It’s a new year of travel and adventure! We’ve been talking about our vanlife goals for this year and thought why not share them here to hold ourselves a little more accountable? Now Nathan wants us to be very clear that these are definitely not New Year’s resolutions. They are resolutions that we are starting at the start of the year… but apparently they aren’t New Year’s resolutions because he doesn’t believe in those. Yeah, you can judge him as much as you want on that one, Tiff certainly is!
Given Nathan’s stance on New Year’s resolutions, we have never verbalised or really even thought about goals for the year ahead, so this is new to us. It’s also quite exciting to see if we can stick to them all and keep growing as eco-conscious travellers.
Be sure to check out our Instagram to chat with us about your goals for 2024!
Eco-Conscious
We have been loving our journey to an eco-conscious way of living and traveling. We’re intending to step even further down this road with you all over this next year. We’d like to keep introducing new habits to our daily lives to lessen our environmental impact. As always, we will take you along for the ride too! We already have a few resources here for tips on how to start your own eco-conscious travel journey. The plan is to keep growing these and implementing them in our lives as well.
The main thing we are going to focus on first is cutting down on unnecessary spending. We plan on stopping impulse buying for the entire year. If we want something, we need to go at least a month of wanting it before purchasing. We also need to research and find out what the most ethical and sustainable option is before buying said item. This is going to be hard to implement in January, particularly as we’ll be showing Tiff’s sister around the South Island, and inevitably that will involve wandering around towns with nice shiny things to buy.
Our next big focus will be short drives. Instead of driving a few kms into town from a campsite, we are planning to walk, ride or bus to reduce our carbon footprint and to keep our fuel costs down in the process! We are hoping to implement this from January, but aren’t too sure how well it will go with showing Tiff’s sister a good time. We will keep you updated, though! Once we start making these two more of a habit, we’ll introduce a new eco-conscious change to our travels. Our aim is to make a new change or take on an eco-conscious challenge each month. If you have any suggestions let us know on our socials.
Budget
Over our last few years of travel, our savings have taken quite the hit. Getting stuck with a rusty van will do that to you. Having to buy a motorhome to replace said rusty van definitely took a huge chunk of our savings. We had to fly to Perth a few times for some events, both happy and sad, and whilst we love being back home, that too cost us more than expected.
This year to keep us on the road we are aiming to stick to a budget of on average $100 NZD a day. This will be slightly tricky, but we are confident we can get there. Our initial budget of $160 NZD a day when we first started out is just a little too much now. Check out the breakdown of our first year of spending here. In 2023, we were able to get our average daily spend down to $129. So decreasing again should be achievable.
Getting Outside
Last year, on a complete whim, we took on the 1000hrs outside challenge. One of Tiff’s work friends from Australia just had a kid and posted about taking on the challenge. You can read more about the idea here, from the creators of it all. It seems to be geared more at families trying to get kids to be more active outside. However, we absolutely loved doing this! It was so fun to track our outside hours and it definitely resulted in us getting outside more.
We saw some great health benefits and Tiff even managed to get a thong tan!! No, not that kind of thong… we are Aussie, after all. If you know Tiff you know she has never tanned before and whilst her ‘tan’ wasn’t much more than a slightly darker shade of white she loved it!! We actually didn’t think it would be hard to hit 1000hrs outside given that we live in a van and are hiking all over Aotearoa but it proved difficult especially on the months that Tiff was working and with all the rain we get over here. We made it to 606 hours in 2023. Our goal is to hit 1000hrs this year so let’s see if we can get there!
The Road Less Written
We will continue to work and play The Road Less Written way! Doing things differently is our jam. We love living in our van and working when it suits us. Ultimately, we’d love to keep living like this for quite a few more years to come. To do that we want to start growing our presence here and introduce some new things too. We are thinking a little YouTube and selling our wonderful prints and artwork as we travel around Aotearoa. So watch out for some exciting new updates! If you can’t wait that long, then check out the prints we already have available on our online store here.
We’ve tried to set the bar high for our vanlife goals in 2024
Some slightly ambitions goals there but we are really excited about hitting them! We want to keep learning and sharing our lifestyle with you. Hopefully, we can bring you some joy in our adventures and keep inspiring you to live life on your own terms. If you have some goals of your own you think we’d like, let us know! We want to keep the conversation going, so head to our Instagram to join the conversation.
Keen for more inspo? Be sure to check out:
- 10 Game Changing Vanlife Money Saving Tips
- 4 Freedom Camping Apps to Make New Zealand Travel Simple!
- Campervan Essentials For Your Next Home on Wheels
