One of the aspects of planning for our family gap year that I found the hardest was trying to come up with any kind of budget. There is a LOT of planning that has to go in to travelling the world with children. Some of it, like choosing your destinations and dreaming about the things you want to do is a lot of fun. But when it comes to finances it can be very daunting – where do you even start with budgeting for a whole year of travel? How much does a family gap year cost?
That’s where this post comes in. Costs will vary widely between families and destinations but I wanted to lay out exactly how much our family gap year cost so at least people dreaming of escaping the rat race (even just for a while!) might have a vague idea of how much it might all cost.
How did we keep track of our family gap year costs?
I had a giant spreadsheet that was designed to give us an overview of how much cash we had where and what the budget for each country was. But for the day-to-day budget tracking I downloaded the Trabee App. Trabee is a brilliant tool that allows you to set a budget for each country and then log items as you spend them. You can also categorise each item so that you can see your total spend on accommodation, transport, food etc.
I found this a really helpful way to keep on top of our spending.
What did we originally budget for our family gap year?
You can read about our original budget in our full post here from when we initially set off on our adventures.
Essentially, our budget broke down like this:
| ITEM | BUDGETED AMOUNT | NOTES |
| Flights | £5,000 | Long-haul flights only |
| Travel insurance | £2,000 | Two blocks of insurance |
| Travel vaccinations | £500 | Full rabies course for the boys; booster for me and Steve |
| Travel costs | £37,500 | All accommodation, travel on the ground, short-haul flights, food and everything else PLUS a term of international school fees |
| Costs at home | £5,000 | Mortgage, bills and on-going subscriptions |
| Contingency | £5,000 | For emergencies and/or stuff that we’ve failed to account for! |
| GRAND TOTAL | £55,000 |
Where did we go on our family gap year?
After MUCH planning and discussion, we settled on an itinerary that took us to Mexico and Costa Rica, before a quick trip back to the UK for Christmas. We then spent six months in South East Asia travelling through Malaysia (including Borneo), Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Cambodia and Vietnam.
We flew back to Europe for the final leg so we could include our campervan Joyce in our travels. A quick ferry over the channel took us to the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and France for the Summer.
How much did we spend in each country?
For us, our family gap year cost broke down as follows in each country:
| COUNTRY | TOTAL BUDGET | NO. OF WEEKS | TOTAL SPEND |
| Mexico | £5,000 | 3.5 | £4,472 |
| Costa Rica | £6,000 | 5.5 | £6,034 |
| Singapore | £1,000 | 1 | £946 |
| Malaysia | £2,800 | 5 | £3,110 |
| Indonesia | £4,700 | 8 | £5,500 |
| Borneo (Malaysian) | £1,850 | 3 | £2,173 |
| Thailand | £2,500 | 4 | £2,695 |
| Cambodia | £1,900 | 3 | £1,755 |
| Vietnam | £1,900 | 3 | £2,074 |
| Europe (in the campervan) | £5,500 | 6 | £5,600 |
What was the cheapest country we visited on our family gap year?
For us, Cambodia worked out as the cheapest country we visited. We found the food to be cheap, we didn’t take any internal flights and the guesthouse we based ourselves at in Siem Reap was really affordable (c.£20 per night).
What was the most expensive country we visited on our family gap year?
The absolute most expensive place we visited was Singapore (no surprises there!). I struggled to find accommodation that was less than £150 a night and, although the hawker stalls are great value for eating out, a couple of days here really hit our budget HARD.
Because of this we only spent a handful of days in Singapore around our flights in/out of South East Asia.
Outside of Singapore, our most expensive destinations were Costa Rica, the Yucatan in Mexico and Europe.
Whilst it is possible to visit these countries on a budget, it was much harder to keep to a strict budget here than in South East Asia. In these countries we barely ate out at all and had to think hard about which tours/activities we really wanted to do.
What was our budget per day?
For most of South East Asia (excluding Singapore) we stuck to a budget of £35 per night for accommodation (it was often much less) and £35 per day for all food, local transport and misc costs like laundry etc. I budgeted the ‘big ticket’ activities separately in to the overall budget for each country.
In Costa Rica and Mexico we had a budget of £60 per night for accommodation and £60 per day for food, local transport and misc stuff. Again, I budgeted activities separately to make sure we could afford to do everything we wanted to.
How much exactly did our family gap year cost?
| Item | Budgeted Amount | Actual Spend | Notes |
| Flights | £5,000 | £4,587 | Return long-haul flights from UK to Mexico and UK to Singapore |
| Travel Insurance | £2,000 | £1,069 | We split this into three blocks – Mexico/Costa Rica, SE Asia and Europe (it was much cheaper this way!) |
| Travel Vaccinations | £500 | £745 | Full rabies course for the boys; booster for me and Steve. We then added Japanese Encephalitis (x4) and Dengue Fever (x1) in SE Asia |
| Travel costs | £37,500 | £40,788 | All accommodation, travel on the ground, short-haul flights, food and everything else PLUS a term of international school fees |
| Costs at home | £5,000 | £6,500 | Mortgage, bills and on-going subscriptions |
| Contingency | £5,000 | – | Safe to say we spent all of this! It’s been absorbed in to the amounts above though (as most of it went on travel expenses or additional costs at home) |
| GRAND TOTAL | £55,000 | £54,122 |
Our travel costs broke down as £34,359 on in-country spending (see the table above for each country), plus an extra £2,721 on short-haul flights between countries. Where we’ve taken internal flights these are included in the country costs above but I budgeted the between country flights separately.
School fees for the boys’ time at Pelangi School in Bali came to £1,853 (see the whole separate post I wrote about international schooling here).
We took the decision to spend £650 on PADI Open Water courses for Steve and Griffin whilst we were in Thailand. Plus we spent a whopping £1,205 on festivals/gigs on the way round (this included Hell&Heaven OpenAir in Mexico, Szene Open Air in Austria and Rammstein in Germany for the four of us). Steve and I even got tattoos in Oaxaca, Mexico (and these are also included in the costs above!).
All of these costs are included in the travel costs section above.
Whilst I’m really pleased that my travel budgeting actually came in about right (after all those months of stress and a seemingly infinite number of calculations!) it did still feel that we spent more than we thought. The travel bit was surprisingly spot on, but we overspent on our two weeks at home in the UK over Christmas and didn’t budget fully for all the add on things like coding subscriptions for the boys that we picked up on the way round. We were also planning to use some of the contingency to cover initial costs when we got back to the UK (before the first pay check!) but this had to go on credit cards instead in the end.
How much would a family gap year cost for you?
This is the bit where it’s important to say that the cost of a family gap year is of course going to vary widely depending on where you go and what you choose to do. Clearly SE Asia was a much cheaper destination for us than Central America, but we absolutely wanted to include Day of the Dead in Mexico and all of Costa Rica so we had to adjust the budget to make it work.
We didn’t work remotely on the way round but met plenty of families who were able to make remote jobs work for them. This completely changes the dynamic of a trip but does allow you so much more financial freedom if you can keep an income stream going whilst travelling.
Were there any unexpected costs?
In a word, yes. I’d taken months to map out what I thought we would spend on travel, activities, visas, insurance, accommodation – but then there’s all the rest of the life stuff that happens on the way round.
The campervan broke down in Switzerland and the repairs set us back over £1,000. We also decided to all get vaccinated against Japanese Encephalitis when we arrived in Kuala Lumpur (which cost us £125 total instead of the £1,000 we’d been quoted in the UK, but still an added cost). Then Griffin REALLY wanted to do his PADI Open Water course in Thailand – it was such an amazing opportunity for him to do it that we decided to splash the cash.
We also took way more internal flights in SE Asia than I had originally budgeted for. In total we took 14 short haul flights in and around SE Asia that really added to the costs. But in the end there were just times when the overland routes would only have saved us very small amounts so we went for the convenient option of flying.
However much you plan and save, there will always be unexpected costs!
How did we fund our family gap year?
We saved and saved over a few years to fund our year out. We didn’t sell our house and all our worldly possessions – we just saved hard. We budgeted for as much as we could, meal planned, stopped unnecessary spending (no meals out, no big costly days out, no random spending on Amazon on stuff we didn’t need!) and squirrelled away as much as we could.
We were very lucky that both our jobs allowed us to take a sabbatical for the year. This helped massively with the financial planning as it gave us the security of an income when we got home.
Top tips for budgeting for a family gap year
- Whatever you’re considering for your contingency budget, double it. Unexpected things happen, there’s always extra stuff you might want to do and it’s so helpful to have this budgeted in!
- Download the Trabee App so that you can accurately keep track of all your spending in each country
- Don’t forget to budget for costs at home that you might have forgotten about. I was so focused on budgeting for the travel side of things that I forgot to include boring stuff like home insurance renewals and breakdown cover for the campervan which hit us!
Are you planning a family gap year?
Then you are in the right place! We have tons of posts on different destinations, what to pack, how we educated our boys on the road and much, much more!
This is great – what an amazing adventure.
Thanks! It really was the best adventure imaginable 🙂