Last November, my partner and I left Spain and traveled for 94 days with our 10-month-old baby! A lot of people asked -or at least thought!- how can they finance such a long family vacation?!
Did they win the lottery? Did they sell everything they have to travel?
I will directly reply to those questions: no! We didn’t get rich over night. If we did, believe me, we would have traveled much longer than “only” 3 months!
We also didn’t sell everything, as the FiveTakeFlight family did for instance. No, we just left our flat and came back to it afterwards.
The reason why I am writing this post and why I posted daily on Instagram telling people about our trip, is that I am hoping to inspire others to do it as well!!
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. This means that at no extra additional cost for you, I may earn some referral fees if you purchase through those links.
So, here is the truth behind our finances before, during and after our journey of 3 months in Asia!
1- How we started to finance our dream family vacation
Before telling you how we planned our trip financially, let me tell you how this dream started.
The day we met with my partner, he told me that his one of biggest dream was to travel to Asia for a while to discover the culture.
Here is a secret for you, but don’t tell him :). At that exact moment, I thought “wow, this guy is for me!”
So, when we started dating we talked deeper of this dream and I made him the promise that we would go travel to Asia.
From a dream it became a project of ours.
Having our baby didn’t alter this dream, it just made it even better! How wonderful can it be to discover another country through the eyes of your child!
So, now that you know the story behind this journey. Let’s enter into details of how we got enough money to leave for 3 months on vacation!
The money used to book the flight tickets, the travel family insurance, the international vaccines, some travel gear and clothes and the first vacation rentals places came from 2 sources of income:
- Selling our car: as we had moved to the city center of Valencia, we didn’t need a car anymore. We can do everything by public transportation, walk or cycle everywhere. In fact, we didn’t sell it for the trip especially, we wanted to sell it and then, I decided to buy our return flight tickets to Bangkok with the money earned.
- Having our own vacation rentals: we started hosting for Airbnb
8 months before our trip. It’s helping us a lot to save money and paying bills!
I understand that for most of you with kids, especially living in the United States, you will reply me that selling your car in not really an option.
In Europe, it’s easier to go around without a car and in that sense, I feel lucky, because we are saving a lot on car insurance, car repair, petrol, parking and cost of the car in itself!
However, let me insist on the 2nd point: hosting on Airbnb. This is the best thing I did since we moved back to the city center of Valencia!
The extra cash that we earn from it is just great! You can rent the extra room you have at home or even your whole flat when you are away.
You can click on this link to see how much you could earn extra a month renting your place. If you register using this link as a host, you will even get $25 additional for the first time you are renting it using my code as a host.
For instance, if you live in NYC, you could earn around $1500 per month renting it a room in your flat 15 days or $1000 if you live in California.
As you can see, I earned in 8 months last year $5000 hosting on Airbnb.
So, as you see, for everything we paid before our trip, we didn’t touch any of our savings nor use any of the money coming from our regular income. It costs us in total $1100 for the flight tickets for the 3 of us and $800 for the insurance, vaccines and other things to buy for our family trip.
The best thing is that we were even saving more thanks to Airbnb from our regular income, since it was also paying fully for our rent!!
That’s how we could finance the first part of our family vacation.
2- Financing our family vacation during our trip
a. Renting our flat during our trip
In October, we looked for and found a family, who was looking to rent a flat for short-term.
This was perfect for us, as they would pay the rent, the recurring bills and take care of the flat for us!
We were always communicating with them during our vacation, so we knew everything was fine.
b. Living within our means
We always live and travel within our means. So, for that reason, we didn’t go crazy booking expensive all-inclusive family vacation packages or resorts.
We booked most of our vacation rentals on Airbnb. If you haven’t used it yet, I advise you to do it for your next family vacation. In Asia, you can find amazing flats to rent for less than $20 per night!
We also didn’t go to fancy restaurants, we usually cooked at home our breakfast and dinner, as we were choosing flats with kitchen access. It was better as well for our baby, to be able to not always eat out. We were buying food at the market or at the local supermarket.
We were going to local restaurants for lunch and in average, our meal including drinks were between $5 to $8 for the 2 of us + our baby.
c. Working online remotely
Being traveling 3 months didn’t mean that I would not work for 3 months.
I worked there as well but I adjusted my schedule to only work 3 days a week and as usual, I was working only early mornings and late afternoons.
I could work by the pool sometimes, while my partner and our daughter were enjoying it!
Honestly, if you love traveling, then I can’t recommend you enough to start finding a way to work online. You can check my other posts on this topic to get you started.
While traveling, I was earning $600 a month teaching less than 10 hours a week in amazing places and my partner was earning $500 a month.
d. Using a bit of our savings for the previous year
For our dream trip, we started saving a year before. This means that we were living within our means in Valencia as well. For instance, we were not going to restaurants every week, we would go maybe twice a month.
In total, we brought with us around $1000, which paid
for 45 days everything we needed like transportation, food, entrance to sightseeing places.
Only our vacation rentals were not paid with our savings, but with the money we were earning online.
Then, when our savings ran out, we used our income to pay the second part of our trip.
3- Our finances after traveling 3 months in Asia
The day we came back from our trip was the day to pay the rent!
As I knew it, I had planned before and from the $600 I was earning every month, I was making sure to save one part to pay the rent when coming back.
To be totally honest with you the first 3 weeks after our family trip, we were quite short on money since we had used a part of the money coming after the trip to finance the end of our vacation.
However, when I say that we are short on money, it doesn’t mean that we came back with no money at all in the bank. We still have as much savings as we had before our trip that we didn’t touch!
Last truth to tell you:
Check how much you spend living in your own city, and compare it with how much it would cost to travel in Asia or other cheaper countries.
I am pretty sure that you will see that it would be cheaper to travel around the world!
That’s it Mama! I hope I showed you in a way that all dreams can come true!
Let me know in the comments what are your dreams? Are you traveling with your kids?
Remember to please pin me!
I’m Natacha, a French vegan Airbnb host who has been working online for the past 4 years. I help hosts stand out and make more money online so they can have a good work-life balance!
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