If you have read my post about questions we got asked about our road trip you know there was a ton of questions about finances. I felt like I couldn’t go into too much depth in that post so I decided that this planning processes needed a post of its own! I also posted about tricks on how to save money while on the road. You can check that post out here!
After much research and reading other blogs, articles, and Pinterest tips these are the main planning and saving tools we used for our road trip! If you want a more detailed version of how we saved and planned please let me know!
Planning
Important dates/destinations
All of our planning revolved around pinpoint places and times that we had to meet. For example we promised our best friends we would be in Oregon for a birthday celebration. We also met my dad in Florida just before Thanksgiving. And we did plan a stop back at home half way through to pack some warmer clothes as we headed into colder weather.
Other than that we planned a general path we wanted to take. We knew we wanted to get northern states done first before they got too cold to camp in. We also had certain destinations we couldn’t pass up so we made those a priority to see. For example we knew we wanted to visit national parks but if we had extra time we would visit towns or cities near by as well.
Physically map it
While planning we actually purchased real physical maps from Barnes & Noble in order to truly see the layout of our trip and what would make the most sense. We circled or highlighted destinations we couldn’t miss and visually mapped out a path from there.
This helped so much to see it on a larger scale rather than just on a phone or laptop map. We of course still used our phone maps to actually navigate but we did most of our planning on physical maps.
Roadtrippers App
We used a lot of apps on our road trip but Roadtrippers helped us see some of the best road side attractions! You can actually map your destination just like Apple Maps but it will pull up attractions to see along the way! We added many detours this was but saw some of the coolest things.
I plan to do a whole post about our favorite road side attractions but a few examples we found thanks to Roadtrippers are a giant pair of legs, the center of the United States, and Car Henge!
Be Flexible
This is probably the number one piece of advice I tell to anyone planning this kind of road trip. You have to be flexible and accept that as amazing as it will be, things may also go wrong. We ended up wrecking our car half way through and had to take it into a shop for two weeks to get repairs done.
We also completely changed directions about two weeks in because we thought we would run out of time before cold weather set in and we weren’t heading north fast enough. There are so many examples of change of plans and having to adjust our expectations. But if you can just go with the flow you will enjoy the experience so much more!
Saving
Before I get into tips on how to save for a road trip I want to be very clear about something. We made the decision to basically sell all of our belongings and move back home with my dad in order to save money the way that we did. We saved money for this trip for 3 years but we definitely could have cut that down. We had over one years salary saved for each of us before considering quitting our jobs to travel full time for those 5 months.
Set a budget
Obviously in order to save we set budgets in our day to day life. But that isn’t what I am talking about, we also set a budget for our travels. Which meant we had X amount of money each month and we did not go over that amount. If we wanted to splurge on a hotel then we only did free activities that week. If we wanted to buy souvenirs at a location we slept in our car extra nights.
At this point we were already pretty good at budgeting because of our budget life before we set out on this trip so for us it was easy. But lots of times on vacation we do splurge and this just was not one of those trips for us.
Set up autopayments
We not only made sure that all of our bills were set up on auto payment but we actually set aside one year’s worth of payments before our trip. This covered us for the whole road trip plus some cushion time when we got back home. This relieved the stress of paying bills while traveling and essentially everything was already taken care of for us.
We also did this all out of a separate account that we did not touch while on the road. We specifically set up that account to set aside that one year of payments and nothing else. In order to do this you need to know exactly what all of your monthly and yearly expenses are and guarantee you set aside enough to cover them.
Work on the road
Now a days there are so many opportunities to work remotely! There are also small jobs you can pick up along the way like house sitting/dog sitting. I personally do copy writing and content creation when I am on the road. I mostly create social media images for doctors offices but have done other copy writing like business plans and resumes as well.
You just need to find something you are good at that can be done from anywhere! I did not want to work a ton while traveling so I worked very very minimal hours doing maybe one to two jobs per month. Basically enough to bring in an extra $500 – $1000 monthly for just extra spending money. I know many people that work much more than that but because we had already saved so much for this trip I chose to do the bare minimum.
Save Extra
Whatever you think you need to save, add 25% just to be safe! We ended up not going over our budget very much but we were so glad we had saved this extra money. For one thing, as I mentioned we wrecked our car. This extra 25% allowed us to pay for that without cutting our trip short or anything like that.
We also lived off that extra money for a while when we got back home until we got back into normal jobs. It is basically an additional emergency fund and worst case scenario you have extra savings!
Thank you for all the tips!