“Just how do you finance something like that?“
This is the first thing Anner’s mom said when we told her we were planning this trip. It’s an excellent question! The short answer is that we saved. (Boring answer, huh?) We were actually surprised by just how easy it was to stop buying stuff and save once we were fixated on the trip (good-bye grande mocha and hello short americano). So for a year-and-half we buckled down and saved where we could and sold a lot of stuff on Craigslist, as well as a fair amount of Aaron’s jewelry. In fact, this could probably be called the Aaron and Anner World Tour sponsored by Craigslist and Aaron Barr Jewelry! With everything, we saved about the equivalent of one year’s household income. We figure that if we stay away from expensive countries, our money should last a while – though if we’re honest about it we don’t really know how long.
We plan to post detailed information here about how much we’ve saved, end up spending, and what we learned about managing money from around the world, but this is what we have to get this blog started.
Side note: This savings business is probably one of the best things to happen to our marriage, trip or no trip. When talking about money you really have to get to the bottom of a lot of other stuff to understand where your spouse is coming from and to understand each other. We’ve navigated it pretty well (mainly due to Aaron’s extreme patience and ability to identify our differences much more readily than I did…because I was busy being “right” which is not the same as “understanding” so, thanks Hubs). No doubt these lessons will serve us well for a happy marriage long after the trip.