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The problem with touring Europe on $40/day is a fairly typical contract software developer might pay $1800/month or $60/day for family health insurance. The po
by VLM 10y ago
The problem with touring Europe on $40/day is a fairly typical contract software developer might pay $1800/month or $60/day for family health insurance.
The point being that if you're wealthy enough to have a roof over your head and food and medical care, which a significant fraction of the American population doesn't have, then trying to nickel and dime it when traveling doesn't make any sense as an over-hyper-optimization.
I'm in good financial shape so most Americans can't replicate this but I went to Ireland a couple years ago for a week, it was all the time I could get off work, I dropped oh at least a couple grand. From memory the plane tickets were like $700, so that's a hundred bucks a day even if all we did was panhandle at $0 per day. If I have to work 51 weeks a year, when am I going to spend the money on that prevents me from dropping $500/day instead having to spend $5?
- notahacker 10y agoSure, but the whole point of "Europe on Five Dollars a Day" and "Southeast Asia on a Shoestring" and their ilk was opening up the idea of leisure travel to people who aren't working 51 weeks a year on contract programmers' salaries and feeding their families, and might instead have a few months off after their studies or in between low paid jobs.