Married couple Jack and Jill (what perfect names!) will soon be leaving on an around the world journey. We virtually sat down with them and had an electronic conversation about trip planning and budgeting. Tentatively, they are planning to leave in April, but that’s all up in the air right now. Our gut feeling is that they will leave soon, especially since we can all track the progress of their financial savings on their blog, wherespoople.com. After all, they’ve been planning this trip for 4 years!

Jack and Jill Travel the World
Jack and Jill went up this hill

When I asked them about their trip, where they were going, and how long it would last, here’s what they said.

Our itinerary is not quite set in stone yet. But so far we’re planning to travel for at least a year, starting in China, making our way west to Western Europe, then south to Egypt and surrounding, down eastern Africa, then heading west again to South America, and back up to North America. That’s assuming we’ll make it back to the starting point. Who knows where we’ll end up?

They’ve done some traveling before, though, and I asked them to tell us their favorite place so far. Their answer:

This is tough. I want to say Yosemite National Park, it’s simply our favorite place on Earth. It’s about 4 hours away from where we live. Abroad — I’d say Scotland. It’s beautiful and when we were there, the weather god was cooperating and granted us with days without rain, blue skies, and just gorgeous, breathtaking scenery all around. Alaska‘s pretty neat, too, we love mountains.

We always ask people what they expect to learn about themselves, because travel is more than just learning about the places you visit. They responded:

Well, we expect challenges on the way and it’ll be interesting to learn how we’ll be able to handle those as a couple. Jack and I have a quite different style of traveling and different ways to deal with stressful situations. So, it will be a good opportunity to learn even more about each other, how to compromise, and how to deal with tough situations in unfamiliar surroundings, and that sort of thing.

Yes, we agree. Sometimes traveling with your favorite person can be a challenge, so good luck! We’re sure you’ll have lots of insightful advice to give us after your trip is over!

When I asked them about how they determined their budget, here’s what they had to say.

We looked into how much others have spent on their RTW trip and started from there. Right now we’re budgeting about $2000/month per person, because that seems to be the average price tag. It’s all inclusive of airfares, vaccinations, visas, and all that, so it’s not as bad it seems. In terms of managing our finance on the road, we just put everything on credit cards and worry about it later. Just kidding! The last trip we took, we kept track of purchases on pen and paper because we didn’t have a laptop with us. We still have that notebook somewhere. That makes for an awesome souvenir, by the way! This upcoming trip, we might do the same thing and maybe every couple of days update everything online so we can share it with those who might be interested (such as people like us!).

Finally, Jack and Jill had some advice for other travelers.

When things are not going smoothly, take a deep breath. Then take a snapshot of the surrounding area to look back later. For us, it’s those moments of misfortune that make for great stories afterwards. Keep a journal or a blog because you can forget. Even stuff that we don’t think we’ll forget…

Good luck guys, and have a great trip!