I’ve been rolling my eyes lately at a lot of travel blogs. There have been a few articles lately written by Americans lamenting the value and instability of their dollar. Travel has become too expensive they say. Being an Australian though although our own currency has strengthened in recent years we are still worth about 10% less than our American friends in the global market, yet we still travel and we do it with far less whining. The truth of the matter is be we from Australia the US or just about any other western country we aren’t exactly doing it tough, if you are complaining about the cost of travel chances are you are amongst the richest people in the world, sure Europe isn’t cheap, but it’s not cheap for anyone who doesn’t live there. As for complaining about Australia, well just put the shoe on the other foot for a minute.

Both Australia and the US have on our doorsteps some of the cheapest places to travel to in the word. Australia has Asia and the US Central and South America, relatively here if you are complaining about the cost of travelling to an in these areas your being a spoiled little brat. Of course I am speaking of budget travel though, without too much trouble you could spend as much on packages in the cheapest places in the world as you could in far more expensive countries. Consider the relative cost of things and what you get for your time and money, travel still seems like a good deal to me.

I think I’ll stick to complaining about costs in my own country where although imports have become significantly cheaper the benefits are not being passed onto consumers. Purchasing items online and shipping them here is sometimes much cheaper. I know with books at Amazon I have a much bigger selection to buy from and can have them sent to my door at 1/3rd of the price of finding them in stock at a local book store. Maybe I could get into the import\export business on my travels and make a killing.

I’m working on a more detailed and useful plan now, if it looks familiar it’s probably because I blatantly ripped it off from Dave, why? Well the layout was simple enough and very easy and useful to follow, so planning and keeping track of things is just much easier. Obviously it is a work in progress and although it may not appear that way I don’t want to have a day by day itinerary, days in each country are just rough estimates for now and even when I make the more specific later I’m planning on leaving enough time up my sleeve to be able to spend an extra week here and there as I decide on the road. My main travel plan is that nothing should be set in stone, if I want to change how long I spend in a country, go somewhere else or something like that hopefully I’ll have set my plans so they allow that.

After saying more than once that I would and filling out the forms 3-4 times, I’ve finally had my passport photos done and have them with my application. I will be putting that in ASAP before it gets even more expensive, it is now $200 for a standard 32 page passport. I’m not going to post the photos, they are as always, shockingly terrible. Along with that I also have to renew my drivers license and our national parks pass.

While Xmas shopping on the weekend I found a shop that had the two different versions of the Headlamp I was after, I ended up getting the “Tactical” version of the Princeton Tec Quad. The only real difference between the two was that the one I got comes with coloured filters which can sometimes prove useful.

Finally the map above shows the countries I will be travelling to (Red), the most likely last minute add ons (Green) and if by some miracle I can afford it, countries in Europe I would most likely visit (Blue). Map brought to you by WhereI’veBeen.com.

I’ve finally done it. After a few long hours of counting we reached the grand total of $339.95.

Now all I have to do is finish bagging it and getting the amounts in each bag right and then endure the embarrassment of walking into the bank and handing an armful of money to the poor bank teller. Oh well it can’t be much worse than the last one having to help me deposit a cheque, but what do you expect I’m 23 the last time I saw a cheque was years ago. I’ll update with some photos later.

9.8Kg, so close. As soon as I hit 10Kg I’ll count it. I received my $100 cheque from Emailcash but I still haven’t cashed it, I hate cheques. This month also marks 1 year from the planned departure of Earth Bound, all things going well. I’m fairly well on track with the money for that, although I have a bit on my “to buy” list at the moment. I scratched new running shoes off that this weekend but there is still jeans, walking pants, headlamp and other bits to buy.  I think my gym membership ends this week too so that will be another $33 a month in my pocket and I’m running more often than I ever went to the gym anyway (Thanks Nike+).

If you are saving like me check out this post from a while back How to Get The $$$ For The Trip Of A Lifetime

Not much to say this month, although I’ve been adding at about the same amount as before the scales read the same as last month 9.3Kg. I guess that is digital scales for you, they tend to jump around regardless of if they are weighing something light or heavy. So I’ll just keep popping in the pennies this month and see if we start moving up again.

I cashed out most of my Emailcash money yesterday, I won’t actually get it for at least a month but that is another $100 I could do with. Especially after I spent nearly $250 on an iPod and Nike+ on the weekend, more on that later.

And as a side note the redesign is coming along well, almost there.

Another 0.6 increase this month which got me up to 9.2kg. So we are getting pretty close to the goal weight now.

I payed off the last of my car loan last week and my battery then died, $80 for a new one. But this week I’ll be putting in my tax return and on the first run through it looks like I will get a pretty good one. I’m tempted to buy a second hand kayak but it will go straight into savings for the Earth Bound trip.

Just quietly I’m slowly redesigning the site from the ground up with a completely original theme, don’t expect anything soon though. Creativity takes me more time than most and learning the skills creates further delays. When it comes to my own work like this I’m a bit of a perfectionist.

Tripbase is a cool little web application that matches destinations to how much you want to experience certain things like, nightlife, nature and food. Maybe not comprehensive but it is still in alpha, something to play with for a bit of fun and maybe even for finding some inspiration.

Rick Steves Interview with Rolf Potts was featured on their respective sites a few weeks ago now and it is definitely worth listening to. It’s always good to put a voice to a name/face.

The word on Earth Bound is spreading and we have the main site up now, there is also a forum where you can talk with us and MySpace and Facebook groups to join to help you keep up to date with what is happening. We will be launching a comp soon for bands to have their music featured on the show so if you know any up and comers or have friend in a band point them in our direction.

I finally went into the bank and checked my loan account balance and I had about $780 left to pay off, I’ve since payed some more and today is payday so the usual amount will go in today, after that next payday will mark the end of my car loan. I’m excite, instead of watching my car loan go down I can start watching my Travel Savings go up.

I’m keeping myself quite busy at the moment with learning how to Wordpress theme from scratch and I’ve taken on making our Earth Bound blog theme look like our main page and that is going fairly well so far. Hopefully not to far away I can start releasing some new themes of my own. I’m also working on two possible new blogs and slightly changing the direction here a little, more expanding than changing really. Maybe doesn’t sound like much but it really is taking up a bit of my time, but unlike work at the moment it is actually fun.

I’ve been quite busy the last week so this is a little late but all the same the current weight is 8.6 Kilos, a 0.6 Kilo increase so not far off the 0.8 increase last month. I think the lower number can be explained by me not paying with cash so much this month.

I’ve been reading a book called Money Karma which is really good, I’m finding useful because I can relate to the ideas and philosophy even if I can’t with many of the figures. Today I bought an organiser, budgeting book and some other stationary to write down my goals and log and plan a better budget. I’m going back to paying in cash again as I seem to spend less and it means more will go into the money tin as I’ll be given change.

I’m guessing I have less than $1000 left to pay off my car loan now so it should be gone by the end of this month, I really need to go to the bank this week and find out exactly how much is left. I’m hoping I will be saving before September when it will be 1 year out from the start of the GRTV trip, I’m aiming to be saving $1000 a month so I should have $12,000 by the time I leave all going well plus whatever I get for my car and extra from holiday pay owing. So things are looking quite good for now.

Reading how others are saving for travel I’ve noticed that many adopt a Buddhist philosophy towards saving, some knowingly and others not so. Of course the philosophy isn’t exclusively Buddhist, any philosophy is just that, but this one has long been associated with Buddhism.

A few months ago Brave New Traveler had an excellent article called 5 Steps To Save Money Like Buddha now I don’t know that Buddha was really into finance but I doubt he would frown upon people practising things like non-attachment and seeing things for what they are worth. I find myself looking around the house not for things I don’t have but for things I can sell. Playstation games have gone and DVDs are on the way out, I’m a bit of a miser so there isn’t much left to sell anyway but it actually feels good to get rid of these things, I can now see how pointless it is keeping them and in some cases, buying them in the first place. A while ago I also gave up buying magazines like FHM which I bought religiously for some reason I still can’t figure out, I haven’t saved any money there though because I started buying others like National Geographic and Outdoor magazines but the difference here is that these inspire me and teach me new things, FHM just burned a hole in my pocket and probably one in my brain as well.

Dave at GoBackpacking is a Buddhist and it’s reflected in his posts about saving and his approach to money. It might seem that moving your priorities from material things to accumulating money isn’t exactly admirable but ultimately the move isn’t from one material thing to another but to what the money will eventually bring, it’s the difference between looking for happiness in having money and using money to help open the door to more meaningful happiness.

Now I’m not advocating that anyone who wants to save money should become a Buddhist, obviously you don’t have to as reassessing your values and placing a higher value on non-material things is a philosophical change not a spiritual one, although you could take it to that level. This philosophy can help you learn to live below your means it may even make you happier knowing that you are not giving into shallow materialistic wants. One of the biggest money making, life enhancing methods of increasing personal ‘wealth’ on the internet also follows this philosophy, people are trading in 60-80 hour work weeks and directing their energies into earning money through more efficient methods often maintaining their previous income but now also being “time rich”, one example is the NuNomads another and Number 7 on Amazon’s best selling books is The 4-Hour Work Week. It’s seems Post-Consumerism is coming into reality but not coming from quite the same path they thought it would.

[thumb:72:l] Weigh in this morning was 8.0 Kilos, thats a 0.8 kilo gain in one month, not bad. At this rate it will take another 2-3 months to reach the 10 Kilo goal, my dilema is that it is only half full now so there will still be a way to go when I reach the target weight, keep going or cash out and actually earn interest on it in the bank?

In other money matters I had my car in for a service last week and it ended up costing my close to $600 and that had to come out of my savings, so I made a call and put the remainder of my savings towards my car loan and decided to no longer contribute to savings until my debt is payed off. This should only take a couple of months and what it will do is minimise interest and fees payed and although it won’t make a difference to how much I can save it will mean when I start again I will have more money earning interest for a longer period of time. I’m still not sure what to do about my camera though, I’m not paying interest on it and I never will but I am paying about $3 in fees each month, there is about 10 months left to pay it off in.

I think this little exercise will show you every litlle bit helps, I expect in the end there will be over $100 in the money tin and I have also earned almost $100 through a survey site called Emailcash and I will cash out of there when I reach $130. I think I started both of these little things at about the same time which granted was about 3 years ago on average it works out that I have contributed less than $1 a day combined closer to 30c I think (someone with better maths than me could figure it out). So lets call it $250 not much over 3 years but it’s still $250 and who on a backpacker budget is going to snub $250 towards their travel fund, especially when it came from the money that would have otherwise went into parking meters and other such useless things.

[tags]Money, Saving, SNL[/tags]