Tips 👏
- Bring a SIM Card Remover to easily change SIM.
- Download all the apps before leaving since good Wi-Fi is rare.
- Set-up your VPN on your phone and try-it-out as early as you can.
⏱ Duration
It took us around a month to sort-out our tooling, in parallel with the other steps.
Accounts 💵
To handle the money during our trip, we decided to open a joint account with Monzo. While other banks offered the same product, we went with Monzo for the following:
- Free, and come with a mastercard for each
- Very easy to move money between accounts
- Small fees on international payments and withdrawals
- Reliable customer service with 24/7 chat within the app
- Free app to check your spendings in real time, perfect to log expenses
- Real-time notifications for every payment, help to double check for fraud
- Possibility to create pots to save money and avoid having all the cash on the main account
Both of us already being customer with them, that was just logical. We simply created a pot (kind of saving account) for the trip and moved all our money in. Everyday, we were moving a bit of money from the pot to the joint account for free, ensuring to not have all of it accessible on the debit card in case of fraud or stolen card.
We don’t have any affiliate with them, but we highly recommend it since it’s very modern and bloody simple to use. Note that if you’re alone, you can still use the pots without a joint account.
The main drawback was the withdrawals limit. While we could withdraw as much as needed, we only had 200£/month free of fees. After what, we paid 3% of charge which turned out to be very expensive, specially in the many cash-only countries. The best would have been to also get a Revolut card. While they do more or less the same (200£/month free and then 2% fees), alternating with 4 cards would have make us save a lot.
Pictures 📸
During our trip, we knew obviously we would took a lot of pictures. We are not professionals, so we left only with our IPhones as cameras. After a month, our devices storage exploded, meaning no more pictures. We started by deleting older ones to free some space, but that was far from ideal. The best option we found was to upgrade our ICloud allowance to 50GB. Super easy and not that expensive for what it is.
Dropbox also offers a similar service, but since it’s not Apple it’s working as good as ICloud. While it’s having a wider range of service included in the package, we still preferred the ICloud storage service.
Apps 💾
Here’s the list of free apps we found super useful while travelling (again, no affiliate):
- Netflix: Perfect for rainy days.
- Gmail: Superbe email client, fast and reliable.
- Trip Advisor: Great to find things to do around.
- Express VPN: The best VPN we found for China.
- XCurrency: Offline and up-to-date currency rates.
- Monzo: Perfect for managing the money (see above).
- Messenger: Great for online video calls and catch-up.
- TravelSpend: Log and budget your expenses day by day.
- WhatsApp: Essencial for communication in South America.
- Maps.me: Free offline map of the world, including trail paths.
- FourSquare: Perfect to find the best restaurants in a very easy way.
- AirBnB and Booking.com: The best to find cheap accommodations.
- Flight Radar 24: Ideal to check your flight status just with the flight number.
- Facebook: Besides keeping in touch with your friends, useful for the groups.
- Google Sheets: Great for planning and budgeting, comes with offline version.
We also installed the apps of all the airlines we travelled with, to track our flights and manage our bookings.
Budget Tracking 💸
Once finalizing the budget per country for our trip, we searched for a simple way to log our expenses day by day, to give us an overview on how we were doing budget-wise. We found the best was a t-mix of TravelSpend and Google Sheets.
The free app TravelSpend allowed us to log all of our expenses in a very simple way. It let us select a category, price, date and currency, and added it into the backlog. To use it we just created a trip, with a date and a total budget and the app pretty much took care of the rest. Just by opening it, we knew how much we already spent and how much we had left to use in the country.
However, we found two main problems to it. First, the synchronisation was completely broken, meaning only one of us could take care of it, even if that was a premium feature (we had to upgrade to get that). Secondly, while it was generating nice charts and graphics, the insights were very confusing.
To fix the second problem, we created a Google Sheets with a bunch of formulas. The cool thing of the sheets is that the app is free, the logic is very powerful and it’s possible to manipulate those offline. The main usage of it was a breakdown per country. For each, we put the total budget, the dates and any pre-expenses. Every now and then, we were taking the total number spent from TravelSpend, and input it in the sheet. Thanks to formulas, it was computing at the current date the amount allowed to spend, amount left to use, and an overall trend on how we were doing, showing the deficit or surplus in real-time.
Thanks to that, at the end of each country we knew exactly how much excess or deficit we got, giving us a very accurate idea on how we were doing overall on the world trip budget. You can find an example of our sheet here, which you can re-use by duplicating it. Feel free to comment at the bottom if you have any questions.
Sheets planning 📝
While building the calculator, we also found two others great usages of Google Sheets and the flight list.
After browsing around on some forums, we found a way to generate dates day by day in each cells. That helped us to basically use the sheet as a calendar, to visualize and update our planning in a super easy way. That was perfect for booking activities and hotels without getting the dates wrong.
We also created a third sheets in this craziness for our flight list, including date, time of departure and arrival, airline, seats number, booking code, and duration. Again, very helpful, specially to communicate with hotels and tours.
To be fair, both of those can be achived with any kind of to-do-list app. But having everything into one app, super customizable, free and on top of it available offline was a bless, and we heavily recommend to do the same, even if they probably violate our privacy. You can find an example of both sheets here, which you can re-use by duplicating them. Feel free to comment at the bottom if you have any questions.
Subscriptions check ✅
Another last minute thing we did before leaving was to check all our daily life subscriptions. Most of those being money in the trash while travelling for a long period of time (or maybe in general). To do so, we’ve been through our bank statements, listed them all, and asserted whether we would keep them or not.
For example, we cancelled Deliveroo, Amazon Prime and the famous un-used gym membership. We obviously forgot half of them at the time so we advice you to take care of it in advance.
SIM Cards 📲
We were not sure what was the best option telecom-wise for us visiting 9 different countries. We did some research, a found some international SIM providers like KnowRoaming, offering quite a good rate anywhere in the world. We tried it and it’s basically a scam. They ensure all-can-you-eat data but in reality that means 1GB after what they take all your credit and block your allowance.
We trashed the SIM and in the end realized the best if you’re from UK is to take a Three card. It’s very easy to top-up, and they have a bunch of destinations where the usage of data is without extra fees. For the remaining countries, we simply bought a local SIM card and that worked perfectly.
The reality is at the moment there’s no international great data providers, and all of them charge a huge amount of money for not that much. Changing SIM and number is annoying, but not that bad if you’re using mainly online social networks.
Hope this was helpful, you can ask us any questions on Instagram.