During those 9 months travelling in South-East Asia, there hasn’t been a single day, when we haven’t had questions: What do we do today? Where do we eat? And obviously… How much does it all cost?
We decided to travel here with an average budget of 30€/day per person. It includes everything: accommodation, transport, food, fun stuff, souvenirs etc. When on one day we are flying, on the next day we have to be satisfied with a noodle soup.
Why so small budget?
Shortly, we quit our office job and unfortunately our parents haven’t sent us loads of money yet. Neither have any of our friends… So, we have to rely on our own savings and on everything we make here on the road.
Logic has been simple. Less we spend, the longer we can enjoy our little adventure here.
That’s why need to calculate every decision we make every single day. Can we afford this coffee? Can we go to the adventure park? Is this beer worth it? (It usually is)
We have often dreamed about how easy would it be to stay here carelessly just for a 2-week holiday. There are just so many things tempting us every single day. And we want to try it all! But which ones are worth it and which ones we pass on to travel longer?

Our decision process
Thanks to my “mathematical” parents, I tend to have a little bit faster calculation skills than Grete. That’s why I am usually playing the calculator role.
After seeing local prices, I quickly convert everything to euros, try to remind the price of it in previous countries, and compare them. That’s how I know if something is relatively expensive or not. On a walk in a night market, my mind does this process around 20-30 times.
I am like a walking calculator, currency converter, and value analyzer. It sometimes feels like a burden to be so stressed about money, but that’s the only way to keep the discipline.
And that’s not even the hardest part. After my calculations, I state my opinion to Grete, and then we need to make a compromised decision. I know, that doesn’t sound good… But I am a lucky one, I have an unbelievably like-minded girlfriend. Still, sometimes she wants an ice-cream and I want cookies. What to do? On some day, I choose, the next day, she will.

Overall, it’s better to have someone on the side while making decisions. Sometimes we make a fool decision together, donate our money to a scammer, or buy the cake which
How to we keep track of our expenses?
The magic tools we use are… drum roll… a diary and a Google Spreadsheet!
We are writing down all our expenses to my diary after every day.
From there I re-type them to our google spreadsheet weekly (or whenever I reach WIFI). This document is my sophisticated holy place, where all expenses in local currency are converted into rows of euros and are added to different spend categories. The truth then is lying there in a bold. Where do we spend our money? Are we inside our budget?
This process of writing and re-typing everything is really dull, but that’s the easiest and cheapest way to have control over our financial situation.

Even before coming to travelling, I manually kept track of all my expenses for years. I think this has been the main reason why I managed to save enough money. I even get anxious when there have been some weeks without seeing my current balance.
After 9 months of calculator life
Before we came to travel, we even romanticized about living a frugal life without an income. Truth be told, the reality is often sad and annoying when we have to say no to cool things or when something disappoints us or when we can’t find an agreement between us.
But that’s the lifestyle we chose ourselves. Almost like Elon Musk, when he chose to live with 1$ per day. Not so extreme, of course, but still challenging.
I am sure that after getting back our decent incomes, we keep living a similar budget life with some exceptions (think dark chocolate and beer) because that’s the only way to reach financial freedom one day.