Budget control is always crucial on a trip, especially when you are travelling for a long period of time in a budget way.
For this reason we decided to set a daily budget for our trip and make a register of every expense since the very beginning.
As it was said in our article “How to put our world in a bag”, we found a very useful app (Trail Wallet), which has been helping considerably in this daily budget control.
Taking the assumption that we will be travelling for a whole year, we estimated a total amount of expenditures of 24.000 euros for the both of us (2.000 euros per month for the couple), amount that we have been saving since we started working on our consulting/auditing roles. Please note that this estimate does not include the flight from our home country (Portugal) to the first country we visited (India), neither any pre costs incurred during the trip preparation (for instance, medicine, vaccination or bags).
Travelling in Asia, if considering the majority of Asian countries, is not that expensive. However, since we wanted to make sure we could have access to reasonable good conditions, we found this estimate quite fair.
We have finished our first country visit, in the marvellous India. So, it seems like a good time to have an overview of our expenditures so far.
During 45 days, we spent a total amount of 2.285 euros, while visiting 11 different places in India. The cost timeline was as follows.
Comparing to our daily budget, we performed well, since we were below the budget most of the days. However, one should not forget that sometimes we incur in specific costs that tend to increase our average daily costs, such as airplane tickets or country visas. For this reason, we have been trying to be below daily budget to compensate these hypes in costs.
Additionally, the graph below allows to have an idea of our expenditures per category.
Here we can see that transportation and accommodation are the categories that contribute the most to our expenditures in India, followed by food & beverage. Having in mind that we travelled mostly in upper classes or AC buses the transportation costs can be lowered with a minimum effort. Moreover we took two flights during our time in India which increased substantially this aspect.
Finally, in order to have an idea of the travelling costs in each place we visited in India, we present below an average daily cost per city. These costs does not include transportation expenses between cities and it has the goal to identify the cheapest and more expensive places to visit in India.
New Delhi and Goa were the most expensive cities on average.
Our next stop will be in Sri Lanka, so let’s see our performance in terms of expenditures there!