How much should you actually be saving each week for your Big Lap?
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3 September 2026 Inside this newsletter👉
Whohoo! It's spring! Time to dust off the hats and find the suncream... soon... hopefully! :) We've now done 2 short trips in our new van and each time, we've added to the list of things to take next time... We'll be heading away again this weekend, and no doubt the list will keep getting longer. This is all in preparation for a many month trip early next year. Which brings me to: The question we get asked most is how we actually afford the longer style trips. Every time, it comes back to the same thing: finance is the part that stumps people, right up until you break it down into a single weekly number you can actually save towards. Start with your departure dateEverything starts with knowing your departure date. Most people take about a year to plan, so pick a date and use it to count down. That countdown is what tells you how many weeks you've actually got left to save, and it's the first thing our spreadsheet asks for. Try our free departure date calculator here to see if it can help you work out your date.
What's a realistic number?A commonly quoted ballpark is around $1,500 a week, which works for most families as a starting point. For us, it's closer to $700 a week, and we'll say upfront that's unusually low, it's just the lifestyle we live. We know plenty of families who budget $3,000 to $4,000 a week too. There's no single right answer, which is exactly why working out your own figure, category by category (food, fuel, caravan parks), matters more than borrowing someone else's. If you want the simple way to work out your budget, find out more about our Budget Calculator here. ​ To see the budget calculator in action, check out this video that I made:
Turn it into a weekly target you can actually tick offOnce you've got a total trip budget, divide it by the weeks you've got left before you leave and that's your number. In the video we run through a worked example, an illustrative departure date and category inputs that land on a total of $51,120 and a weekly savings target of $896, purely to show how the maths works, not our own real figure. The part we like best is what happens after that: you tick a box each week as you save it, and watch the total count down. It's tangible. If your own number looks unmanageable once you see it, that's worth knowing now, not after you've committed to a date. Have a lovely day PS if you want to work out your own real weekly number, our Big Lap budget calculator is here: Big Lap Budget Calculator​ |
