S. for more than the short stint of coverage stipulated, that’s okay.

Another key thing about our insurance: because it excludes preexisting conditions and has maximum coverage limits, it doesn’t meet the ACA requirements.  I guess this is less of an issue if the individual mandate is no longer in effect, but when we bought the insurance in October, this meant that we would need to be outside of the United States for at least 11 months of the past 12 to not be subject to the penalty when applying for U.S. insurance on our return.  Since we planned to be away for 11 months (or more), this was not an issue even before the individual mandate was lifted.  Still, it’s interesting to note what ACA-qualifying coverage provides that this private option does not.

Summary

While it is definitely not cheap to live for a month in Europe, it’s not outrageously expensive, either.  It’s definitely possible to do it more cheaply than we have, too.  We’re not willing to bunk in hostels with a bunch of twenty-somethings, and we like to eat well when we cook at home.  In the interest of full disclosure, I should also probably note that our condo is subsidizing our trip, as we are netting just under $1000 from renting it out, after condo fees, property management fees, taxes, etc.  I should also note that Spain in January is probably one of the cheaper “live for a month in Europe” options, especially with just one city involved, and future months will most likely be more expensive.  Stay tuned!