How much did 8 months touring in our motorhome cost?
In 2016 we spent the summer touring Scandinavia. A quick nip back to the UK in November enabled us to visit family and friends, and to get a service and MOT for our Hymer B544 motorhome, Zagan. Then on 19 November 2016, we hit the road again. As winter was coming, there was only one thing for it, we headed south.
Our Winter tour of 2016/17 lasted eight months and took in France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Andorra. So, for all you facts and figures fans, here’s a round up of our adventure and at the bottom you’ll find all the stats you could ever want.
The Budget
While we have set a budget of £15,000 per year for our travels (£287 per week), we don’t let it rule our lives. If we want to go out for a meal or stop on a campsite – we do. On this trip, we did just that. We ate out 50 times and spent over a third of our nights on campsites. We’ve met people who travel on a third the money we spend each year, but we don’t need to live on such a restrictive budget, so we don’t.
I track what we spend every day in my diary and pop it into a spreadsheet (there’s a link to a blank version at the bottom of this article). The spreadsheet rounds it up for me to a weekly view against budget and a monthly view of total spend (fixed costs and travel costs) against our income. The information is all there, but we don’t spend hours studying it. We’ll have a quick monthly check to see that we aren’t massively overspending. We don’t spread/weight the big annual costs, such as MOT and service of the van across the year, so we know some months we’ll be up, others we’ll be down.
Where we went
We spent a night (or more) at each dot
We had agreed to tour Morocco with our friends Phil and Jules, this then turned into agreeing to run the Marrakesh Half Marathon (when will we learn not to drink when Phil and a laptop are around?). We headed south through France and met up with our friends in Anglet. We then crossed into Spain and made our way south to Portugal for Christmas in the Algarve.
After Christmas we headed back along the Algarve and over to Gibraltar for New Year. On the 4 January we caught the ferry over to Morocco. We then headed south to Fes to take part in a run as a warm up for the half marathon.
We experienced snow in Morocco in the Middle Atlas Mountains as we made our way to Marrakesh. One of the highlights of the trip was taking part in the half marathon there, obviously not a highlight at the time when you are puffing your way around the street in the baking sun, but looking back it will always make me proud.
After Marrakesh we headed for the coast and hugged it south to Sidi Ifni, before turning east working our way along the Algerian border, via the odd stunning gorge and dry riverbed, to the Nomad Festival at M’hamid and then the amazing dunes of Erg Chebbi. We then turned north and made our way back to Tangier Med port and returned to Europe 87 days after we left.
Back in Spain we needed a rest, so as our friends headed north to ski in Italy, we spent 42 nights house sitting in a stunning villa in the Valle de Abdalajis. We wandered along the Costa del Sol and explored the hill towns behind the coast before realising it had gone hot. Too hot for us to cross the middle of Spain (which was our original plan), so instead we cooled off in the Sierra Navada before creeping our way around the edge of the country, moving from campsite to campsite so we could get our awning out and keep Charlie the pampered pooch cool.
Leaving Spain we headed for Andorra and spent a few nights in the cool of its ski resorts, stocking up on cheap fuel and booze before coming back into France. Our journey back across France was planned so we could watch a mountain stage of the Tour de France, another trip highlight.
The nitty gritty numbers
The number of campsite nights is very high for us. This is because we spent nearly three months in Morocco where campsites are our favourite places to stay (and very cheap). The heatwave in Spain also had us retreating to campsites to keep cool, using our ASCI discount card to keep the costs down.
We also spent 17% of our trip house sitting. We found this was a great way to stay still cheaply and get to know an area, while giving us the opportunity to get the Saharan sand out of the motorhome and our clothes.
We filled up with LPG six times and diesel 28 times. Our most expensive diesel was £1.06 a litre in France towards the end of the trip. The cheapest diesel was a tie between two countries; at £0.76 a litre we filled to the brim in both Morocco and Andorra.
Our Tour cost break down
EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT.
These are our numbers, yours will not be the same. My best piece of advice if you are thinking of doing something similar and want to know how much you will need is to start tracking your own spending. That way you will know where your money is going and what things you like to spend on.
Also these figures do not include servicing, MOT, insurance etc for our van as they focus solely on this trip. If you want to know what it costs to spend a year in a motorhome, including the above, check out our 2016 costs.
Caveat aside, when planning our trip I was always interested on what others spent, and so here are our figures:
You might notice a lovely category that is a catch all for stuff that we can’t squeeze into anywhere else – Supplies/Misc. This list should give you some idea of what things are included in there:
Bike covers, cycle helmets, inner tubes, lighter fluid, washing up bowl, velcro, gas canisters, shoelaces, house sitting site subscription, tagine pot, tagine mat, book for kindle, SD card for phone, ACSI book, corkscrew and much, much more.
For those of you who like your numbers and pies, here’s a pie chart of the above table. Now you can easily see that we like pies too, as we ate our way around this trip. 48% of total costs were spent on food and drink from either the supermarket or eating and drinking out- good job we were running too!
And finally, the moment you have all been waiting for – the grand total of how much our eight month tour cost:
At just under £1000 per month for the adventures we have had, I think that was a bargain!
Ju x
Below is a blank copy of the spreadsheet we use, I’ve taken out all of our monetary data which may have broken some links. You’ll have to update the dates to get the weekly and monthly round up sheets to work, but it should be a good starting place if you want to track your own spending.
[gview file=”https://ourtour.co.uk/home/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Blank-Tracker-Spreadsheet.xlsx”]
I can’t see a column for ‘new front suspension’!
Took bathroom sink out today (oh what fun) – local boatbuilder claims he can mould a new one in indestructible fibre glass for less than a thousand pounds before Christmas…..will keep you posted x
#dreckley
Ah, that’s because it’s still on the ‘to do’ list! Good luck with the sink, if it is good and cheap we might pop down and get ours done too!
I love cost posts since it is very helpful with planning trips. You have done extremely well here keeping costs down without compromising on enjoyment. Although you have not included here, I guess you have some fixed costs from your home in the UK? Also can I ask, how long are you allowed to be away from the UK and still be a UK resident and qualify for free health care? I love how informative and fun your blog is….suffering with the withdrawal symptoms at the moment, I hope you will be back on the road soon again😄
Hi Gilda
Our fixed costs at home are all kept on a separate spreadsheet. We rent out part of our home (along with a couple of other houses), and this is how we generate most of our income for our life on the road. So while we do have some fixed costs for our house in the UK, these are more than covered by the rental income. The trip costs are just that, the cost of doing the trip.
With regards to how long you can be away, I had no idea, so have just looked it up. As we are both British citizens, UK residents and pay our taxes here there doesn’t seem to be a limit. We’re always back home at least once a year to MOT our motorhome, so fit in doctor and dentist appointments then.
Ju x
I haven’t bought my van yet, but read this with great interest. So much is possible, and I loved the detail. Could you just tell me how you came by a house-sit?
Hi Kirsteen
You’ll find all the information about it here – https://ourtour.co.uk/home/our-first-house-sit-trustedhousesitters-com-valle-de-abdalajis/
Cheers Julie
Thanks so much for this post. Really interested in the costs. We leave 8th December and heading straight to Morocco and following most of the route you’ve taken. We’ve got £20,000 solely for the trip for a minimum of a year, so hopefully we can get used to a budget and stay away longer.
I track all expenditure on “pocket expense” app on my phone, so I can add in the odd ice cream i.e. Items we do not get a receipt for. It allows you to create your own categories, for instance I split groceries into food and booze … quite revealing! It provides charts and you can show different time periods.
Like you, our biggest cost so far this year is groceries, followed by vehicle related (mostly diesel and lpg) then eating out. What a good life we lead!
Ah yes, our groceries and eating out are split into food and booze too. They were rounded up together for this review as were a few other categories or there would have been liads, but as you say, quite revealing!
How wonderful to read this! I’ll have to start teaching myself some excell! I also keep track of our expenses. – in a very simple excell file. And from reading your blog and this post in particular I think we can do it too, start travelling that is. Only our costs at home will still be somewhat high I suppose, but well we have been living on a budget for quite some time. High time we start using the savings!!! Planning on travelling for longer periods from next year onwards!
Some great ideas that I am planning to steal. How did you find insurance for the van? I can only get a quote for a few months, not for an extended trip. Good luck and thanks for the blogs.
Hi Graham
We use Safeguard for our motorhome insurance as they offer 365 days European travel. As you have discovered many others sadly don’t.
Cheers Julie
Excellent Blog guys thanks for taking the time to document yr travels.. We tried but failed miserably after a month or so..
🚐❤️
Your site is truly an inspiration and really informative. We had several questions that have already been answered by reading it.
We are currently searching for a motor home but it needs to be winterized for skiing and will start with short trips before staying away longer.
We loved your book, Funding Freedom, and have been working on this for almost 4 years but not in such an organised way.
Looking forward to future blogs. Keep up the great work.
Thanks guys. Jay
Hi Guys,
God Bless you both and I pray god continues to bless you.
Your blog is so informative and it is such an inspiration for people like me to undertake the travel. The details of expenses are very helpful in planning.
Please keep up the good work. Wish you both all the best.
Thank you, a great blog I will steal some of the ideas.
Hi great roundup – you listed a small fee for foreign cash withdrawn in Morocco – Could you elaborate on how you are able to make withdrawals from a UK (I assume) bank account in Europe with no ATM fees?
Hi Joe. We use a Caxton fx pre-paid credit card for cash withdrawals in euro countries. It doesn’t charge a fee at atms, which means we can take out smaller amounts. This is our review of it from when we first got it in 2012, some things have changed but the basic principle is still the same. Cheers Julie https://ourtour.co.uk/home/review-caxton-fx-prepaid-euro-credit-card/
Hi
I’ve just been reading your blog 😀 maybe I missed it but was wondering did you buy 3rd party insurance on the border in Morocco and if so how much was it please ?
We are with Adrian flux and for full comp it’s 700 or 630 for 3rd party !
Tried all the usual suspects for insurance but no look
Ps it will be our 1st time and excited and nervous! !
Cheers if you can help it’s so hard to find what the price is on the border before you travel although I’m also wondering if it’s worth the paper it’s written on !
Hi Sam. We had a green card from Safeguard on our latest trip. On our first trip there in 2012 we had to buy at the border. After haggling (welcome to Morocco) we ended up paying €92 for one month of cover. No idea who was covered to drive or what level of cover it was. We saw it as simply ‘keep out of jail’ cover. When we knew we were going again, we found a company who would provide a green card. Safeguard weren’t the cheapest, but provided 3 months of cover as part of the policy which worked out to be a huge saving! Not sure if you have spotted our book about taking your motorhome to Morocco. It includes all the research we did before taking our motorhome there and may be helpful for your first trip https://ourtour.co.uk/home/motorhome-morocco-an-ourtour-guide/
Have an amazing adventure.