How to plan for a year abroad with kids.

We’ve been back in Australia for 3 months now and the most common reaction we’ve been met with is:

“I wish we could do something like that and just go.” I found that no matter the positive response I gave, they would usually follow with all the reasons why they couldn’t do it. Things like money, jobs, mortgage, bills, kids, school, activities. These are all very important factors to consider of course, but I think most people just put it into the “too hard” basket without any further thought.

After the past few years of the covid pandemic combined with the massive price increases on pretty much everything, I can’t think of a better time to re-address that “too hard” basket. It might just be exactly what you need.

Why?

The first thing to do is decide why you want to do it… for us it was a mixture of a few things, but the main reason was not having seen half of our family for almost 4 years. It might be something not quite as drastic, like wanting to re-connect with your family, wanting to see more of the world or just wanting to make more memories. No matter what it is – It’s still a reason.

How?

So you’ve established the why and now for the how..

Some people may have been planning their year abroad for a long time and might even have a special “TRAVEL” savings account which is great, but the truth is you can do it without the extra planning or savings. We started talking about the idea in July and flew out the end of December so it can be done.

Do you need to have travelled before?

My husband and I are very lucky to have done so much travelling even prior to having kids, but regardless of how much travelling experience you have, planning for a year abroad with kids requires organisation, patience (things can go wrong) and most importantly that both parents are on the same page about the whole trip.

How do we pay for it without a “TRAVEL” savings account?

In the early stages of our planning, I read a number of articles suggesting we fund our trip by selling all of our possessions. This didn’t really sit right with us, so we decided to go another direction and rent out our home for the duration of our trip.

We didn’t need to be experts in real estate to see how crazy the rental prices were in Australia and with near to no rentals available it didn’t take long to secure a tenant.

We could then budget accordingly and use the rental income as our weekly spendings. This of course would depend on the size of your mortgage and any other liabilities as to how much would be remaining. If the amount isn’t enough to achieve what you want then I would suggest looking at selling some items of value or dipping into some savings.

The fun part… Research!

Once you’ve got a rough idea of what you can spend you can start to research.. Where do you want to go? What do you want to see? This can be such a fun part of the planning process to do as a family… I actually got a few great Kids Atlas books for the kids to start looking at and we all chose places we wanted to see or for my 10-year-old daughter – the foods she wanted to eat!

For us we decided it made sense to be based in Croatia near my husband’s family and as Europe is so accessible, we would travel around from there.

What about the kids?

By having a base point in Croatia, we were able to send our kids to Croatian school but still take them with us on various European adventures.

This was all that we had hoped as both girls learnt the Croatian language, made friends, and really got out of their comfort zones.

Be sure to chat to your kids’ schools about this as you may find they need to be UN-enrolled from an Australian school to attend an overseas school. Home-schooling may also be the easier option depending on the country you’re travelling to, but after my short home-schooling period during covid I wasn’t rushing into this option. (Shoutout to anyone that’s a teacher)

Didn’t they fall behind in their schooling?

Quite the opposite. I was worried about them falling behind – especially given it took them a few months to even understand what the teacher was saying, but our younger one came back to Australia for Term 4 of Prep/Kindergarten (Australian first year of schooling) and it was only a matter of weeks before she was up to speed with the rest of the class.

The older one managed to somehow improve her mathematics… but after reading various articles about the benefits of learning a language for children, I’m not at all surprised. The list of benefits have a direct impact on a child’s academic achievement. Improved reading, writing, and math skills are just some of many benefits.

What else do you need to organise?

You have decided to do it, you’ve picked the destination/s, you’ve sorted a weekly budget, you’ve decided what to do for schooling… what else?

Travel Insurance will require plenty of reading and lots of fine print. Since covid there’s a lot of grey areas so be sure to investigate this.

Make sure your passport is up to date – especially with kids as their passport expires faster than an adult one.

Packing! Quite possibly the worst bit. If you’re packing for more than one season, try to pack a little of each to cover all bases. Worst case you’ll have to buy whatever you’re missing when you get there but be prepared to not find the exact item depending what country you are going to. Adapting is all part of the travelling experience, right? (but if you can’t adapt – there’s always online… I managed to find my aveeno body wash, my bondi sands and even my sepphora mascara)

Book the flights. Given we left during covid, our flights were actually very reasonable comparing to most other airlines so I would definitely fly Qatar Airways again in the future. If you are looking at round-the-world tickets I would recommend chatting with a travel expert.

In the past I’ve always booked our flights all over the world, but with constant changes and rules and things not yet back to pre-pandemic times I would use a professional. We had some changes coming home and the team at Flight Centre helped a lot ensuring it was a drama free return to Australia.

Lastly if you are considering having a base point like we did with Croatia, you will need to research any visa requirements for the country of choice. Had we not had family to help, this could have been a very confusing process but if you are interested in Croatia a fabulous website I came across recently is Expat in Croatia.

Hardest part of leaving?

Saying goodbye!

Hard to come home to normal life?

I’m still struggling to answer this one. Lots of people have asked me this and I sound so vague in my reply. Yes of course I am happy to reunite with friends and family, but there’s this part of me that I quite possibly left in Croatia.

I think anyone who has returned from spending each day travelling, exploring and adventuring, will struggle to return to everyday life.. I find myself in search of how this could be achieved permanently so if anyone has the answer to this please let me know.

What did we learn?

I personally learnt that I am still very much the same excited adventurer I was at age 10 when I would sit and read my childrens atlas and just because I now have 3 sidekicks, we can still achieve anything we set our minds to.

Remember Wander more. Worry less. xx