How we’re saving for eight months of hiking
Two-week hiking trips always left us wanting more. We’re making room for the long-distance trails we’ve been dreaming about—and sharing how we built the budget and are saving for it.
£27,000 rounded travel-budget target · home costs planned separately
Why eight months—and why 2027?
We have always wanted to spend longer on long-distance trails. Our two-week hiking trips have been brilliant, but they have also left us wanting more time on foot.
We can take eight months off work. 2027 is the earliest we could get the funds together to make that time away work financially.
A travel target, with home costs kept separate
Our current planned travel budget is about £27,000, rounded to the nearest £1,000. It is the target for the trip itself, not the whole cost of being away.
We’ll keep paying our usual home-running costs during the eight months, so we plan for those separately rather than hiding them inside the travel figure.
How we built the travel budget
We split the trip into chapters and built up the costs mostly item by item, including transport, food, accommodation, and spending on and off the trails.
For prices we hadn’t booked yet, we looked up comparable costs at a similar time of year in a different year and tried to account for inflation.
Once we had the numbers together, we went through the detailed plan with Copilot and Gemini and compared their suggested budgets with ours. We used them as a sense-check and didn’t change our estimates as a result.
We didn’t add a fixed-percentage contingency to the travel budget because we didn’t want to pick a figure at random. Instead, we’re currently on track to save more than our target, with that extra intended as a buffer for unexpected costs.
The saving habits that work for us
After bills and our normal food budget, we move any money left straight into savings. Getting it out of our spending account helps us avoid slowly spending it instead.
We’re fairly frugal day to day: we don’t drink or get takeaways, and we keep a close eye on subscriptions.
When 2027 first started to look possible, we tried saving very aggressively to see how we would find it. We’re now getting ahead of where we need to be.
What we’d suggest if you’re planning time away
Start by separating the cost of the trip from the costs that keep running at home. Then decide what you need for bills and everyday essentials, and move the remaining money into savings before it disappears into day-to-day spending.
If your timeline allows, try a more ambitious saving pace early on and see how it feels. It helped us learn what was possible before we committed to the plan.
The travel target is a rounded planning figure, not a final trip cost. We’ll update the story as the plan—and the savings—change.