Building a Budget for a Dream

Although our Poker Pilgrimage is still five years away, we spend a lot of time thinking about its viability and about building a budget for our dream. We are fortunate to work as consultants and thus know that we will be able to take our jobs on the road.  However, a year of travel (and poker!) will certainly lead to reduced hours, and a wide variety of costs (gas, food, and lodging for a start) that are different than those we face today.

We also hope to reduce hours with our primary income source on this trip. While our main hustle pays well, it is not our favorite way to spend time. So we are actively looking for side hustles, both small and large, that will help increase our income as we are building a budget for this trip.

On the other hand, we plan to give up our apartment and one of our cars. We will also reduce or eliminate costs that we bear today. Initial targets include gas expenditures and groceries. Our Pilgrimage budget will help us get an idea of the costs we can expect during our year of travel, and tell us how much we need to start saving today.

This is only a rough initial budget. We intend to update our budget regularly as we take deeper dives into each aspect of our trip. These posts can be found in our “Building the Stakes” thread.

For our first budget, we share our original baseline estimates for our yearlong trip.

As you can see, we are starting with a very rough estimate. Over time, we will fully explore each of the items above to refine our budget. We will share each of these explorations in a post so that you will learn the financial ins and outs of long-term travel along with us.

If you have any questions about our initial budget, feel free to ask in the comments.

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