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Published: October 19th 2010
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This is the obligatory first post of Coles’ New World.
In just less than a month from now Klaire and I will embark on the first of many legs of an Amble around the World.
First, some quick blogging lingo for those new to the blog world - post is to blog as page is to book, and comment is to post as...um, comment is to page. Basically - a comment is not a blog (looking at you, News Ltd).
With that out of the way, in your first travel blog post people often cover getting ready, that sort of thing. It can seem a bit tedious to most, but because we found this sort of thing useful ourselves we figured we’d contribute a bit to the hive mind. So, the FAQs:
What are you doing with your stuff?- We co-own a unit with a major bank under a special deal where they shout us a place to live and we pay them at least double back over the next three decades. Fairly common, I’m told.
Because we have to keep paying it back while we’re away (I know, I know, how bloody rude) we had to
Storm clouds
A storm near warwick, qld get someone to rent it out. Happily, things fell into place and a friend has signed a 12 month lease at a good rate. It’s below market rent, but offset by not having to pay agent fees and the likes to bloodsuc...sorry, real estate agents 😉. Also, she’ll look after the garden well which is important to us.
In another stroke of luck,
Slowfeet have a large shed we can store our stuff in for the duration. Downside is that it’s a 450km round trip to get the stuff there, but we’ve broken it into small chunks by taking single ute loads up over many weekends (I should point out here that Klaire is not entirely enamoured with this style of operation as she’s got a weird idea that things should be done properly with the proper equipment and finished in good time. She will eventually learn that is Just Not the Coles Way). So, house packed, or very nearly.
Where did you get the cash? - The megabudget helped here. By obsessively cataloguing all income and expenditure onto an unnecessarily complicated spreadsheet we were able to figure out approximately when we would be able to pull the trigger
and leave work for a time. I.e. when the extra repayments we had made on the unit + any likely rental income = mortgage repayments + travel expenses.
How much did you save? - Enough for a RTW the world ticket, plus mortgage repayments, plus daily average costs. This last bit is the main one. We did a fair bit of research (i.e. googling) on just this, as it can vary quite a bit from place to place. We are sticking primarily to cheaper regions, and the magic figure is ... we have enough to last for 10 months at $90 (AUD) a day between us. This includes all transport, food, lodging, visas, etc, but does not include the original purchase of the RTW ticket.
If we do it more cheaply, we can push the time out, if it’s more exy we come back sooner - simple as that.
Will it be enough? - We’re pretty sure we’ll do it pretty comfortably, actually. And, as it turns out good ol’ Ben Bernanke and the Fed are doing their bit here. The closer the Yanks push their interbank rate to zero, the better Australia’s 4.5%!l(MISSING)ooks, and the higher
the Aussie goes. As I write it’s at 99.94 with only the arbitrary parity barrier holding it back (further evidence that rational economic actors exist only in the fevered imaginations of internet libertarians and the like, but I digress) and is likely to go higher until the RBA gets spooked and starts to do stuff.
So, yeah, we gots the dough.
Why the RTW ticket? - We actually get asked this a bit. In between wanking on about other travellers and telling you the best way to travel most expert travellers you read about will tell you always just to get tickets on the way.
Well, sometimes, but it depends on a lot of things. I did the sums (I can’t do much, but I can do spreadsheets) and for us the RTW ticket was by far the better option. Even factoring in the potential/likely cost of missing flights and making changes to the schedule it was cheaper, and certainly flexible enough. It also enabled us to get a reasonable chunk of spending out of the way before we started which makes budgeting easier.
Basically, if we can get to Istanbul, we can get home.
That
will probably do for today, as interesting as it was you probably can’t take too much at once. I'll add a couple of photos too, so chao for now.
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Slowfeet
Slowfeet
Welcome to the Road
You must be going the long way up to the block. We reckon it is closer.