Oh the things you think you’ll need and never end up using… and those things it never occurred to you to bring that could have been game changers. You know what they say about hindsight, well here’s ours. (more…)
Van Build
Trip Budget
Trip Budget
I don’t have a ton of details about where our money went while we were traveling. We didn’t feel like tracking it and keeping that many notes. We just spent it till it was gone and then came home! But we did track the total trip cost as well as the costs for the build out of the van (more on those below). Factoring in gas/diesel will certainly be a big budgeting/planning piece for those looking to drive the Pan Am. We’ve included a link to a gas calculator on our site that gives current pump prices anywhere in the world. A pretty healthy chunk of your trip fund is going into that tank. Keep in mind the effect a more fuel efficient vehicle will have on your fund. Also, diesel is cheaper than regular gasoline just about everywhere in world besides the US. We didn’t know this when we planned our trip.
The budget is tough to nail down in advance. We largely were just going off a very loose, educated guess. Depending on what you drive, what kind of excursions you do, how much you stealth camp, where you eat, etc, etc, your trip fund could differ tens of thousands of dollars in either direction. We certainly weren’t traveling as cheaply as possible but we definitely were careful about how we spent our hard earned cash. (more…)
Build Costs
The following is a complete breakdown of the materials and cost for building out the van from scratch. The first table is an overview. Any item in bold in the first table has a more detailed table below covering individual items and associated costs. We spent a total of $7,354 purchasing the van and outfitting it entirely. These numbers do not include any mechanical repairs that were done to the van prior to leaving. We spent close to 5k more replacing the head gasket and having the transmission rebuilt among other things bringing the grand total of the van to approximately 12k.
