Our one year trip around the world includes 27 countries in 12 months. We’ll take all forms of transportation, and stay at hostels, Airbnbs, and hotels. We’re also planning activities, which are generally more expensive, like gorilla trekking, scuba diving, and kitesurfing. 

Parts of our trip will be expensive while other parts will be cheap. We expect everything will balance out to roughly $100 to $150 CAD per person per day, or roughly $50,000 per person for the year. An amount blog posts tell us we’ll need, too. 

Our savings come down to three things: save as much as you can, generate extra savings, and make those savings grow. Here’s exactly how we’re doing it.

Saving, saving, saving

There are many ways to save and this must fit with your own lifestyle as well as financial means. We tightened our budget by cooking at home a lot more, drinking less, and only buying the essentials. This allowed us to save roughly $5,000 per month.

We deposited our savings directly into a savings account every time we got paid. That way it was out of sight and out of mind, and we lived within our budget. 

Airbnb

Airbnbing our second bedroom helped us earn roughly $25,000 over two years. You can do it too.

Kijiji

We have sold things like old phones, cameras, and printers on Kijiji. I have no idea how much we’ve earned with Kijiji but everything helps! Anything we can’t sell on Kijiji goes to our garage sale.

Garage sales

Three annual garage sales helped us earn over $2,000.

Once a year we go through all our stuff and host a garage sale. Hosting a garage sale certainly isn’t for everyone, but we love spending the day outside, getting rid of stuff we don't use, and hustling for 25 cents. We donate most things that don’t sell, so we consider everything we make as gravy.

Pro tips:

• Selling in a good neighbourhood attracts better buyers who will pay more
• Signage is key
• You never know what will sell so try selling everything (perfumes and colognes are usually a big hit)
• See if friends would like to donate anything to your garage sale

Honeyfund

Instead of signing up for gift registries for our wedding, we created a honeyfund.

Guests had the option to contribute to experiences like a cooking class in India or a night in a tiki hut in Fiji. The contributions were deposited in our bank account and we’ll use that money towards our adventures.

Investing

Investing our savings through our tax-free saving accounts (TFSA) helped us earn some extra cash. I’m not going to pretend I'm a financial advisor so I won’t make any recommendations other than to sign up for a TFSA and get a financial advisor.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

1. Your TFSA account can hold investments and not just act as a savings account. Holding investments here can help grow your money over time.
2. Since you won’t need all your money at once, you have more time to make your money grow than you may think.

Resources

We used Tangerine for our savings account. Open an account with my Orange Key 39534862S1 and get a $50 Bonus! 

We also used Questrade for investments through a TFSA account. Use my QPass key 306621351398463 to get cash back when you open a Questrade account.

Start hosting with Airbnb and earn $50 when you host your first trip through my referral link. 

We used Shopify to create our honeyfund and wedding website.