Retirement Travel on $50k, $100k, and $200k — How Far Can Your Wealth Take You?

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If you’re planning for retirement, and you know that you’ll want to travel, it’s time to think about how much you’ll need to invest.

Obviously, you’ll want to save for the basic retirement necessities, like your cost of living. But you also want to travel when you retire, perhaps more than you travel now. 

So, the question you’re asking now is just how much you need to have ready. Or, the inverse of that question, how far can your wealth take you at different levels? 

Let’s talk about it. 

Plan Your Travel 

Once you have set up your investments for your general retirement account, plan your travel. 

Do you want to travel once a month for a week at a time? Do you want to travel for a month or two at a time and then come home for the rest of the year? 

Perhaps you’d like to travel across the United States in an RV. Perhaps you want to backpack across Europe or South America, or both, in your golden years. 

Whatever the case, sit down with your travel plans and figure out how much you think it will cost you every year. 

Then, calculate how many years you plan to travel in your retirement. If you retire at 65, you can probably get a good 10 years of travel before your body may call you to slow down a bit. Especially if you’re in good health and you’re a female. Thirty-four percent of American women live to be 90, after all. Why not make the most of those years? 

For example, if you plan to spend $10,000 per year on travel, you’ll need $200,000 to travel for 20 years. 

One person spends, on average, $1,991 to travel within the United States for a week. International travel raises that average to $2,300. Of course, various luxuries and cost-cutting can alter those numbers greatly. 

Earmark an Account

Now, once you have your figure in your head, earmark a separate IRA for travel during retirement. That way, you’ll know you’re working toward that goal, and it’s not affecting your general retirement account. 

Most advisers will tell you to invest that money in a Roth IRA, but be sure to talk to your financial advisor for your specific needs. 

Now, let’s look at what you can do with your travel money. 

$50,000

If you retire with $50,000 in a retirement fund, you have a few options. 

At about $2,000 per week, you can choose to spend a few weeks traveling across the United States each year. If you break it up and visit different states, you can probably see all 50 states within five years.

Three trips per year will cost you $6,000 total, which means you’ll have around 8.33 years of travel. You can visit a few different states at a time. Choose your locations wisely, travel in the most cost-efficient way possible, and consider camping or choosing locations that allow you to rent a room in a shared house, and you can save a ton. 

At this price point, you can also decide to use your travel funds to visit somewhere you’ve never been to in the States and get a little part-time job to support your extra expenses while you’re there. 

For example, if you wanted to visit Louisiana, you could get a job in New Orleans as a cashier in a local shop and travel across the south on both your retirement money and your extra income. 

Most big cities across the United States have unskilled, low-paying part-time jobs that could be fun for you to take on. They offer an opportunity to get to know a place better. 

$100,000

With $100,000, you can mix your travel and extend it out for much longer. 

You could choose to travel domestically a couple of times a year, at $2,000 each trip, and take one big international trip each year, for closer to $5,000 if you want to stay two weeks. It only makes sense to stay a bit longer if you’re going to take such a big trip. 

At $10,000 per year, you can travel well for the next 10 years. Shorten your international trip and cut out one domestic trip each year, and you can extend that to 15 years of travel. 

It’s also an option at that price point to decide to travel farther and stay longer. 

For example, you can travel to Thailand or Bulgaria, where the cost of living is low. There, you can rent an apartment for cheap, buy food at a local grocery store, eat in, and wander the streets of local spots, beaches, and even surrounding countries. This will cost you as little as $500 per month. Even factoring in a plane ticket for $1,000, your money will take you much further this way than trying to travel short-term in the U.S. or traveling in luxury. That’s $2,000 for two weeks in Thailand. 

$200,000

With $200,000 or more, you have many more options, but you also have more thinking to do. 

For example, yes, you could travel in luxury, staying in fancy hotels in Europe and enjoying the finest restaurants. But that will only last you so long. 

A single luxury trip to Europe for two can cost you upwards of $15,000 for a month, at $500 per day. 

If your goal is to just take one month-week trip to Europe per year for the next 10-15 years, you’re set. 

But you could use that money to travel more widely, have more experiences, and enjoy more, if you’re willing to think outside the box. 

For example, stay longer and rent for the long term. You already have your cost of living covered by your general retirement fund, so you can rest assured that your home fires will keep burning. 

In the meantime, you could rent a country cottage in France, Ireland, or Italy, way outside of the big cities, and spend a quarter of what you’d spend in cities like Paris or Rome. You could rent a bicycle to get around, and make your food at home. Take day trips using affordable trains and see the entire country in a couple of months. 

You could make it your goal to explore one or two countries per year this way, and be a true world traveler over the next ten or twenty years. 

The average cost of a month-long rental in France can be as low as 700 euros, in Ireland as low as 1,000 euros, and in Italy somewhere in between the two. Add monthly bills, and you can live in a Western developed European country for one month for around $2,000 if you’re outside the big cities, living modestly. 

You could do that six times a year for the next 15 years and still come in under your $200,000.

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