How Much to Save Each Week for Your Big Lap Around Australia
How do you actually afford a Big Lap around Australia? It’s the question we get asked more than any other, and for a lot of people, the finance side is what stumps them. It’s the “how do I afford it” that keeps a real departure date from turning into an actual plan.
We work it out with a spreadsheet, breaking the whole trip down until it lands on one number: how much we need to save, every week, to make it happen. Once you’ve got that number, it’s something tangible and manageable to put away, rather than one enormous, scary total sitting in the background.
Here’s exactly how we work it out, step by step.
– For working out your route, kilometres and where the fuel is: Hema Maps
Start With Your Real Departure Date
First things first, you need to know your departure date. If you’re not sure how to lock that in yet, that’s a whole topic on its own, worth sorting before you go further.
Most people take about a year to plan, so pick a date, whether it’s a set start of a school year, a work notice period, or just a date that feels achievable, and use it to count down. That countdown is what tells you how many weeks you’ve actually got left to save.
Work Out Your Total Trip Budget, Category by Category
Once you’ve got a timeframe, the next step is working out your total trip budget. We build this up category by category rather than guessing at one big number, because it’s far easier to get an estimate right on food, or fuel, or caravan parks on their own than it is to pluck a total out of thin air.
Food, fuel and caravan parks are probably the biggest costs of a Big Lap, so they’re the ones worth starting with.
- Food: estimate your weekly grocery spend and multiply it out across the whole trip. We always add a buffer on top, around 20%, because food does get more expensive once you’re out in the middle of nowhere.
- Fuel: this one depends on how many kilometres you’re planning to cover and your average fuel cost per litre. Towing changes your fuel burn a lot, especially in a headwind, so it’s worth its own proper calculation rather than a rough guess (we’ve got a dedicated video coming on exactly this).
- Caravan parks: work out how many nights a week you’ll realistically spend in a park, the average cost per night, and don’t forget the extras, some parks charge per child, and some even charge for pets.
What’s a Realistic Weekly Number?
A commonly quoted ballpark that works for most families is around $1,500 a week. It’s a reasonable starting point if you haven’t worked out your own figure yet.
For us, it’s closer to $700 a week, and we want to be upfront that this is unusually low. It reflects the particular way we travel and live, not a benchmark everyone should be aiming for. On the other end, we know plenty of families who budget $3,000 to $4,000 a week. There’s no single right number, which is exactly why it’s worth working out your own rather than borrowing someone else’s.
Turn the Total Into a Weekly Savings Target
Once every category is filled in and you’ve got a total trip budget, the spreadsheet compares that against how many weeks you’ve got left before you leave, and gives you one number: how much you need to save each week to hit it.
In the walkthrough in the video, we use an illustrative example: a departure date about a year out, a full year on the road, and 57 weeks left to save. Filling in example numbers for food, fuel and caravan parks lands on a total trip budget of $51,120, which works out to $896 a week needing to be saved in that particular example. That figure comes purely from the example inputs used to demonstrate the method, not from our own real weekly number above, it’s there to show how the maths works, not as a target to copy.
The part we like best is what happens once you’ve got your real weekly number: you tick a box each week as you save it, and watch the total count down. It’s tangible. You can actually see yourself getting closer, week by week, instead of just hoping it’ll somehow come together.
If your own number comes out looking unmanageable, that’s worth knowing now rather than later, and it’s a sign to look at ways to bring your overall trip budget down before you commit to a departure date.
Our Thoughts
Breaking a Big Lap down into one weekly number is what turns “someday” into something you can actually plan around. Your number is going to look different from ours, and that’s exactly the point, work it out from your own real food, fuel and caravan park costs rather than borrowing a figure from anyone else’s trip.
👉For more on how we work out our own weekly budget, check out our Big Lap budget planner here.
