How to Calculate Your Budget For A Long-Term Motorhome Tour

So, how can we afford to do this year-long motorhome tour? This is what we’ve done to calculate our budget for our motorhome tour.

I was always brought up to save for what you want before you buy it (and that’s pretty much what I’ve done for most stuff with the exception of houses), so that’s what we’re doing.

We spent two weeks travelling around Europe towards the end of 2010 and while away I used an app on my phone to log how much we spent on stuff.  It’s wasn’t very in-depth, but gave us a good starting point.

2010 Trip
£184   Overnight stops/campsites
£421   Travel – ie fuel and ferry
£371   Food – eating out and supermarket
£107   Stuff – everything else

£1083 Total

£67.68 per day as we were away for 16 days in total

Now we figure we won’t be driving quite so far each day when we do the big tour, we also plan to do some wild camping (free) and the ferry fare will be spread over more days.  So we’ve set ourselves a budget of £50 per day.

We’re planning on being away for a year so it’ll be around £18,250

We’ll also have to pay for the van before we go which will be somewhere between £15,000 and £22,000 depending on how old the van we buy is.

So we need to save over £33,000 to do this….. time to start looking down the back of the sofa.

Update – We ended up staying on the road for two years. We tracked how much it cost for everything, so you can see a full breakdown of our tour costs.