What is going on YouTube greetings from my inside cabin here on the beautiful Ruby Princess if this is your first time joining me I’ve been traveling full-time since 2019 every year I travel a different way my first year of travel I lived in a different country every 30 days then covid hit so I bought a van and did the van Life RV life throughout the United States for a year then I hopped on a
Plane to Thailand I did some motorbiking around land for a year and this year I’ve lived on nothing but cruise ships I have 73 days left I think of cruise ship living before I hop on a plane head over to Asia and do more 30 to 60 day country hopping and I’m going to integrate some cruise ship travel and some other types of travel in there as well but one of the most common questions I’ve gotten over the last almost five years is how much does it cost to live this lifestyle
And I’ve been meaning to put videos together like this I just haven’t been organized enough but I made a resolution that I was going to start being more uh organized tracking my expenses and sharing them with you I know it’s something you’re interested in and no matter what type of travel I do I’ll be able to make these videos and you’ll be able to see the differences between what does it cost to cruise full-time what does it cost to live in a country like
Thailand for 30 60 90 days what does it cost to live in a country like Iceland for 30 days so this video will not be a first of the month till the last day of the month video in the future I am going to do them that way and per rate them but for this video I’m going to share my last 30 days it just worked out really well I’ve been on three 10day cruises so the expenses you see here are going to be from the day I started uh my cruising 30 days ago so it’s going to be the last
30 days of expenses so about a month and you’ll see how much it cost me to live on this cruise ship for the last 30 days I’m going to be using my trusty iPad here and I’m going to share my screen with you I’ll show you the receipts so you actually can see the breakdown of what these cruises cost and I also have a nice little graphic that I’ll show you that’ll break down all my other monthly expenses when when you’re cruising a lot of your expenses are included in the
Cruise fair so the graphic won’t be hugely diverse this month but in the future when I start traveling more International um it’ll be a little bit more diverse and you’ll see other things but there are things on here that monthly expenses that I have that are separate from cruising that I figured I’d share with you as well and you’ll see how much it cost me to live this last month on nothing but Cruise ship so let’s jump into these first set of
Receipts okay so we’re going to start with my itinerary so you can see what I did on these 30 days of cruising like I mentioned I repeated this itinerary three times so three 10day itineraries a total of 30 days you might be asking yourself Kevin why you doing the same cruise over and over again that’s just kind of how it worked out I’m on this ship for 10 3 days so my first 30 days were the same three cruises but starting this Cruise the one I’m about to start
Right now and for the next 73 days it’s completely different itineraries we start with a Caribbean cruise where we’re going to all the saints like St Thomas St John and the ABCs and after that cruise I do a full Panama Canal Transit onto from the East Coast Coast to the West Coast and then after that I do a California wine cruise where I go up the coast of or go up the entire West Coast not just California California Oregon and Washington State
All the way up to Vancouver and then I go from Vancouver to Hawaii and then from Hawaii back to Vancouver and then I start a 21-day Alaskan cruise so it’s going to be varied a lot from this point I didn’t mind the 30 days uh in the CER being in the Panama Canal because it’s nice and warm while everybody’s freezing where they are all right let’s jump into the cost of the cruise this first receipt you see here is for the first cruise and I’ll share why there’s no
Cruise Fair on here in a little bit after I share the three receipts so stick around for that but I’m just going to go over how much the cruise cost me first and then I’ll tell you why I didn’t pay a cruise fair so you’ll see here that taxes port fees and expenses are $500 you’ll see a miscellaneous fee right here it’s $200 and that is the deposit you have to put down when you book this kind of cruise and I’ll explain that more later you are actually
Refunded that deposit in onboard credit which I used to pay for other things which we’ll talk about a little bit later but Allin this 10day cruise cost $700 $500 for taxes fees Port expenses and that miscellaneous fee which I’ll go over a little bit later how that works you’ll see on here that I got onboard credit so anytime you do a cruise you’re almost always going to get onboard credit I got two kinds of onboard credit this cruise I got some onboard credit
For being a veteran and I got onboard credit for a future Cruise credit okay so I did a terrible job explaining onboard Credit in my original first take video so I figured I’d tell you about onboard credit from The Atrium here and try to make it a little bit more clear so there are tons of ways to get enor credit not just being a military veteran that’s one way another way is to own the carnival stock Carnival owns princess so if you own a 100 shares of Carnival
Stock you can get onboard credit up to $250 you can also buy the future Cruise credit where you go and you pay 100 bucks then you get $100 off the cruise you book plus onboard credit from $15 to $150 I believe it is and you can also get onboard credit from the different deals you book and a travel agent sometimes has access to onboard credit that they can add to your crew so there’s a ton of different ways you don’t just have to be a veteran to get
On board credit all right back to the rest of the video and I I don’t subtract that from the cruise Fair because I actually spend that on board on things like internet coffees stuff like that that I’ll explain more later so the next one will look exactly the same except for the dates will change it says February 18th to February 28th and you’ll see it’s the exact same price the exact same onboard credit so we don’t have to spend too much time on this one
And then the next one exact same thing it’s exact same Cruise like I mentioned it’s $700 you’ll see there runs from February 28th to March 9th today is March 10th when I’m recording this video and you’ll see that uh everything else is the same $125 on board credit so the total price of this Cruise uh for me for 30 days was 2400 bucks you’ll see in this monthly expenses I just listed that as housing cuz that’s what it is and we’ll talk about more of the more about
Some of the expenses on here for my month so you’ll see dining out is is zero when you’re on board a cruise ship all your meals are provided there’s no reason to spend any money I didn’t spend any money this month on food you’ll see Transportation so that was my Uber from the airport to my hotel the day before my cruise started so you might ask yourself how come there’s no hotel fee and no Airline fee on here I’ve mentioned this in many videos but I use
The Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card and they give me a ton of points and I use those points on flights and hotels neither the hotel nor the plane cost me money that’s why you don’t see it in the expense report here the next category is cell phone I have a $50 cell phone plan with T-Mobile which gives me access to use my phone in 215 countries when I’m in the US Canada or Mexico it’s just all 5G normal Team Oval coverage when I’m overseas I only get 3G that’s still good
I can still use maps and get an Uber and stuff like that but I always pay $50 extra for the month and I get their international plan which gives me 15 gigabytes of data and that’s plenty for me so my cell phone is usually about $105 a month with T-Mobile but it works anywhere in the world that I want to use it and I like that Simplicity all right so the next item on the expense report is travel which was Zero like I mentioned my hotel and flights were paid
For healthcare so I am retired military I spent 20 years in the US Navy so I have TR care for life which cost me $15 a month pretty cheap I know a lot of you are like oh I wish I could have that health insurance is so expensive if you haven’t watched the YouTube channel grounded life finances check them out they travel full-time they are 50 years old and they pay for their insurance out of their pocket and a cost them about $250 a month they have a whole video
About it but go check out their Channel and you can see how you can get pretty Affordable healthc Care uh as a full-time traveler now groceries so you’ll see groceries listed here for $30 a month I actually went and bought some things to bring on the cruise I brought some fuu coffee creamer so I would spend less on coffees on board so you’ll see here I have my Silk Almond creme brulee creamer with me and that saves me $5 the coffee I used to just use onboard credit
But we’ll talk a little bit more about that later so the next expense is entertainment you’re on a cruise ship you don’t need to spend any money on entertainment there’s all kinds of shows comedians live music you’re pulling into a port every other day usually so you can go out in town and do all kinds of cool things for free if you watch my port videos you’ll see that I don’t usually take an Excursion I just walk off the ship ship and see what kind of
Trouble I can get into and so my entertainment expenses are zero shopping is zero I haven’t bought anything and other nothing so you’ll see here my total expenses for the month 30 days living on a cruise ship is $252 total which I think is a pretty good deal all right so let’s talk about why I don’t have any Cruise Fair expenses okay so I did a terrible job explaining that on my first take so I figured i’ come down in the casino and
Tell you my casino story from the actual place it happened so before I started my one year on a cruise ship I took a trial Cruise run actually on this ship so you guys asked me to film some of the casinos so I came down to this this very casino and I put $50 into a slot machine I subsequently lost that $50 pretty quickly but at the end of the cruise I got a little envelope slipped under my door that said hey on your next Cruise you have
$150 free credit so that me meant I could take $150 down the casino and put it into the slot machines so this was December of 20122 cruising was just starting back up again and they were trying to encourage people to go cruising so I kind of got lucky in that respect so I went to my next cruise with my $150 I went down the casino I put that $150 in a slot machine and I won a little mini jackpot was like $1,200 somewhere around there so I took
My money put it in my pocket said yay gambling is great I ran into the YouTubers parad DJ on the cruise and they said hey man we Cruise for free on Princess and Carnival because of free casino Cruisers I know you got that $1,200 but you should consider putting it back in the casino and seeing if maybe you get some of these Free Cruise offers so that’s what I did I ended up playing that entire jackpot in the casino took me a while to get through
That by the way I was up down up down up down up down I racked up a bunch of Casino points and then at the end of the cruise I got another envelope slipped under my door this time for $200 $250 a casino credit and I was like well that wasn’t worth it cost me $1,300 to get that about 10 days after my cruise I got this email that said hey book a free inside cabin with us and get 150 or 250 onboard credit I was like oh great I got a free cruise out of it so I went to
Book the cruise and I went online and I saw all these cruises every Cruise under 21 days was 0o for an inside cabin and I would have to pay the port fees taxes and gratuities as well as put down a $200 deposit so I did that I booked it and then I went back into the search engine to book some more cruises and I saw that it was still 0er and I was like what’s going on here so I went and read the fine print of the email and it said every offer you get you can book three
Cruises and in the next month or so I started getting all these Casino deal offers with every one that I received I was able to book another Cruise so once I got to the cruise ships and we and were on those cruises I was like how you know how long is this going to maintain and so I was watching this channel called cruising with Mark and he he was talking about how to maintain your Free Cruise eligibility and it was basically by gambling so I was like you know what
I’m going to do I’m going to play my free credit and anything I win with a free credit cuz when you play free credit every time you win it converts to real money and I was like I’ll play my free credit and all my real money and at the end of the cruise whatever onboard credit I have left I’ll put in the casino and sometimes that was two three $300 princess lets you use your onboard Credit in the casino some Cruise Lines don’t but princess does so that was my
Strategy and I’ve kept that up up till now I always put my free play into the casino and anything I win from my free play and then whatever onboard credit I have left I play in the casino and that’s kept me in the casino system I don’t know how long that’s going to last but it’s lasted for like 9 10 months so I’m still getting free cruises and I’m going to take advantage of it as long as I can you might be saying to yourself well Kevin I am not going to gamble and
I’m not going to get these free cruises so the life you’re living doesn’t apply to me well before I started getting Casino credits I actually was able to book cruises for under $100 a day all in and I’ll show you now how I did that so I made this video called how to cruise cheaply and this was before I was getting Casino deals and at the time I was able able to find solo cruises for $50 a night all in so that included tax support fees and gratuities everything
For about $50 a night which would be about $1,500 a month in Cruise Fair now every Cruise wasn’t $15 or $50 a night but if you can stay at 100 a night or under then you’re talking about 3,000 a month if you go up a little bit more then you’re talking about $4,000 a month which when everything is included still isn’t a bad deal but I’ll show you really quickly I won’t go super in depth on this but I’ll show you really quickly here on my iPad what I’m talking about
So I use this website called Cruise Plum a lot of you have heard me talk about it many times it’s featured heavily in that video how to find cheap cruises but you’ll see here that there’s a ton of cruises that have a cabin cost per day of as low as $63 a night even now so I’ll scroll through here and you’ll see a ton of them with MSC you’ll see some on the Regal Princess you’ll see some on the Majestic princess so a lot of princess on here a lot of MSC and you’ll
Just see them keep going and going and going and going and going there are a ton of cruises on here for under $100 a night which will keep you at that $3,000 Mark now I know what you’re saying like hey these These itineraries are kind of like specific itineraries some of them are transatlantic some of them are transpacific things like that well what you do is you find these cheap cruises and then you do backtack cruises that maybe a little bit more expensive
You combine them and that’ll bring your cost per night down so if you’re booking one of these 60 a night cruises and then you go book another 120 a night you’re still going to be at that about 100 a night range and you’ll be at that you know $33,000 a month all inclusive all all expenses included uh Cruise life so if you use a tool like this you can definitely H take affordable cruises that probably cost you less than your current life okay so
One more look at my monthly expenses here so you’ll see this month of cruising cost me$ 2,572 $2 I think that’s a pretty good deal that’s one of my cheaper months I’m pretty excited about it if you enjoy these type of videos where I share my monthly expenses and what it costs me to live my full-time travel life let me know down in the comments and I’ll do more of these thanks for watching see you next video
