It's the end of the career break road. Time to go back. Copyright CareerBreakSecrets.com

You haven’t even left and now I’m asking you to think and plan for reentry? Yup. In some ways, this is the easiest part of the budget. Similar to any budget, the formula is simply:

Average daily spend X Days before earning a salary = Re-Entry Budget

See! Easy peasy!

I know, I know. That’s not the whole story, is it? There’s a lot that will go into figuring out how much your spend will be. To be conservative, you could use the same number you calculated from your current daily spend in estimating your travel budget. Essentially, whatever you spend today, plan for that.

That only leaves one tiny little detail. How much time will you be looking for a job before you are drawing a salary again? I can’t tell  you how much time to budget for. But, I can give you some factors to think about as you set your budget. I would love to know how long reentry takes on average. As soon as I know, I will let you know. But, in the meantime, setting this part of the budget is more art than science.

Factors For Setting Your Re-Entry Career Break Budget 

• Do you have a job waiting for you? Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who works for an understanding, progressive company
• What are the general economic conditions? Hard to tell, right? Especially ever since 2008-2009.
• Start up living costs needed. Do you have any extraordinary costs that you need to incur to get started again?
• Moving expenses. Are you returning to the same city/town or are you going to be starting fresh somewhere else? For most people, you are naturally going back to the same city. But, if the career break comes during a transition period of your life, you may be heading somewhere new to start fresh. Plan accordingly.
• Changing your career or same career? Generally speaking, I would tell you that if you are going to be staying in the same career or profession, your search time for a new job will be less. Why? All of your contacts, expertise, know-how is in that industry. If you are looking to change careers, you should plan for it to take a bit longer. How much? No idea. But, you are restarting without a support structure and industry colleagues to help guide your way. This might be shortened if you used part of your career break to build some skills or knowledge in this new area. Either way, it will impact your search time.

Anyone re-entered and have any thoughts or care to share your experience? Let me know in the comments below.

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Career Break Budgeting Part 4: Reentry Budget is a post from: Career Break Secrets: Travel show, independent travel blog and advice for career breaks and around the world travel adventures

Where will your travel take you? Copyright CareerBreakSecrets.com

Travel the world for $30 a day, $50 a day, $20 a day. It’s so hard to know how much you really need until you get out there. But, that’s little consolation while you’re still at home, at work, trying to make sure you have enough put aside.

My goal in this post isn’t to tell you how much you need. For all I know, you ¨need¨ a 4-star hotel every night and you will refuse to take a local bus. So, I will attempt to give you a laundry list of the things you might spend money on while you travel. Also, don’t forget that I wrote a review about Budget Your Trip and their budgeting tool can give you some real traveler data. Also, my friends Warren and Betsy from Married With Luggage have been tracking and reporting on what they’ve actually spent from their worldwide travels. Also soon I’ll be reviewing the new e-book, Dream. Save. Do.

In creating this part of your budget, you need two expense categories: the first captures on-the-road expenses and the second captures your at-home expenses. At home expenses? Yup! Are you keeping your house/apartment? Are you going to be storing your stuff while you’re away? While your goal should be to minimize your financial responsibilities back home, you will likely still have a few. So, plan and budget accordingly.

Factors Influencing Your Career Break Travel Budget

As you try to figure out how much to budget per day while you’re on the road, here are a few factors to take into consideration.

• How much of a budget traveler are you, really? Everyone is on a budget when they travel. And, most people I’ve met think they are a budget traveler. But, there’s budget travel and then there’s real budget travel. For some, staying at a 2 start hotel is what they are willing to do while others are going to couchsurf the whole way. Whatever kind of traveler you are, be honest and budget accordingly.
• How much financial responsibility at home can you leave behind? Your goal is to minimize as much of your responsibility back home as possible. It will minimize your worry and what you have to budget for. Don’t leave a lot of financial obligations behind.
• Your dining habits: You’ll no doubt be eating out while you’re traveling. It’s unavoidable and one of the great pleasures of travel. But, if you can cook a few meals for yourself, you’ll save on the road.
• What type of accommodation will you be using? As a good friend of mine who had taken a career break told me before I left, ¨Jeff, sometimes you’re going to want a hotel.¨ But, for the vast majority of the time, will you be in a hostel, renting an apartment, couchsurfing, camping?
• Once you get on the road, how will you get from place to place? Will you tend to rely on overland transportation or flying? Tip: the more overland transport you can take, the cheaper it will be. The biggest problem here is that bus and train prices can be harder to research ahead of time than flights. A couple of tips about foreign airlines
• Not all foreign airlines have pricing structures that cause the price to go up closer to the departure date. You can sometimes still get a good deal at the last minute.
• Beware budget airlines. The cheapest ticket isn’t always the cheapest flight if there are a lot of ancillary fees. I flew RyanAir once. It cost me a fortune when it was all said and done.
• What kind of bank fees will you incur? Have you selected a bank that will minimize your ATM fees? What about foreign transaction fees? These will add up over time. So, choose wisely.
• How will you plan to get around in the cities and towns you’re in? Maximizing the use of local transportation and minimizing taxi use will stretch your budget. And, walking, when possible, costs nothing.

Travel Budget While You’re Traveling

Here is your tickler list of budget items that you should be thinking about. What did I leave out?

One-the-Road Budget Items

• Accommodation
• Meals
• Tips
• Tours
• In-country/cross-country transport
• Daily transport
• Medicine, Dr visits
• Internet cafes
• SIM cards: Phone and/or internet
• Visa fees (yes some countries still charge)
• Baggage fees
• ATM fees
• Money exchange fees
• Credit card foreign transaction fees
• Books, magazines, newspapers
• Gifts
• Market Shopping
• Splurges
• Travel guides
• Music, movies
• Replacement clothes
• Emergency finds
• Monthly banking fees
• Health Insurance – if not already accounted for in your Pre-Takeoff Budget.

Back At-Home Travel Budget Items

• Storage
• Mortgage
• Insurance: home, car
• Debt, loans
• Utilities
• Credit card and other banking fees

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Career Break Budgeting Part 3: Travel Budget is a post from: Career Break Secrets: Travel show, independent travel blog and advice for career breaks and around the world travel adventures

How Much Do You Really Need? Copyright CareerBreakSecrets.com

As you’re planning your career break, you’re probably focused on how much your going to spend once you’re on the road. Well, a good way to minimize your on-the-road spend is to maximize this part of the budget. It’s not practical or desirable to buy everything now that you ¨might¨ need. After all, if you’re like me and had never backpacked before, you kind of need to get out there to see how you really will be traveling to know what you really need.

Having said that, there are a number of things that you should go ahead and buy now while you still have a job and are still drawing a salary. And, this is the time to be thinking about some of your other needs on the road like getting the right credit cards and bank accounts. Don’t forget to check out my post about the 5 most important things to do before you quit. And, there is also a good resource I recommend for helping you negotiate your career break if you want to return to your same employer.

Factors in Determining Part 1 of Your Career Break Budget

As you start creating this part of your career break budget, there are three factors you need to consider in determining how much you will need.

1. Time between quitting your job and leaving. Some people leave mere weeks after they quit. Others want a little more time. Whatever your timeframe, it’s best to set your daily budget high. Said another way, for budgeting and savings purposes, assume you need as much to live as you did while you still had a job. If you can economize a bit during this period, then you’ll have a nice windfall for your trip or for your reentry period.
2. How much gear do you need for your trip? Do you already have a backpack? Do you already have the basic gear? Or are you starting from scratch? The more you’ve traveled before, in theory, the less you need to spend. Then again, you may be tempted to replace some of your gear, just because.
3. How much spending can you stuff into this phase? Some of the items on the checklists in this phase and the next phase are interchangeable depending on your preferences. For example, are you buying a full RTW ticket or is your goal to get to your first destination and take it from there? The more you stuff into this phase means the less you need for your on-the-road travel budget. But, you may find that approach unnecessary preferring to take a wait-and-see attitude to see if you really need everything on your list.

Budget Categories For Your Pre-Takeoff Budget

This is a starter list to help you get organized. What you spend and how much you need all depends on your circumstances. My goal here is to get you started and get the brainstorming juices going.

• Clothing: pants, wool socks, hiking boots, flip flops, things you can layer. Side note: think breathable and quick drying fabrics as much as possible
• Gear: backpack, headlamp, travel towel, water bottle, sports watch (I actually stopped wearing a watch while traveling, but I know a lot of people that liked to have one still)
• Electronics: laptop/netbook, iPod, unlocked cell phone, ereader/tablet
• Travel stuff: Tickets, hostel membership,  tours, Visa fees, guides, airport lounge memberships, big trip/tour you want to plan around
• Health items: Shots, doctor and dental visits, glasses, contacts, COBRA (for US residents), travel health insurance,small first aid kit,/supplies, medicines
• Finances: Setting up/updating your will, trust, credit cards, debit cards
• Entertainment: Books, music, TV and movies
• Home: Mortgage/rent, utilities, insurance, food, etc

If I missed something, or you have questions, let me know in the comments below.

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Career Break Budgeting Part 2: Pre-Take Off Budget is a post from: Career Break Secrets: Travel show, independent travel blog and advice for career breaks and around the world travel adventures

Figuring out if you have enough isn't an act of faith.

Let’s get right to it! One of the top questions people ask me is how can you afford to take a break to travel? There’s no magic, but there is budgeting.

The first step is to take a look to see if you have the funds available for a break. As I’ve written before, long-term travel budget planning and estimating are easier than you might think. And, for a deep dive into the topic of saving for your dream trip, be sure to check out Dream.Save.Do. By Warren and Betsy Talbot, which I will be reviewing soon.

Once you’ve determined if you have the money travel, it’s time to start creating your functional travel budget for your career break. And, don’t forget, this is one of the 5 most important things you need to do before you quit.

So, let’s take the mystery out of budgeting for your career break. There are 3 parts to a career break budget that I’ll tackle in 3 follow-up posts of this series so I can go into detail into each. Here’s the overview so you know what to expect!

How to Budget Your Money To Travel in 3 Parts

Part 1: Pre-Takeoff Budget

The pre-takeoff budget covers all of the things you need to buy to prepare for your trip. The timing of this budget starts from now until you get on the plane to leave.

There are 2 parts to this budget. The first contains travel stuff: tickets, gear, insurance are the most popular items in this category. If you’re still working when you start buying these items, they will be easier to pay for since you still have a salary coming in.

The other part of the budget includes home expenses you will have after you leave your job and before you get on the plane. Don’t forget to save money for these costs like utilities, internet, groceries, etc. That money has to come from somewhere and it’s better to have planned and saved for it.

Part 2: Travel Budget

This is the pot of money you need when you’re actually on the road: accommodation, food, tours, in-country transit, additional plane tickets, etc. When you hear people write about traveling for $30 or $50 a day, this is the part of the travel budget they are talking about.

This part is a little harder to budget in detail since you likely won’t know what you’ll encounter on the road. This is where your scenario planning comes in handy. Be conservative and budget as high as possible. Then, watch your budget like a hawk so you can come in under budget.

Part 3: Re-Entry Budget

How much money will you need once you return before you have an income again? Start thinking about it now. If you have a job waiting for you, you likely won’t need to budget too much. But, if you’re going to be looking for a new job, then make your best guess as to how many weeks or months are needed. And, if you’re thinking about a career change after your break, plan for even more time. There is no doubt that this can be the most difficult part of the budget estimating process since there are a lot of factors that will determine how much you need.

I hope this series helps you get you on your way. Budgeting is critical and anxiety-inducing. But, that’s only because it seems so daunting. Let me help you go through the process. And, be sure to leave your questions in the comments or email me with your questions if you desire a bit more anonymity.

Watch your feeds for parts 2-4 of the series!

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Dancing With the Devil in the Details of a Career Break Budget is a post from: Career Break Secrets: Travel show, independent travel blog and advice for career breaks and around the world travel adventures

Get started budgeting. Copyright CareerBreakSecrets.com

You’ve got the itch, but you’re scratching your head trying to figure out how people leave it all behind to take a career break to travel. When I decided that I really wanted to travel, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out IF I afford it. I researched lots of places on the web to try to get costs and budget numbers. But, in 2006, there were very few out there, publicly available.

In my mind, I had numbers like $10/day, $20/day in my head. But, I had no idea if that was based on reality. And, what if I was wrong? I’d be in the middle of a foreign land with nothing.

So, out of necessity, I took a different tack. I decided to look at my current lifestyle to see how much I was spending per day to maintain myself.  This lifestyle included all the bells and whistles. It included my mortgage, my car payment, cable, electric and gas bills, dog food, etc, etc.  I used a 4-part assessment process to see if I could indeed travel for as long as I wanted to.  And today, I’m sharing that with you. I have yet to see anyone else write about budgeting for their trip in this way.

1. Calculate your Daily Lifestyle Costs
2. Create budgeting scenarios based on a percentage of those costs
3. Compare those scenarios with your savings or whatever you plan to use to finance your trip
4. Revise and refine

Step One: Calculate Your Daily Lifestyle Costs or How Expensive Are You?

The most common way to talk about travel budgets is on a per-day basis.  So, that’s what I used and how we’ll talk about it here.  Since it will always be difficult to know what your true costs on the road will be, let’s start with what you do know: how much your current lifestyle costs. This is your lifestyle at 100% (assuming you’re not overloaded with debt, in which case it will be your lifestyle at 100%+).  So, grab a piece of paper or your favorite spreadsheet and total up your monthly expenses. Don’t leave anything out: mortgage/rent, bills, entertainment, gym, any pampering you might treat yourself to. Throw it all in. I would recommend doing one that includes what you put into savings and one that keeps your monthly savings contribution out of the calculation.

Now, take that number and divide by 30. It’s pretty high isn’t it? You didn’t realize you were so expensive to maintain. If you’re like me, I didn’t realize I cost so much. Here are a few numbers that may surprise you. For after-tax salaries (assuming no savings), your  daily costs would be as follows.

• $30,000/365: $82.19
• $40,000/365: $109.59
• $60,000/365: $164.38

So, even if your after-tax income is around $30,000/year, you spend about $82 bucks a day to live. For the record, most long-term travelers don’t spend anywhere near that while on the road…unless they are traveling in Europe.

Step Two: Create Budget Scenarios

So, now that you have those numbers, I want you to calculate scenarios about how much you think you could live on while on the road.  Could you live on 50% of your number from Step 1? 30%? 60%?  This will start to give you the ranges of daily budgets that you will want to set for yourself.

To make this number more real, start looking at your expenses and see what goes away. Are there expenses that you will not be incurring while you’re traveling? I bet there will be many.  Of course, there may be some new ones. For example, while you may get rid of your apartment or plan to sell your house, you may incur some storage fees.

Personally, this was the point, I decided to get rid of a lot of my stuff. After all, why pay for stuff back home that you won’t be using on the road. And, that is money you could be using for extra perks or tours while you’re traveling.

Step Three: Evaluate Your Savings

So, now you have some baseline daily rates for your budget. How long do you plan to be gone for? 30 days? 90? 180?  To be conservative, include in that a number of days that you will have once your back and will be looking for a new job (assuming you won’t be going back to your current job).  You want to build in a cushion so you aren’t freaking out about money once you return. And, it will reduce the chances that you will leap at the first job that comes along, especially if it’s not one you want.

Take your daily rates and multiply them by the number of days on the road to get your total travel budget.  Now compare that to what you have in the savings.  Is it doable? Are you short?

So, let’s say you want to travel for 60 days, you decide to build in another 60 days for job hunting. And, let’s say you decide on a budget of $70 per day.  The calculation would simply be 120 days * $70 = $8400. That’s the amount you want to have in the savings for your trip.

Step Four: Revise and Refine

This step will start to get the wheels turning about how to really finance your trip while you’re away. It will also get you thinking about other expenses like plane tickets, insurance, shots, etc, and how you will budget for those items.

For me, once I did these calculations, I realized that I had the savings to finance the trip and it made giving notice at work a lot easier.

Happy budgeting and let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

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Long-Term Travel Budget Planning Made Easy is a post from: Career Break Secrets: Travel show, independent travel blog and advice for career breaks and around the world travel adventures

Screen shot of Airbnb's site

This year I had two trips to New York, one in June and the other in October.  Both times were for events in Manhattan. Looking around for budget accommodation was a challenge to say the least. I really didn’t want to waste time commuting over bridges and through tunnels.  Even cheaper hotel chains were ridiculously expensive.  I have points on several hotel programs, but really didn’t want to use them for work trips.  For my June trip, I sucked it up and stayed in an average hotel.  By the end, I was even more infuriated that I had overpayed for service that under-delivered. By October, I finally found a smarter and cheaper option, AirBnB.com.  I had such a good experience with AirBnB that I will definitely be using them again…around the world.

Service Overview

AirBnb.com is a site that offers you a place in someone’s home. The accommodation can range from a simple air mattress to your own room to an entire apartment or house. I even saw one option in Colombia for someone’s island!  The system acts as a broker and payment system between you the owner.  I have been a big fan of getting out of the hotel and renting apartments for a long time. I’ve done in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Madrid, Paris and Bogota.  So, immediately I was keen on the concept.  Here’s how it works.

1. Select.  Enter your destination, dates and the number of guests. If you leave the dates off, the directory comes up
2. Sort and Filter.  Next, you can sort the results by ¨Recommended¨, ¨Distance¨ or ¨Price¨.  At this point, you can also filter the results by the type of room you want, price range and amenities offered. The list of amenities included the most important one for me: Internet Access!
3. Play.  Now it’s time to play around and look at the options.  You can see the individual listings that include photos, complete descriptions, reviews from previous renters, and the house rules (which all include the owner’s cancellation and refund policy). Don’t ignore the house rules!  I love the integration with Google Maps because you can see exactly where you will be located in the city.
4. Select and Book.  Once you find a place that you like or want to know more about, you are guided to book the location.
5. Response.  The owner will receive your request and respond to you.  In New York, my first option was not available as the owner had an unscheduled trip.  I was disappointed. But what I liked was that the owner got back to me right away, and was very friendly. So, even though I didn’t get my first choice, I was not upset with the service. So, I went through the process again and finally found another great place.
6. Confirmation and Pre-Payment.  Once the owner approves your request, you will receive a confirmation email with the owner’s contact details so you can coordinate the check-in.  You will also be charged for the stay.  That money stays in escrow with AirBnB until you check in.
7. Check-In.  Once you arrive to your city, you’ll meet up with the owner, get the keys and relax in your new place. At this point of the game, your money is transferred to the owner’s account.  You will probably work out the check out details with the owner at this point.
8. Check-Out and Review.  The day has come for you to leave to head off to your next destination, or home.  AirBnB will send you a form to review your stay and the host. AND, the owner will receive a form to review as a guest.  This information is made available to other owners. It’s a great check to weed out unruly guests and bad hosts to keep everyone honest. So, you better be a good guest and leave the place like you found it!  Oh, and each side gets to see what the other wrote.

Pros and Cons of the Service

My Top 3 Pros Are

• Simple, easy-to-use service to find the right balance between the creature comforts you want and the budget you have
• Great detail on the listings like photos, services included and maps
• Double-sided review process that keeps everyone honest

My Cons Are

Honestly, I’m sure there’s something. No service is perfect. And, maybe after a few more stays, I´m sure I can come up with something.  The wildcard is definitely the owner from whom you rent. I would highly encourage you to check our AirBnB for your next trip.

Post-Script

I got a large studio in New York with wifi and full kitchen for $80/night in October. Compare that with a crappy hotel in which I paid $250/night in June.  Not only was it cheaper, I was way more comfortable, my internet worked and I could cook for myself and not rely on takeout!

Let me know if you have any questions about the service or have something to add from your experience.

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A Review of AirBnB, A Great Budget Alternative is a post from: Career Break Secrets: Travel show, independent travel blog and advice for career breaks and around the world travel adventures