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The cost of living in a van is significantly lower than owning/renting a house and all the bills that come with it. That being said, neither of us are earning any money whilst we are travelling, and so we are relying on some savings to keep the trip going.
We're certainly not the best at budgeting (even though Charlie is an accountant, Roxy is the one in charge of the money!), but we thought we'd share a few tips on how we keep our spending down, and how much things cost.
Our budget
We have a budget of £65 a day. We set our budget in GBP as we knew we'd be using lots of different currencies, and this was the easiest way to manage it. At the start of our trip, we had a budget of £50 a day, but very quickly had to increase it as we found it impossible to stick to!
Full disclosure; we have been overbudget 5 out of the 8 months we have been travelling so far. When we set our budget we didn't account for bigger costs like ferries or the Eurotunnel. We also didn't track our budget for November, but we were definitely over budget, a trip to Disneyland made sure of that!
We know that van life can easily be cheaper than £65 per day but we also want to make sure we don't restrict ourselves too much, as there are always going to be times that we want a luxury, or really want to do something that costs more than we can technically afford. We are also restricted by how much the trip can cost us in total, as we have a limited amount of savings that we have dedicated to the trip. If we spent everything we would struggle to live if/when we return to the UK.
Our average spending by country
Take a look at the table below to see our average spend in each country to date. We have taken a few of our bigger expenses out of this table, as we think it gives an unfair representation of how much van life costs in each country. Some of these bigger costs include:
Eurotunnel - £169
Ferry - £458
Snow tyres - £270
We have kept a reasonably simple spreadsheet to track our costs and have entered costs on the day they were spent, so the figures by country can get somewhat skewed by big fuel costs. For example the San Marino costs show an average of £161, and that is because we bought fuel, costing £107, as it was the cheapest we had seen for a while.
Similarly, we went skiing in Romania, which was one of the most expensive activities we have done (including having to buy ski goggles etc.), making the average cost per day look higher.
How much we spend has also been affected a lot by the time of year and weather. For example, during the winter, we preferred the comfort of campsites, as it meant we could plug in our electric heater! So we were spending a lot more money on accommodation.
During the warmer months, we have been wild camping (i.e. not paying to sleep somewhere, or just the small cost of a car park for 24 hours), so we have been spending less money on accommodation, but have been doing more things (activities or attractions) and eating more ice cream!!
Another thing we realised recently is that, as we were restricted by how long we could spend in the Schengen zone (more in this on a future blog), we were having to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short period of time. This meant we were filling up with diesel almost every four days, or at least once a week. Now we are out of the Schengen, and are no longer time restricted, we are only having to fill up every ten days or so. This has a huge impact on our overall budget as well as our country averages.
As we write this blog, since the 1st December (when we started tracking our daily spending) we are cumulatively £490 over our trip budget, but we are on track to be back under budget in the next few weeks.
Things we do to make our money go further:
1. Wild camp
This is by far the easiest way we have been able to bring our spending down. Campsites average at around £20 a night, not a massive expense, but when it's every night, it soon adds up! We have an ACSI card which gets you discount in the off season, and we also 'shop around' for cheaper campsites or look for camper stops, which is halfway between wild camping and a campsite (it may have water and grey waste disposal facilities, but no shower or toilets).
2. Get a card with no exchange fees
Initially we were using our curve cards, they give you £500 to spend each month with no exchange fees and excellent exchange rates (this limit is actually going up to £1000 a month, and for summer 2022 they have scrapped this altogether so it's currently unlimited!). You can use your normal bank account, just through the curve app. (If you'd like your own curve card, use our referral link to get a £5 welcome gift https://www.curve.com/join#EA7LPY6N). If you don't want to open a new bank account, this is a good option. You can load all of your cards onto your curve card, so you don't have to take as many cards out with you! This worked for a short period, but as we have been on the road for such a long time, the £500 a month limit didn't get us very far, so we looked for something a bit more suitable.
After a bit of research, we decided to open a Starling account. Starling is very easy to manage from the road, as it's a totally online account. There are zero foreign payment fees and they have a decent exchange rate! The only downside, you HAVE to open a solo account AND a joint account, you can't just open a joint account from the start. The only other drawback is that it is another bank account you have to open, meaning more cards in your wallet! (If you'd like to open a Starling account, you can use our referral link and they'll plant a tree! https://www.starlingbank.com/referral/?code=FzIGdK).
3. Cooking
Where possible, and particularly in countries where it is expensive to eat out, we try to cook as much as possible.
On average, we probably have about three or four meals out a week. In countries like France and Switzerland, this was probably more like once a week, and in Bosnia and Bulgaria, it was maybe more like six or seven times a week. It always depends on how cheap it is to eat out! a lot of places will have their menu outside so take a look at the price before you sit down and don't be afraid to walk away if it's too much!
When going to supermarkets, we look for the bigger ones where products will likely be cheaper, and we can buy in bulk. We eat a lot of veggie meals to save money on buying meat - our staples are pesto pasta and potato curry. We also avoid buying bottled water where possible, taking our reusable bottles with us and filling them up from the van, or from a water fountain in the town/city we are visiting. The water in Western Europe is almost always drinkable and although websites say to avoid tap water in other countries, we have so far not had any issues. It could be that because we have been drinking it for so long now, we are used to it.
4. Go solo
As we are travelling as a couple the cost of everything is doubled, this means sometimes we go solo on some activities. We realised quickly that we don't have to do everything together. If one of us wants to go and look around a museum, but the other one isn't interested, we don't waste money on entry fees for the both of us. We've done this a few times, usually when Roxy doesn't want to climb up some kind of tower or a steep hill!
5. We aren't on holiday
Don't spend money like you're on holiday! We don't have to do all the activities and we don't have to see everything. We are selective about what we spend our money on. The colosseum, for example, is beautiful enough from the outside, so we didn't pay the tourist prices to go inside. There are activities on our 'bucket list' that we will happily spend a bit more on, but this just means we have to be conscious about not over indulging in museums etc.
6. Drive slow!
This is probably quite obvious, but it did take us a while to really notice this. Driving slow not only saves fuel, but it also means we have more time to enjoy the scenery. We used to drive at a maximum of about 65mph (approx 100km/h) but our friends, Anni and Tom, told us that driving at 1,500 revs (for us, that is around 50mph or 80km/h) is optimum for saving fuel. It really works, thank you Anni and Tom! Our fuel lasted much longer than when we had been driving faster. If only we had thought about this when we first started travelling.
7. Free walking tours
Okay, they're not totally free, but they are usually great tours and you pay what you want at the end. We usually give around £10, but you can obviously give whatever you think the tour deserves, or, what you can afford. If you think the tour was rubbish, you don't have to give anything!
(Free walking tour Plovdiv, Bulgaria)
We also do our own free/very cheap tours using apps such as:
Questo - (https://onelink.to/questo) they have paid and free options and are widely available in Western Europe. These are our favourite as you have to follow clues and answer questions about different locations. We have completed probably 10 Questo tours and have only paid for 1 or 2 as we keep getting free ones for completing a task (usually a taking a selfie) during the tour!
Urbs travel - again, has paid and free options. It's a mini audio tour in your pocket, but also suggests different routes for you to take, depending on your interests. It also has bar and restaurant recommendations which is pretty cool! At the moment they only have a few major cities, but they are adding more and more all the time.
GPS my city - all completely free. You can follow a map to read information about different sites.
8. Don't be too touristy!
We don't buy lots of souvenirs. Again, we are not on holiday (technically)! Living in a van also helps with this. As we have a limited amount of space, we have to really justify any purchase. We still wanted to keep a memento from each country we visit, so we buy a fridge magnet. Even then, we have to search for the smallest one as we have limited magnetic space (our fridge is weirdly not magnetic!). This has also become a fun task, particularly for Roxy, who gets very excited every time we get to buy a new magnet.
9. Free Laundry
Most campsites will have a washing machine, sometimes they are crazily overpriced and sometimes laundrettes are cheaper. If you can find a campsite with a free washing machine, MAKE FULL USE OF IT! We tend to do washing every two weeks (or whenever Charlie runs out of boxers!) and it can sometimes cost us over £20 to do it all.
During the winter we had to rely on using tumble driers a lot, which added to the cost of washing, and shrunk a lot of our clothes! Now that the weather is warmer, we wait for a sunny day and try to hang everything out to dry. We have two elasticated washing lines which fit perfectly in the van, but we needed something bigger for outside so we bought a 20m wire washing line which we can easily tie between trees. This saves us a lot of money by not using the tumble dryer, and also not having to buy new clothes once they shrink!
We also have a Scrubba (you can buy it on Amazon here https://amzn.to/3Hy7owZ) so we can handwash things if needed. If we really wanted to save money we could use this to wash our clothes (we have done this in a couple of times), but it takes a long time, especially as you can't get as much water out of the clothes, so they take much longer to dry.
10. Getting around
We try to avoid taxi's and instead opt for cheaper busses, cycle or walk. If we are going to use public transport, we often do a bit of research and see if we can get a travel pass for the time we are in the city/town. Sometimes you can pay a small amount and get unlimited travel for each day. Obviously this is different in each country/city so we can't write recommendations for each one, but in Paris we bought a week pass for roughly €20, which gave us unlimited travel on bus, metro and tram.
11. Bonus
We have talked about this at the start but probably the most useful way to help reduce our costs is to keep a record of what we spend. Card payments are easy to keep track of in our online banking app and if we spend any cash, we text each other the amount so we don't forget!
At some point over the next few months we will give our budget spreadsheet a tidy up and share it on our website for any other van lifers out there looking for a simple, free, budgeting tool (and anyone else for that matter).
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