'How do you afford to travel Australia?' We get asked this a lot. No, we are not rich. No, the sale of our house doesn’t fund our trip, and no we didn’t win the lottery!
So how do we do it? Well its simple, we budget really, really tightly!
Our weekly budget is $600 - $700 and I’d say at least 2 weeks of every month we don’t even spend that. (We do not factor in insurances / phone costs / rego in there as we don’t pay for these weekly, these are all paid a year upfront when we are working.)
So, what does that get us? On average we allow....
$200 for food- a week's grocery shop and sometimes a top up if the kids have been particularly hungry, plus the odd iced coffee or fish and chips.
$150 for fuel - we generally go through a tank and a half a week.
$150 for accommodation, free camping 75%, low cost camping 20% and expensive caravan parks 5%.
$100 a week for miscellaneous – every week throws something at us, a new door handle on the van, under body wash on the car, medical care for a kid or dog food! If we don’t spend this, we put it back into the savings account to save for special things like tours or bookshop sprees!
Here’s how we keep our budget low.
1. Travel slow. Our number one tip for spending less while living on the road is to travel slow. This means we move once, maybe twice a week. We try to only fill the car up with diesel once a week. This also means actually physically driving slower too, even just 10km less than what you normally drive at will help with your fuel efficiency. If we have to travel fast and end up filling up 2 or 3 times in a week, we make a concerted effort to free camp to make up for it.
2. Speaking of fuel, get the Fuel Map Australia App to find out where the cheapest fuel is near you. But if you do decide to fill up diesel from places that aren’t BP or Shell, make sure you get some diesel / injector cleaners, Australia is known for its dirty diesel and this will stuff your car up!
3. Free Camp. Don’t feel like you have to be in a caravan park all the time. You may not realise it, but you and your van are probably already pretty well set up for free camping, especially if you bought a van in the last 5 years. You’ll be right for at least a few days a week. Most vans come with decent size water tanks, as well as solar panels on the roof for powering lights. We go weeks and weeks on end without being hooked up to power, we just need somewhere to dump our toilet and fill up our water and we are set for a life permanently free camping. Camping this way, even for just a few days a week can halve your weekly accommodation costs.
PS. Please don’t think you need a generator, they are awful things, noisy and polluting. Just learn to live without the TV for a few day’s!
4. Drink less. Yep, you heard! Have a liiiiittle bit of self-control when it comes to alcohol! It took us a while to remind ourselves that we are not on holiday 24/7, so no drinking on school nights. Alcohol is SO expensive, so if you save it for when you really really just need that beer / wine, you’ll save money. Also try and buy when it’s on sale, and buy in bulk if it’s a really good deal!
5. Don’t eat out. Whether it be a pie / sausage roll here and there, or out for cocktails and nibbles, this is the quickest way to burn through your budget. You’ve just spent however much on your weekly shop, don’t then go out and eat out 3 times in a week. Save it for that one time you’re at this amazing beachside bar and just need that Pina Colada (been there), or when you’ve had a really long travel day and you just need someone else to make the food and do the dishes (been there too!), or maybe when you’re somewhere like Byron Bay and the food is just too, too good to not splurge on!
6. Make good coffee and stop buying takeaway. Get yourself a decent coffee machine, or if you don’t want that huge contraption in your van, grab a Wacaco Minipresso like ours and make yourself delicious creamy espresso shots in the palm of your hand! Grab you're very own Minipresso through this link - http://www.wacaco.com?aff=329
7. Replace clothes at Op Shops! Inevitably someone is going to need new clothes at some point- holes in the knees, red dirt so deeply imbedded it won’t come out, or even just growing out of clothes. Don’t race to Target or Kmart, I know they’re cheap, but they are poorly made and the pollution caused by ‘fast fashion’ is terrifying. Take yourself to an op shop and pick up a fancy pair of barely used Rip Curl shorts for $2, or a nice Nike jumper for $4, or a pair of cargo pants from Seed ($4) Yes, we have bought all of these. We are so well dressed nowadays, and it cost us hardly anything!
8. Don’t do all the activities. Make peace with the fact that you can’t do every tour available on the Great Barrier Reef, or visit every Island in the Whitsundays. Pick and choose your tours, search the web for the best value for money, go on groupon and snag a deal there. Quite often you can get to where you want to go by just getting a ferry, or a half day tour, rather than a full day tour that usually includes food (and so therefore hikes the prices up). Prioritise what is important to you, if you HAVE to swim with the whale sharks, consider saving money on another part of your budget – either free camping, or go without alcohol that week, something to help offset the hideous cost that tours put on families.
9. Grocery Shop Local and eat healthy. As much as you can, buy fresh fruit and veg from local fruit shack type places. The produce is better and cheaper. Also buy all your tinned and packet stuff from Aldi. If your weekly food shop is over $250 for a family of 4, you've got room to improve! We eat very healthy for around $150 p/w. I think this is achieved by hardly ever buying alcohol, only having meat once a week, and not buying junk food like chocolate, potato chips and soft drink. We fill up on high fats like nuts and plain Greek yoghurt, nutritious fruit / veg and longer lasting carbs like sourdough. Your body and your wallet will thank you for this one!
10. Refill gas bottles. It’s much cheaper to go to a BCF or some other Gas supplier and get your bottles refilled rather than to ‘swap and go’ at petrol stations.
And on the subject of gas, a tip we got from ‘My Big Rig Adventures’ was to stop using your gas hot water service, but rather boil washing up water in your kettle. I can’t tell you how much gas this has saved us (and therefore money). We get about 5 more days out of a gas bottle by doing this.
These are the budget saving strategies that work for our family. We left in January 2019 and won’t have to stop to work until November, which means we have enjoyed 10 months of freedom. We have come in over our weekly budget only a half a dozen times in that period ( yes one of those weeks was in Byron Bay!!). Sure, we’ve had to sacrifice a few things to make our money stretch this far, but gosh is it worth it, to live this free and easy life! Obviously, every family is different, and what I’ve written here might terrify you
(drink less?? That might be the only thing keeping you going!!), but sometimes it just takes someone to point out a few simple ways to save some money, and to show that you really don’t need to ‘do it all’ to ‘have it all’.
Good luck and see you out there!
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