Saving for Te Araroa – my saving plans and expected costs

As promised, I’ll take on my journey filled with the preparations for my Te Araroa hike for the next year and a half. Although it is still unclear whether New Zealand will be open by that time (in October / November 2022), I do assume that travel will be possible again by then.
 
Besides the fact that New Zealand must be open to tourism by then, there are two things that are necessary to make this trip: time and money. Fortunately, time I have as an entrepreneur, but not yet enough money. That’s why I made a savings plan for this trip, which I will share with you in this blog. So to hopefully inspire you to chase your dreams and to show you how you can make a big goal a little smaller and more achievable in such a way. Enjoy reading!
 

How much does hiking Te Araroa cost?

I started researching how much it would cost to do Te Araroa, but didn’t find a ton of information about it. The Te Araroa website itself has a recommendation of approximately NZD 7,000-10,000 for a period of 5 months. On other blogs I read completely different amounts. So I find it difficult to estimate. Since I have of course traveled through New Zealand before, I checked my old spreadsheets with costs.
 
During these trips, I only traveled on a budget so much. I bought and / or rented a car, went out for dinner once a day (usually for lunch) and sometimes even stayed overnight in luxury hotels. I spent an average of NZD 100 per day.
 
Regarding the above, I assume that I should be able to need a little more than half of this during Te Araroa. Because I I’ll camp lot of the time and/or spend the night in (free) mountain huts and will eat out less. So I’ve estimated the average amount Te Araroa website mentions, or NZD 8.500 – which roughly equates to € 5.000 – or € 1.000 per month in spending in New Zealand.
 

Flights and insurance

Then there are costs for flight to New Zealand from The Netherlands. I find it difficult to estimate how much that will cost me because the world is of course in crisis at the moment. It remains to be seen what flight prices will do. In recent years I have been able to book a return ticket to Auckland for less than € 1.000, so I am assuming an amount of € 1.000 for a plane ticket for this trip.
 
I already have travel insurance for my work and I count it as business costs, for which I set aside an X amount each month as those costs. So I do not charge any extra costs for that, but I include them in the costs that I will continue to have in the Netherlands.
 

 

Cost for gear

I expect to be able to get all the gear I expect to need through my various websites and my work. So I did not charge any extra costs for this. I have not yet thought about which gear I’ll take with me, that I will look into at a later stage in the preparation process. In addition, items will of course be broken and/or lost along the way. I make a separate budget for that.
 

Costs in the Netherlands during my adventure

Then there are the costs that still remain at home when I’m not there. Think of rent (I’ll keep my cabin in the woods and will most likely share the rent with my partner), my health insurance and other insurances. In addition, of course I have various business costs such as keeping my websites up and running, insurance, etc. I have estimated that the costs in the Netherlands will be between € 1.000 and € 1.200 per month.
 
Fortunately, I have been working very hard over the years to create ‘passive income’. This is income that you generate without directly doing any counter-service. Think of the advertisements you see on this site and the purchases/reservations you make through my sites. Either way, this income comes in every month, whether I’m out hiking or not. I do include two side notes:
 
– I’ll spend 1 day a week on the trail blogging/creating content and checking whether all my sites are still up and running. I cannot stop all my projects for 5 months. That is a choice I made when I became an entrepreneur and I still fully support it. So I don’t see it as an obstacle. I’m still thinking about exactly how I am going to do this. So bring your laptop or not? Buy a VPN or not? To hire a virtual assistant or not? I will study this further in the coming year and keep you posted about my decisions!
 
– This amount is based on an average from the pre-corona time. Since no one can predict how things will go in the coming years, I have based the expectations on an average from the past. It remains to be seen whether this is feasible and I cannot say anything about it now. However, my intuition tells me that it should definitely be OK like tis.
 
In other words: I’ll pay all fixed costs that “remain” in the Netherlands from my passive income. So I don’t have to save extra for it.
 

How much should I save?

And now the key question… how much should I save? With the aforementioned 5.000 euros in costs for the trail and € 1.000 for the plane ticket, I expect to need at least € 6.000. I expect to leave in October or November 2022 (I will go further into this another time), which means that from March 2021 I have about 20 months to start saving. This equals an amount of € 300 per month.
 
This is of course a considerable amount and I have been thinking all winter about how I could generate this. Because my fixed costs have gone up considerably from January 1, since I moved to my own house, I had to recalculate a lot and withdraw money from my savings account because I hardly have any income due to corona. I’m not going to elaborate on that, but the bottom line is that I have the following ideas to save the amount together.
 
1. Cancel subscriptions.
I canceled my Canva Pro and Spotify Premium. This saves me € 30 per month.
 
2. Spend less money on groceries.
I hope to save around € 50 per month with this. I’m already going to budget stores such as Lidl and Jumbo, but I don’t want to compromise on the quality of my food. I still eat a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts, avocado and I buy meat, fish and eggs mostly organic. It doesn’t feel right for me to cut back on this as well. By the way, I only eat meat once a week lately so that’s a huge saving as well.
 
3. Sell my e-book “10 steps to a more adventurous life”.
I wrote an e-book for adventurous women in January and February. After deduction of VAT and costs for my payment system, I am left with € 9 per sold book. One third of this goes to the podcast costs I make (website, fuel costs to interviews, Soundcloud, etc.) and the rest, or € 6 per book, goes to my Te Araroa fund. I expect to sell about 10 books per month, or € 60 per month.
 
4. I got into crypto.
I won’t elaborate on this in detail because I am not an expert and do not have the ambition to fully keep track of exactly how I do that. However, I have gathered a group of like-minded people around me who provide me with good advice in the field of crypto currency. I use Bitvavo for my crypto coins and check daily which crypto is best for me to buy / sell. This takes me some time, but consider it a hobby. Having a purpose with your crypto suddenly makes it a lot more fun.
 
I realize that I could earn more with crypto, but I also partly use crypto for other investments that I want to make in the future. So I only transfer a small part of my crypto profit to my New Zealand account.
 
Total to save per month:
– Savings subscriptions: € 25, –
– Savings groceries: € 50, –
– Sale e-book: € 60, –
– Profit from Crypto: € 100, –
 
Total: € 235,-
 
This is still not enough to reach € 300 per month, but there are some new developments that I’ll tell you more about in a next article. This will allow me to get the right amount together on time. More about that in the next blog!
 

Conclusion and disclaimer for saving from Te Araroa

I hope to have given you an idea of how I want to pay for this trip without doing extremely weird moves and to continue living my life as it is now. Got questions? Comments? Drop them down below!
 
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