How Much Does It Cost to Spend a Month in Northern Slovenia?
How much does it cost to travel the world full-time?
What about to live as an expat?
How does cost of living in Europe compare to the USA?
These are questions I hear a lot. And the answers are never what people seem to be expecting.
Because the truth is that travel doesn’t have to be expensive. And my life in Europe costs less than my life in the States did.
To demonstrate that yet again, here’s another monthly budget for my nomadic life, this time for a month in Northern Slovenia’s gorgeous Alps based in a comfortable two-bedroom house overlooking Lake Jasna.
Without further ado, then…
| Category | Dollars | Euros |
| Accommodations | $684 | 582.15 |
| Transportation (national/international) | $20.31 | 17.29 |
| Transportation (local) | $8.23 | 7.00 |
| Groceries | $280.96 | 239.13 |
| Supplies | $5.19 | 4.42 |
| Eating/drinking out | $78.06 | 66.44 |
| Entertainment & activities | $5.94 | 5.06 |
| Luna (vet bills, supplies) | $59.81 | 50.90 |
| Health & wellness | $190.07 | 161.77 |
| Other | $53.08 | 45.18 |
| Totals | $1385.65 | 1179.34 |
Budget notes:
Don’t forget that I’m working while I’m traveling, which means someone spending all their time exploring, taking day trips, and eating out is likely to spend more.
Also important to note is that I fall somewhere in between the extreme budget travelers and the luxury crowd. I don’t stay in hotels (usually) and I don’t couchsurf. This means that while you can easily spend more than I do, you can also easily spend a lot less by always eating in, couchsurfing or staying in dorms or at campgrounds. Consider this budget very middle-of-the-road.
Also, these days, I’m traveling with my partner. The above expenses are my spending and do not include his expenses. We split the rent 50-50 and lunch and dinner groceries 60-40 (while purchasing our own breakfast stuff and sometimes our own snack stuff separately). Luna is my responsibility, so these are her full bills and our health insurance and healthcare costs are totally separate as well.
As usual, for accommodation, Chad and I turned to Airbnb. Our place was a gorgeous house overlooking Lake Jasna and the owner was kind enough to give a hefty discount in exchange for a review on the blog. For budget travelers who also want to stay in Jasna, there was a hostel just two doors down from us.
Hiking the nearby mountains: free.
Our national/international transport costs were a series of buses and taxi rides from Ljubljana to our spot on Lake Jasna, and our local transport costs were buses to and from Jesenice, where we cycled to the Vintgar Gorge.
Our grocery bill represents almost all our meals in September, as we only ate out a few times. Luna’s vet bills are getting higher on a monthly basis because of her pancreas medication. And health and wellness costs include prescription refills, as well as my usual monthly health insurance bill.
As a final note: the above budget is our day-to-day living and exploring costs and does not include my business expenses and certain personal expenses like books, movie rentals, and replacing water bottles and clothes. I figure those things are too personal and variable to be helpful if you’re using these budgets to figure out your own trip costs, so I generally pull them out. So think of this as a baseline budget for standard costs.
Want to see more nomad budgets? Check out this extensive post with links to all my published budgets from the last five years.
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