I have wanted to travel the world for over 10 years and on my 28th Birthday last July my boyfriend surprised me with the best present I could have wished for- a lonely planet book of the world and that he had asked for a sabbatical for 6 months starting from January 2019. Tears of joy filled the evening looking through the book of this too big world!

The decision making process of how many places can we realistically fit into 6 months without killing ourselves commenced and we were soon starting to find out you cannot go everywhere in 6 months so we narrowed it down to India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Bali, Australia, New Zealand & Fiji initially and if we had the time and money maybe the US.

We looked into buying a round the world flight ticket however in the end we decided we wanted the freedom to change our minds as we didn’t know how we would feel travelling or what might happen along the way and I am so glad we did!

Throughout our trip we covered everywhere we initially thought about visiting and more, the only planning ahead being the flights coming out of the country we were about to fly into (so we could be let in). This meant that if we wanted to spend more time in a place we only have to change one set of flights, and that we could easily add in a new destination if we felt like we had time.

My boyfriend and I had been saving up since we started our full time jobs after university so we had a good amount to travel with, but I had no idea how much we should budget.

We are late twenties and had our own space for over 5 years so we didn’t really want to start getting into dorms and sharing with teenagers so I struggled to find anything online about a detailed budget for a couple who didn’t want to slum it every night.

We knew we couldn’t go to hotels every night to the standard of our usual holidays of course but top of the list was the privacy of a room for 2 (ideally with a bathroom but this wasn’t always the case). We also knew that many of the places we would be visiting may be the only time in our lives and we wanted to have the money to spend on bigger excursions to have the full experience.

I made an average daily budget for ourselves which obviously differed per country we visited and mainly we actually stuck to it however some places like Singapore were completely underestimated so I would like to share my budget with anyone who is interested in doing a similar trip.