Our February international travel FIRE budget includes the cost for time spent between Chiang Mai Thailand and Colombo Sri Lanka. More of the days were spent in Thailand, but the costs were pretty similar between the two locations.

However, these two locations could not have been more different outside of the cost. Thailand blew us away in nearly every way, and we would be content living there permanently. Sri Lanka on the other hand was a real struggle for us. Colombo reminded us of Manila in certain ways, and the stay seemed to stretch into eternity. I’ll expand on the locations in future posts with my full reflections of each place.

That aside, this post is about the numbers, and I’ll detail our full spending for the month. The spending was very high, but mainly due to flights that were purchased during the month in advance of upcoming stays. When I break down the expat cost of living for Thailand and Sri Lanka, it will highlight the affordability of these locations for long term residence.

Income

If you’ve read prior posts in this budget series, you’ll know that the income doesn’t fluctuate much from month to month. Here is the income we are working with for February.

Expenses

Without much preamble, here are our expenses for February. Descriptions, clarifications, and extra details have been provided where necessary.

Total Expenses:  $10,404.26  Withdrawal Rate: 7.2%

Analysis

The 7.2% withdrawal rate at first glance would be concerning, but when you dig deeper it’s a little less so. When you plan on paper at the beginning of the year, it’s easy to put each location into a neat one or two month boundary, directly on full calendar months. While actually traveling, the budget isn’t nearly as simple as it is on paper.

Flight Costs

We purchase flights whenever it makes sense, usually well ahead of the month of the corresponding stay. It eventually all evens out, with some months get spiked higher in cost, and others dropping substantially when no flights are purchased. For February, we bought two expensive flights in this month. They both involve South Africa, with one to South Africa and one leaving to Portugal. We could have pushed one to the March budget, and the other to the April budget, but we absorbed both in this month.

Food Costs

This is an interesting category because it held some surprises. Grocery store food in Thailand was only $7.50/meal, which means a full month of eating all meals at home would cost about $675. In Sri Lanka that figure was $13.33/meal or $1,199.70 per month. The Sri Lanka figure shouldn’t be taken too seriously as we didn’t stay here long enough to spread out the initial new place surge in grocery prices.

The “food not at home” category as we call it, which is any food not from a grocery store (e.g. restaurants), was surprisingly affordable across both locations. The math says the average meal in this category was $10.24, and that aligns closely with our typical order in both spots. We could buy zero groceries, eat no meals at home, and still eat for only $921.60. That amount is a bargain when you consider we ate out at every meal in Japan and it came to the still reasonable amount $1,991.41. Japan is very affordable when it comes to restaurants and convenience stores, but Thailand and Sri Lanka are less than half the cost.

Discretionary

When you subtract out “food not at home” from discretionary, we only spent $337.85. We had a lot of fun for that small amount of money. It included streaming services to see the super bowl, the olympics, Stranger Things on Netflix, etc. It also included two guided tours, self guided exploration, and some alcohol.

Withdrawal Rate Mitigation

Even with this 7.2% withdrawal rate, we are projected to come in at around 4.22% for the entire year. We wanted to hit 4% but we aren’t quite going to do that. A lot of that is due to us waiting too long to book Europe and those costs rising. A 4.22% rate is hardly catastrophic, and is sustainable in most historical scenarios.

We are doing some mitigation though to pull our withdrawal closer to 4%. This includes paying for the flight to Portugal and “food not at home” for February out of our special side discretionary fund, which is separate from our investments. Over the long haul if we were slow traveling permanently, that discretionary fund wouldn’t exist forever. We would have to reign in our spending a bit, but I have no doubt we could do that.