A Digital Nomad Budget: 3 Months in Bolivia & Peru

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We have now been digital nomads for nine months. We previously shared how much we spent in our six months in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay budget, and now we look at how much three months in Bolivia and Peru cost.

We have set ourselves a monthly budget of £1000 ($1550) for two people, so our daily budget is £33 ($50). We also have an extra few thousand set aside for big expenses like tours, major activities and flights.

Here’s what we spent travelling around Bolivia and Peru for three months. Costs are for two people.

Select CurrencyGBPUSD

Currency: GBP

Currency: USD

This is the breakdown of how much this works out on an average daily basis.

We ended up slightly underbudget for our daily expenses, which is due to how inexpensive Bolivia is. We did spend a lot on activities and flights though – see below.

Notes on Our Expenses

Bolivia

Bolivia is definitely the cheapest country we have visited so far, and we were able to get decent private en-suite rooms for £10 ($16) a night.You could spend less by staying in more basic rooms and eating local food. As we are vegetarian we had to eat in more expensive tourist restaurants most of the time. We only cooked for ourselves a couple of times.Although our daily expenses were under budget we spent a lot on tours (salt flats and jungle) and flights to and from the Amazon region. If you include all these big expenses it takes our daily budget to £46 ($71) a day for two people. See breakdown of extra expenses below.

Peru

Peru felt really expensive after Bolivia, although we did only visit the major tourist destinations of Cusco, Arequipa, Lima and Huaraz.We particularly felt this in accommodation prices. In Bolivia we could get a comfortable room for $16, butin Peru what we got for $25wasn’t great. We really wanted a comfortable bed, hot shower and desk to work at so we ended up paying $40-$45 most nights for the first 3.5 weeks. We went a bit “ignore our budget” crazy.As in Bolivia we also ate out twice a day at tourist restaurants which are much more expensive than the un-veggie friendly local places. In addition we had two amazing but super expensive ($40-45) meals at an excellentvegetarian restaurant in Lima. So worth it!
Most buses are overnight and distances are long so we went for cama class with the best bus companies (Cruz del Sur & Movil Tours). You could get much cheaper, less comfortable buses.
Luckily we were able to make up our major overspend by volunteering at a mountain lodge, where we got free food and accommodation for nearly three weeks.We got stuck in Huaraz for two days because of protesters blocking the roads. We ended up paying a lot to hire a minibus with other travellers to take us an alternative route to Lima. We missed our first flight to Colombia and had to pay to change it (see extra expenses).Although we ended up almost on budget with our daily expenses, if you include our extra expenses of visiting Machu Picchu, replacing the Macbook´s hard drive and buying flights to Colombia, our daily budget goes up to £51 ($79) a day for two people. See breakdown of extra expenses below.

Extra Expenses

We keep a separate budget for big expenses like tours and flights. We spent a lot of this in the last three months as we took advantage of tours in Bolivia, visited expensive Machu Picchu and bought internal flights in Bolivia, and from Peru to Colombia.

These costs are for two people.

Income

Notes

Our target income for the first year of Simon’s Line In web design and development business is £1000 a month, which was exceeded in the last three months. Jobs have included complete website design and builds; converting designs to WordPress and creating custom WordPress plugins and features (an advanced hotel booking system that integrates a calendar with Paypal).
Blogging income is from advertising on Kerala India Travel and affiliate commissions on Never Ending Voyage from promoting the Language Hacking Guide. We are not actively trying to monetise either of those sites at the moment, but take advantage of a few opportunities when they come along.

All in all we are happy with the state of our finances at the moment, especially considering we haven’t tried that hard to keep to our budget. We originally saved enough to live off for a year while we built up the business, and nine months after leaving the UK we only have £2000 less in our bank accounts than when we started. The Line In business is constantly growing and we are set to continue our travels beyond February 2011 (our one year annniversary) and hopefully afford our expensive summer plans.

Note on the tables: Simon created a WordPress plugin that calculates your average daily expenses and displays them in a table in multiple currencies (see top two tables above). He’ll be releasing it early next year so stay tuned.