The cost of living (the dream) - £13 a day!

Wednesday 21 August 2013

In hindsight I should have kept better records of our spending like other motorhomers have done. It would have made the task of working out the cost of our trip a bit easier. So it took a little time to trawl through bank statements, my FairFX prepaid card payments and my daily diary to come up with a rough 'ball park' figure of what our 265 days and 14,000 miles adventure cost us - and that figure is £7000.

Having picked myself up off the floor I worked out that it equates to just over £13 a day each or 25p each per mile. That includes fuel, ferries, food, attractions and our overnight stops which sounds a lot more reasonable - doesn't it?

Before leaving we followed 'Europebycamper' a young couples blog and their daily costs for 324 days on the road worked out at £14.41 each a day. The 'OurTour' couple whose blog we also followed have been on the road for a whopping 680 days and have kept amazingly detailed records of their trip which (if I've worked it out right) has cost them an average of £19.70 each a day.

On top of the money we spent on the trip there were a few expenses to shell out for before we left including insurance for the van (and us) as well as the costs of running our little home in the UK (council tax, telephone, internet, power etc) while we were away.

Worth every penny for views and days like this....

So the bank account is empty, my Premium Bonds haven't come up whilst we were away and the girlies and I didn't win the lottery in May. Whilst spring/summer cleaning the house on our return I hoovered under the sofa cushions and only found 7p which isn't going to go far. So what next, where next.......that's what we need to work out and pretty damn quick! I'm toying with the idea of keeping a blog on settling back into life in the UK, the options we are faced with, searching for work and turning 50 - it may or may not make interesting reading! I hope to put up one final post on this particular blog with the best of the photographs from our trip so excuse me while I start trawling through 7500 photographs......