Published on : 01 November 20194 min reading time
THE EQUIPMENT
The equipment budget is a major expense and at the same time, good equipment is essential! There is everything that is clothing, backpacks, accessories such as duvets or shoes or everything that is electronic.
When you start from scratch, you have to buy everything and the budget is quite large. Here is what we have planned (budget per person):
– Digital budget (cameras, laptop, sports camera, tablet, MP3 players…): 650€.
– Equipment budget (backpack, clothes, shoes etc…): 640€.
For more details on what we have chosen to buy to leave, go to our equipment page.
THE VISAS
Unfortunately, to enter some countries, all travellers must pay a visa and the price accordingly. If this is not the case in South America, Asia is the first to be affected. It should be noted that regulations are changing very quickly, especially recently. For example, at the beginning of 2015, the Indonesian government announced the future abolition of the visa for entry into its territory. A measure that we hope to have in place very soon! Moreover, if visas have at first sight regulated fees, it is very likely that we will have to pay a small bribes, particularly when crossing borders by land. We have tried to take stock of the different countries we will cross for which we will have to pay an entry fee.
THE VACCINES
Once you know what vaccines you are going to make, you have to compare prices again. Contrary to popular belief, not all vaccine prices are the same and sometimes double depending on where you buy them. We first called the Institut Pasteur in Lille and the prices were exorbitant. We then approached the surrounding hospitals that had a “travel” service: Tourcoing Hospital and Denain University Hospital and we could see a huge difference in price, see instead the table below which lists the main vaccines, as well as the total cost. To find out which vaccines we have made and their costs in detail, go to the Health section.
INSURANCE INSURANCE
There’s no way we’re leaving without insurance! Accident, flight delays, loss of luggage, theft of equipment, medical expenses… all these are reasons why you need to be well covered. There are insurance companies that offer a special “long-distance travel” package. As far as we are concerned, we have chosen Chapka insurance with the Cap Aventure option, which offers attractive rates, not necessarily the cheapest, but in addition to having good guarantees, it also covers sporting activities compared to certain competitors, something not to be neglected. This formula cost us 43€ per person per month but we got 10% discount, just on request! Tip: what you need to know is that with Gold or Premier credit cards you have a fairly complete insurance coverage for three months from your first flight, that’s already a cost!
THE BANKS
We are based in two different banks. We wanted to leave with two cards: a Visa Premier and a MasterCard Gold. Before we rushed headlong to the online banks that everyone was talking about, we made an appointment at our respective banks to explain our project to them and see what they could offer us. Benjamin’s bank first offered to pay him back everything. He could switch to a MasterCard Gold card without paying and would be reimbursed withdrawal and payment fees upon request. An attractive offer but one that made us doubt it:
– the bank advisor takes forever to answer us, when she’s not on vacation!
– you have to claim by email regularly to be reimbursed as they go along (they told us that they could not remove our fees directly that we would be debited and then credited back on request)
– if we have a change of advisor along the way and he is not aware of our file, we do not know if we will be able to continue to benefit from this coverage of costs.
in short we hesitated a lot… and then we know we know that if we could be reimbursed so much we could try to take advantage of it. So we chose to switch to a MasterCard Gold at Benji’s bank, the agricultural credit.
Sylvie chose to stay at her current bank, the savings bank, by switching to a Visa Premier card that was offered to her for 1 year. For the rest, thanks to a young offer, she can take advantage of an option at 0.9 € per month for 4 free international cash withdrawals. For card payment charges, commissions are 2.8%. After comparison, it was the cheapest solution.