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The choices start with your rig. Of course, there are thousands of older travellers having the time of their lives traversing the country in 40-foot motorhomes with all mod cons. These days, rigs costing $300,000 are not even top of the range! But you don’t need to spend anything like that amount. You can pick up an older style second-hand caravan for few thousand dollars, or you may even prefer a camper trailer or a tent! It has been done and is being done by ever more adventurous grey nomads. Rick and Leanne have been spending about six months of every year travelling for the past decade or so and are taking off on an open-ended adventure shortly. “We have a battered old van and I don’t even know how old it is,” says Rick happily. “It’s certainly not the flashest thing on the road but we don’t worry too much about scratches or dints as we head off the bitumen. It’s amazing the places we have managed to take it … it costed us a couple of thousand donkey’s years ago and the money we saved has paid for thousands upon thousands of kilometres of adventure.” Obviously, not everybody will be as comfortable as Rick and Leanne “roughing it” in an old caravan and many people won’t be as handy as Rick at fixing up the suspension problems and others that they have encountered. Depending on how long you plan to travel for, you may consider it a worthwhile to spend the extra cash on a more luxurious rig that is both more comfortable and possibly more reliable. Your on-road budget will be dominated by necessary evils such as fuel, food and camping fees. Fuel is pretty much a fixed cost ... you have to pay what you have to pay to fill up the tank and keep on trucking. However, the speed at which you travel can have a major effect on your weekly fuel bill. If you find a beautiful spot and simply set up camp for a week or two, you can put a big fat zero in the fuel column of your trip budget ledger. Food costs are also pretty fixed. Most grey nomad couples reckon they can live pretty comfortably on about $100 a week without dining too extravagantly and with the odd free fish feed thrown in. Obviously, if you want to eat out at restaurants and suchlike your food bills can climb hugely. Camping fees are the cost that you have most control over. Staying at caravan parks every night at $20 plus can help you get through the Super payout in double quick time … which is fine if you can afford it. Rick and Leanne prefer to spend most of their nights out in the bush, in national parks or at roadside stops. “We’d rather spend the money caravan parks charge on other things … like fuel and the odd beer,” laughs Rick. “It’s nice to get into a van park occasionally for a shower and to do the laundry but we stay for free as much as we can.” Naturally … like the choice of rigs … the places you stay is very much a personal thing. The most budget-minded, slow travelling nomads can probably get away with spending just a few hundred dollars a week; while at the other end of the scale nomads who frequently dine in restaurants, take every tour on offer and travel lots of kilometres every day may spend close to a thousand dollars. Think very carefully about what is right for you, then do your sums … and get out there and enjoy it, however much you have chosen to spend.
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Budgeting for a trip is perhaps one of the hardest things of all to plan for. The answer to the eternal question of “how much is it going to cost me?” is … virtually as much or as little as you want it to.