Why Financial Obligations At Home Shouldn’t Stop You From Traveling

There is this thing like I said before! You will always have costs, whether it’s at home or during your travels. And basically these are the same costs, like paying for shelter, food, public transport, health- and travel insurances, phone and internet costs, etc.

For us, as students living at home with our parents,  the big costs has been particularly tuition fee (although this will not apply to us during the travel since we will be graduated when we leave), health insurance, telephone- and internet costs, ‘hobby’ costs (rent dance-studio, movie theaterpass, rent office space for business start-up and small trips as far as you can call our travel obsession a hobby haha) and our public transport cards. Rest of our salary and study fund went to our bank account for the world trip and the wedding.

Most of these costs will be also present during traveling. We will have health- and travel insurance which is very important! We definitely don’t want to save money on this, but we also don’t want to pay more than necessary. I will write more about these costs in our next blog, since there are many possibilities and it is quite difficult to choose a right one.

Telephone and internet costs: At the moment our telephone provider charges us with a vast amount per month for calling, texting and internet. But this will be different when we leave. We will quit our contracts since we won’t be needing those services. These days you can find internet anywhere, even the most poor countries have internet cafes or hotels or other public places where there is (free) wifi access through which we will stay in touch with family and friends. However I deliberately want to live without internet for a while since it has become an habit. I think it ruins quality time with friends and family since being connected all the time leads to obsession of check your messages, emails, facebook and other social media. But okay, since we are traveling it may be our ONLY way to connect to family and friends far away.  We do think of purchasing local phone cards if we have long stays such as in India, China or Australia. This way Farhang and me stay reachable for each other without needing internet.

Hobby costs: I will continue dancing around the world for sure! It would be strange to stop doing it when it’s one of the things I love to do beside traveling! So it doesn’t matter if it costs me a bit. We are going to do all kinds of activities such as paragliding, skydiving, bunjee jumping, diving, hiking and jungle trekking. This expensive hobby of trying different variations of extreme sports may cost huge amounts of money, but totally worth it! 😉

Transport costs: We will have these for sure, like flying from one continent to the other or taking (inter) national buses and trains.
Ofcourse this will be slightly different from traveling with trains and buses in Europe. I’m not only talking about the price or distance differences but also comfort and luxury differences which can be challenging (Just think of Indian railways and buses, with people covering the whole train haha).

Shelter and food costs: Since we didn’t have this before because of living with our parents, it will be challenging to find a way to stay within our budget, yet finding appropriate and safe shelter and food!

Moral of the story? Don’t convince yourself that you have obligations, responsibilities and other recurring expenses at home and you have total financial freedom during the journey (unless you’re a millionaire). I see it as exchanging same boring recurring costs at home for surviving on the road with every day finding yourself in new and adventurous circumstances.  So it is somehow comparable, but with that ’ living-on-the-road- way of living’  you actually enjoy life with more fun and adrenaline!