We Budgeted $700 a Week for Our Big Lap. Here’s Where It Actually Went
So, we budgeted $700 a week for our family road trip. And in the first three months of living in a caravan, we didn’t actually hit that figure once.
That sounds like a win, and some weeks it was. Other weeks it just meant the money moved from one category into another. What we want to do here is break down what that $700 was actually made up of, category by category, with the real weekly averages we landed on. We’re a family of two adults and two kids, a five and a seven year old, both very picky eaters (that’s a discussion for another day).
This is not for everybody. But if you want to work out how to have the van lifestyle and stay in your caravan, RV or motorhome, however you want to do it, here’s how the numbers actually broke down for us.
– For all your caravan and camping gear: CaravanRVCamping.com.au
– For planning the slow, out of the way routes: Hema’s Big Lap Bible
What the $700 a Week Was Meant to Cover
We split the weekly budget into five categories. Food, fuel and accommodation are always going to be your three big items. The other two are the ones that catch a lot of people out.
- Food: around $200 a week
- Fuel: around $200 a week
- Accommodation: around $180 a week
- Maintenance: around $100 a week
- Activities and everything else: around $20 a week
Neither that total nor anyone else’s is the correct one. It’s the number that worked for our family, at our pace, in the places we chose to go. Your five lines will land somewhere different, and that’s fine. What matters is that you’ve got five lines at all.
Food: Around $200 a Week for Two Adults and Two Kids
Food is probably one of the things you can most easily get cheaper. It’s also the one that moves the most. When you go to the middle of nowhere, food just gets more expensive. That’s how it goes.
The things that kept ours around the $200 mark: shop the savings, shop the local markets, find an Aldi and do a big stock up. That last one only works if you have the room to store your extras and your non-perishable food, so it’s worth thinking about storage space before you’re standing in the aisle with a trolley full of tins.
That $200 includes drinks and all the rest of it. We just spend mindfully, and that’s the theme running through every one of these categories.
Fuel: Around $200 a Week, and Usually Less
This is the number people query the most, so here’s the working behind it. We travel really, really slowly. We do about 200km a day maximum, and that’s every couple of days, not every day. So our fuel bill is low, and that’s intentional.
We do it that way because we like to properly explore the little areas we get to. The kids also don’t like being in the car, so it’s a win win for everybody.
$200 was the conservative figure and we didn’t normally hit it, unless we just had to cover a certain distance. Western Australia is where that changes, because you do get those large gaps between anything. Those weeks the fuel bill went up. On average across the three months it stayed under the $200.
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Caravan Parks: Around $180 a Week
Before anyone asks why we’re paying for van parks at all: we’re not, most nights. We like doing around two to three nights in a caravan park, and the rest of the time we’re not in one. Some weeks we wouldn’t go into a caravan park at all. Other weeks we’d want a break, need a stop, and stay two weeks in the one park. It all averages out, and if you do it over many, many months it really does average out.
A few things that brought that average down:
- Book midweek where you can. Midweek is a really, really good way to save a bit of money.
- Shop the sales. Jump onto the caravan parks’ websites and their social media, they’ll put up when they’ve got the good deals going.
- Go for the smaller, out of the way parks if you don’t need the bouncy castles. They’re normally really quiet, they save a heap of money, and it feels nice staying at the locally run ones.
If you do want the bouncy castles, treat yourself. Just do it mindfully.
The Buffer and the Bits and Pieces: $100 and $20
Maintenance is obvious for the car. Log book servicing, and with a newer car you shouldn’t have too many issues. The caravan is the one that’s really easily overlooked, because it just comes along behind you and it’s all good, until it isn’t. We’ve had a water pump fail once or twice in the last van, all sorts of hoses, wheel alignments. Those little things add up.
We put aside about $100 a week for it. Plenty of weeks nothing went pear-shaped and we didn’t touch it. Other weeks we did need to spend a fair bit. It’s nice knowing the buffer is there.
The last $20 covers activities and everything else, and it’s the sneakiest line of the lot. Every ice cream counts. There are four of us, so that’s 20 bucks easily, plus normally a pack of chips or whatever else. So we rarely have ice creams out, we buy the big packet at the supermarket and keep them in the freezer instead. The pub racks up quickly too. It’s always nice to go to the country towns and support the local economy, just be careful about the difference between supporting the economy and blowing your own budget out, which ends your holiday sooner.
The big ticket experiences sit outside this line entirely. Swimming with the whale sharks is crazy expensive and one we’d highly recommend doing. If you know something like that is coming, put it in the budget, and maybe give the very expensive experiences a separate budget of their own so they don’t eat into your everyday one.
We’ve written more about how that buffer and those bucket-list experiences work together in Your Big Lap Buffer: Budgeting for Maintenance Surprises and Bucket-List Experiences.
What This Number Does Not Include
This is the important one, and it’s the bit that gets left out of most weekly figures you’ll see, ours included until now. Everything above is travel, the van, and the experiences. It does not take into account living expenses, and we all have those.
- Phone plan
- Internet plan
- Health insurance
- A house back home, if you’ve got one
- Storage, if your stuff is sitting in a unit somewhere
None of those come into the $700. They keep running whether you’re on the road or not, so add your own on top rather than reading our number as an all-in figure. We’ve gone through the back-home side of it properly in The Bills That Follow You on Your Big Lap, and the smaller everyday ones in The Sneaky Everyday Costs That Blow Out a Caravan Trip Budget.
Our Thoughts
If you plan everything in advance and get your budget in place, you won’t get the surprises. That’s the takeaway to all of this. Even a pen and paper will do it. Write down everything you reckon you’re going to spend weekly, have a look at it, and see if it’s possible.
Know what you’re spending and where your money’s going, and live within your means. Then if you want to extend your holiday, you’ve got the budget to do that. If you want to go all out and have a really short holiday, that’s completely fine too. As long as you’re doing it intentionally.
What does your weekly number look like, and which category surprised you the most once you were actually out there? We’d love to hear it.
👉For more on how we work out our own weekly number, have a look at our paid Big Lap budget calculator and planner here. It’s the same spreadsheet we built for ourselves.
