How did we fund a Ride The World trip?

How did we save up for a planned 4 to 6 years World Tour?
I know you're a little curious about how we funded our trip, and some of you might be planning your own. So we'll let you in on our secret. Our trip is fully self-funded through good old fashioned hard work and a little financial planning. 10 years ago in 2009, I started out as a secondary school English teacher and Debbie worked in the IT sector as an accounts manager. To increase income, we gave English tuition on the side before we finally both became self-employed English tutors.

For the past 10 years, Debbie and I worked 7 to 12 hours daily, travelling around Singapore on our motorcycles to students' homes. We were paid by the tuition hours. During slight lulls in November and December, we had a couple off days for the year as students graduated or went on holidays. We used those days to learn bike maintenance at a friend's motorcycle repair shop to save on bike maintenance costs for the trip. We also made cross border day trips to Malaysia to shop for half a years' worth of supplies to save money. A typical evening or night's off during a regular week was dinner at the food court and seldom a restaurant meal. We planned our lives around our work to maximise savings.

Home was a public housing 4 room (3 bedroom) HDB flat with HDB loan bought 6 years before trip departure and we rented out the 2 common bedrooms in the last 4 years for SGD $500 each, sacrificing privacy for rental income and generating SGD $1000 monthly (USD $730). A partition wall separated the hall, providing a little privacy from the tenants but restricting space.


Chinese New Year gathering in 2019

On 15 Feb 2019, we engaged contractors to knock down the partition wall and prepared to rent out our entire home. We will be renting a room for ourselves somewhere else for the last 7 months or so in Singapore. Living with strangers and sometimes being accommodating with communal living raised more than SGD $50k over the years. The home rental will help fund part of our trip along the way.

Our wedding solemnization in October 2013 was at the Singapore Flyer with 23 family members and close friends, followed by a simple wedding lunch. We did not host a banquet dinner like most Chinese do to cut costs. There was 1 rented wedding gown and suit and a studio photoshoot.

Our home was simply furnished with IKEA furniture and the cheapest electrical appliances we could find, including display sets. There were neither interior designers, nor any custom built furniture except the kitchen. Besides her piano and our possessions, Debbie eventually sold her wedding ring in December 2018, since it would either attract attention on the trip, become prone to theft in the hotel room or be left behind in Singapore in someone else's cupboard for years.

We rode our Yamaha 2004 FZ6-S motorcycles for 11 years, bought second hand. We did not change new motorcycles, and we did not go on holidays in the last 6 years after our honeymoon trip, except for the odd motorcycle trip to Malaysia or two. Not going for holidays was only partially about saving money. The truth was that we were target-fixated on the big trip and did not think we would enjoy a holiday anyway, since any holiday was "not the big trip" and eats into funds we were saving for the trip we wanted to make.

There are different ways to fund a trip. Some travellers sell their homes and all their possessions, returning home when funds run out and they start from scratch again. Others work along the way while travelling, and yet others fund their trip with other passive income sources like pensions or investments. For the average Singaporean household with a HDB flat or a car, or both, or the hardworking Joe moonlighting a 2nd job on the weekends, the financial challenge of raising enough funds for a world tour is not insurmountable. Given enough years, most people in developed countries can raise enough because of currency strength and job or business opportunities. Many people have travelled the world on USD $10k to 15k per year per person and upwards, inclusive of air or sea freight of motorcycles and air tickets. Round the world trips have lasted anywhere from a year or two to 15 to 20 years or more. There is a budget and duration for everyone depending on comfort level.
The biggest obstacles to planning for and going for a big trip are not always financial. It's the attachment to family members left behind, having elderly parents to care for, health reasons, life choices like children to take care of and worry about restarting their jobs, career or business after trip completion that hold many back from going on a multi-year trip. Not everyone is interested in a trip that lasts for years, just as we are not interested in climbing Everest because we're not climbers. For those who are interested in travel stories or yearn for the open roads, we'll update this blog to share our travel stories along the way. If raising money is the last obstacle in your preparation for a big trip, I hope you might find a useful tip or two in this update. As one world traveller RTWPaul said, "If it's in you, you'll find a way".
RTWPaul's trip costs