$7,000 cash the total amount that we spent for the trip was were the Crawfords we have six kids in 2018 we set out to do the Appalachian Trail but a 2,200 mile hike from Georgia to Maine it was hard for 14 states and 161 days later we finished it together stripe tank tops mm-hmm I am like dreading making this video because calculating and keeping track of massive amounts of data is not my strong suit and I'm worried to death that I'm gonna like miss something it's not gonna be accurate we're gonna do the best we can so we're gonna be talking about how much money we spent on our entire journey doing the Appalachian Trail together as a family of eight we start on March first and went to August 9th so it was a hundred and sixty-one days which is five plus months 23 weeks now for this trail most people like say to budget around $5,000 a person this is what the REI website says it's like $5,000 a person for this entire trip so for us not really knowing like what we're gonna get into and we thought we're a larger family so this is gonna take us longer and probably cost us more we budgeted around fifty fifty thousand dollars emotionally or mentally before the trip getting started we had more than that but that was like okay I feel fine if I expand which still actually sounded like a lot of money when you just like look at it hey like a $2,000 but that's how much we were prepared to spend so I want to share with you guys first of all how I calculated our expenses at first I set off to like try and keep track of every expense and you can see that it lasted 12 days and then I was like okay that's not happening because when you're hiking the last thing you can think about is where to put Pete little tiny pieces of paper with numbers on them so what I ended up doing was I printed up every single one of our credit card statements and I also kept track of the amount of cash that we went with and I just did all the math afterwards so that's how I came with this number so without further ado let's tell you how much we spent well the amount that we put on credit cards was eighteen thousand and forty dollars and the amount that we spent on cash was seven thousand dollars we took six thousand dollars with us originally and we got another thousand dollars and we spent all of it so total for the trip the amount that we spent what was I just talking about seven thousand dollars cash the total amount that we spent for the trip was twenty five thousand and forty dollars which if you're comfortable with this we're just gonna round it to twenty five thousand something up really see they're cheating I knew it this whole time so let's talk about what is included in this twenty five thousand dollars this includes food hotels and lodging which is one of the big biggest expenses and we had forty nights where we stayed in hotels or hostels or cabins that we pay for this cover is gas we took trips off the trail and things like that this covers shuttles a side trip to Washington DC that we did for the day donations that we gave to people and hostels who helped us out national park fees the Smokies was like a hundred sixty bucks just for I'm going to go in to movies that we saw in theaters we paid money to go to walk through a blizzard that was a terrible deal to movies that we saw in theaters which was one of the worst expenses of our entire trip watching Avengers something rather and then Incredibles - I don't want to talk about it the kids liked Avengers lobster even the next day after we finished the trial a lobster lunch that was fairly expensive as 130 bucks allowances for our kids which we give our kids one dollar a year a week so our 15 year old makes $15 a week and that total to be about fourteen hundred dollars which is a fairly large expense and that's the money that basically goes straight to candy seems like at least on the trail as you K them on how I spend their money but while we're talking about some of these expenses I want to talk about a few of the efficiencies that we experienced as a large family probably the biggest one was hotels so a lot of people stay in hotels well on the trail or hostels and things and when you stay in a hotel room a lot of times it's one or two people well our family we had to get two hotel rooms really every time there was one night we couldn't because they only had one available and that was great and we're guaranteed four people per room on each of these nights which is actually really efficient and I think we experienced a lot of these things where we just had a lot of meals that didn't go to waste we were very efficient just just by the nature of having a large family so while it did seem really expensive in a way like compared to eight people hiking it individually I think was cheaper also included in this $25,000 number is it quite a bit of equipment that we had to buy which some people I think would have included that in their starting amount and not included that in the cost of the actual trip but we spent four hundred and ten dollars on a quilt for the three youngest kids that was just warmer and more less weight we spent three hundred and eighty four dollars on two new backpack well we spent a total of I think $700 on trekking poles which means that's about $1,400 went to equipment which one we get to reuse so I don't know maybe that's all there is to say whoa so for this $25,000 let's talk about what was not included we did not include the cost of our airfare to leave the trip that was nineteen hundred and ten dollars we flew from Portland Maine to Seattle which we did include the $300 shuttle price in the figure we gave you but not the airfare because I feel like that's kind of an optional post trip thing saved a few bucks I didn't include $459 which went towards our Marathon registration for the marathon that we ran in the middle of our trip I didn't include 580 bucks that we spent on your iPhone because I'm a little wet in the rain and that that was a iPhone is kind of going out anyways and 120 bucks they spent on a 360 degree camera because just because I was like purely superfluous vlogging equipment and I also didn't include the money we spent on cigars for two reasons one is almost all the cigars we already had and we brought with this second of all a lot of cigars were given to us on the trail and I've been meaning to make a separate video about this but I'm just gonna pound out the question now because I imagine there's a lot of the especially the homeschooling moms out there who are planning trips like this and they're asking this question Ben and kami if we go on a thru-hike how many cigars we bring can we count on cigars being provided by trail magic and I would say no you can't count on it I mean we got really lucky by having people who have seen our videos and provide us really some amazing cigars I want to point out omelet man hooked us up big-time with that was more quantity than quality we also had some Cubans shipped to our house that our parents were able to bring so we were to celebrate our quality and quantity but you shouldn't count on cigars being provided for you trail so you should pack them and also you're not allowed to ship them to yourself via USPS which we I'm not going to say anything more about that finally and Kami's just point us out to me now that one more figure we didn't include is the boxes that we shipped to ourselves that was probably about a hundred dollars worth of food maybe two hundred dollars but we bought that ahead of time and I wouldn't really do it again so don't worry about that the second big section we're going to talk about is income that we made well on the trip that was actually related to our trip so we had other income coming in from different businesses and property and just investments and things like that but I went and I calculated things from income related to our trip and I want to share that because I think that's really important we rented our house out while we are gone which was one of the best moves that we made and like after expenses we made about ten thousand dollars from Airbnb from our house so the expenses are every utility we're talking like internet and you know gas and water and all that kind of stuff and that even includes two thousand dollars worth of improvements we made on the house which now we have to benefit from that includes paying out my sister who managed the property and house cleaners and everything so that's just ten thousand dollars for the profit for leaving our house that would have just been vacant so I think that that was actually really cool and surprising it's basically two thousand dollars a month I just remember the last like week before we were leaving and we're trying to pack our separate trail and we're trying to flip our house over to get it ready for renters and putting all our stuff in the basement our personal effects I just it was just like so hard to think is this worth it ten thousand dollars I think was worth it second of all we had nine one hundred ninety three dollars that people donated to us on patreon just from the link below in our videos and an additional eleven hundred and nine dollars from people on PayPal that were just donations from people that watched our videos that was really cool now a few things I want to talk about regards to income we don't make any other money from our videos well this is a conscious decision we've made not to get ad revenue which means that when you watch our videos there's no little advertisements on YouTube or at least there shouldn't be which is just a kind of a personal decision we made and we're very happy with so that means we don't have to think about money when we're actually making the content we just make whatever we think is the best or truest stuff so we want to pause right now and just say thank you to all of those people that contributed money to our journey through patreon through PayPal that was a financial contribution but it was also like a real emotional contribution just to know that some people had our backs out there and that was really nice and what we were doing was worth it to them a few notes I also want to add about this income is that we have worked very very hard to eliminate debt and eliminate unnecessary expenses from our regular life and I think that's one of the reasons why we were able to do this trip to begin with so we have no debt at home and that's consumer debt on credit cards we paid them off every month and we also have no mortgage so I want to give a quick shout out to no debt because you know when people look at our life and they're like how can they do that they must be rich we've had different times we've had different amounts of income coming in but the biggest thing that has changed our lifestyle given us the ability and freedom to make trips like this has been actually not having yeah also we have like fairly low expenses very few reoccurring things we have Karnes we have a cable bill that was paid for by the rentals we don't even have health insurance and I know that's kind of a shocking thing to some people but we've just decided that we'd rather spend our money in there sure ways that have a return on our family than other things that we haven't seen give us a return for what our values are so if you were to break this all down and if you were to take $25,000 which is how much we've spent and subtract around $12,000 it was actually twelve thousand one hundred two we're just going to round it to twelve then what you would come up with is the number twelve thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight dollars which is how much came out of our pocket for this trip we're just gonna round that to thirteen thousand dollars so if you divide that by a hundred and sixty one days it costs our family $80 a day to do the entire Appalachian Trail which means that's ten dollars a person part of the reason why I think this number is so low is we experienced an incredible amount of generosity while on a trip a couple main things were ultra running company provided shoes for our family for the entire final two thirds of the trip so we went through 7 times 3 21 pairs of shoes for those of us that walked that's not including creamier shoes which he lost quite often and they paid for 14 of those pairs of shoes which is about $2,000 worth of shoes and another huge huge huge help that we had was people that provided meals for us people brought us meals they pay for meals they invite us to their home and fed us a meal and I tried to go through and calculate how many meals were provided for us which is a very difficult thing to do yeah and I calculated about 97 meals were provided for us so I trying to figure out how much was that worth to us just from a financial perspective and it's kind of tricky because when we're eating out in the woods we could get a meal for about 12 dollars I mean it's really eight boxes of macaroni and cheese you know it can be $12 but when we came to a town or a restaurant we'd spend about $150 a meal but we need a lot more it was a lot better for us in a way just because of we were able to consume our calories so I think most of the meals that were provided for us were closer to a restaurant than they were the mac and cheese so if you value them at about fifty dollars a meal that's four thousand eight hundred fifty dollars worth of meals we're just given to us from people so either way you look at it we spent $25,000 on this trip or $13,000 after we take into account the income I just want to talk about some observations that we have when we see this number or some things that we feel because that seems like a large amount of money I guess in one perspective and then in one perspective it seems like nothing yeah to be able to do this incredible adventure kind of a vacation for five plus months for our whole family for $13,000 I mean if we were at home I don't even know the it'd be fascinating to crunch the numbers being at home for five months because I'm pretty certain that it would be way higher than that $13,000 and I have the feeling that a lot of families don't mind spending ourselves included like let's say five or ten thousand dollars on a dream vacation to go to either Disneyland or the Bahamas or make a week or two weeks yeah that's a week but this was 23 weeks you know it's almost six months of solid time together in fact today commemorates six months that we've been we haven't been home you know we left our homes six months ago today and I feel like you know when we look at that type of number a lot of times we don't mind spending that type of money $13,000 on a car or you know if it's a business expense that it for work it's like no big deal we don't mind making invest for things that we believe will have a positive change on a business but for family it's hard to imagine spending $13,000 on something this like epic or large but the bottom line is for us it was totally worth it and I'm even talking for the 25 thousand if you don't even take into account the income so if you're trying to plan a trip like this and you're thinking man you know twenty five thousand dollars and I'm just thinking let's say a family makes sixty thousand dollars a year you know which which we've made at times in our marriage you know that would be about half a year's worth of income you'd have to save up for a while or even the twelve thousand dollars it's really you know one-fifth of a year's worth it doesn't feel like a lot to me for how much we got you know so many people in the comments said about our experience your kids are gonna remember this forever and I I believe that it's not why we did it it's just to create memories but I can't think of a better way to spend twelve thousand dollars or twenty five thousand dollars for our family to get what we want I just can't you know if you believe in challenges as a family and kind of getting out of your element just what we did for five plus months I mean you can do that in a smaller way like take a two-week backpacking trip one-week backpacking trip but you're gonna have to like believe in it enough to put down some money for it but it is interesting in our culture that it seems like more people believe in Disneyland and I understand that I was there too but in Bahamas and these types of trips that are just like entertainment-based versus doing something adventurous and hard but rewarding for you with your families and I think it's cheaper to do adventure over entertainment like 80 dollars a day our family couldn't afford to go see a movie in a theatre for that yeah so for 80 dollars a day that includes all of our lodging food entertainment if you call walkie and entertainment health care or like you know being healthy and getting exercise like we didn't need a health club membership in this time mm-hmm even like education I feel like was taken care of a lot gravy dollars a day that's nothing and you might have to invest you know at the beginning and because if you don't have a lot of backpacking equipment if you're gonna have to like invest some in that for those of you that are considering to do this trail you know one thing that our numbers reflect the 12,000 13,000 that we end up spending I feel like we lived a pretty extravagant life for the Appalachian Trail we didn't say no to anything because we couldn't afford it the fact the matter is there's just not a lot of ways to spend money out there you know when you come into a town you can only spend so much on hotel you can only spend so much on food whatever you can eat really and we did that we bought whatever we could eat or entertainment I suppose and you can't buy stuff because you have to carry it so there's only so much you can buy and carry so we said you know we spent a ton of money on really almost anything we wanted I know we're talking ice cream and pop and desserts and food we had you know a couple nights or we had to pay I pick five hundred bucks for hotels buffets if you're trying to just like budget your Appalachian Trail think about it like I feel like we kind of lived it up and I was really glad that we did that I was glad we were able to do that now we still said no to things because we thought they were like a bad deal or like the efficiency or budgeting is not budging inside of me but the I don't know I just like I hate getting like ripped off or like I'm necessarily spending money yeah but we also spent $23 at a vending machine I remember and just like weird things the final thing I'll say is that if you are planning your Appalachian Trail adventure and you trying to set how much the budget I think this is one of the rare cases where more money is actually better I'm not a huge proponent of saying you know you need more money to have fun like you know I think you can do awesome things on a shoestring budget but what we found is that having more money it gave us a lot more options we saw some other groups of people where a couple of the people in that group had more money and a couple had less and because of that they were like saying oh we can't even stay together as a group because the people want to stay at hotel but the other people couldn't afford it and I thought that was kind of a fortunate for us we knew that we could always stay in a hotel sometimes we decided not to or go into town because like shuttles are just really expensive sometimes but in the back of our minds we always knew we could so I would say I don't know maybe $5,000 is just way enough but if you have the choice of taking extra money on the Appalachian Trail and you're gonna do it I think it's great to have that type of flexibility all right well we're still in Yakima we're gonna be leaving in a couple days I hope this video is helpful for some of you and we talked about finances around here because we think it's an important part of the equation we want you guys to help understand like not just the fun sexy part of the videos resize have it fun climb mountains but there's a behind the scenes where they seems to cost money so I hope that was helpful and it's Friday so we're gonna be resting tomorrow before we leave back to drive home mm-hmm so we hope you guys are able to find rest from work and also from a lot of times having to think and making more of it spending less of it that's a lot of work - one of the biggest things we've had to find rest from so we will see you guys in the next video [Music]
