Hello and thanks for the invite. We have finally graduated from a tent! Purchased an Austrack Stockton X7 Poptop Camper and can not wait to get out amongst it. Our first trip will be a mates place for a week. Hopefully this will shake out any bugs from manufacture and we can start preparing for a bigger trip. Cheers.

Can I bust a myth real quick? There is no magic daily number for travelling Australia. Every number you find online is someone else's trip, someone else's van, someone else's habits. It is not yours. And planning your savings around it is one of the most common reasons families either run out of money on the road or never leave in the first place. So here's the actual framework. Three things drive the bulk of your daily spend. Fuel, accommodation, and food. Everything else sits on top. Once you understand those three levers, you can start pulling them — travel slower to cut fuel, mix free camps with mid-week park stays to cut accommodation, be honest about your eating habits instead of pretending you'll suddenly become a meal-prep machine. Then you add the stuff people forget. The back-home bills that keep running while you're gone. The ambulance cover that's probably only valid in your home state. The Starlink. The van loan. The subscriptions quietly billing to your card. We averaged $700 a week across 11 months on the road as a family. Some weeks were double that. Some weeks we barely spent anything. But we knew our average. We'd built the buffer. And we had an emergency fund sitting completely separate — untouched unless something went genuinely sideways. That's the system. And I've turned it into a free cheat sheet that's now in the classroom — grab it and use it as your reference while you build your budget. If you want to go deeper and actually run your own numbers, that's what the Budget Planner is for ($7us once off, or free with premium membership). Drop a comment below — what cost category caught you most off guard when you actually started planning? Grab the cheat sheet: https://margieandtim.com.au/big-lap-budget-cheatsheet/ Have a great day Margie Watch the video here:

A special hi to all of you who have joined Plan Save Travel community so far! I'm loving the community feel that Skool offers, while also being able to upload my courses, catch ups and more - I'm always after advice on how to improve, so feel free to comment here or email me hello@margieandtim.com.au anytime. On that note, keeping that community vibe going - have you got any advice to your fellow Plan Save Travel members who might be at the very start of their planning journey? What is one thing you wished you knew at the start? To all the members who might not have a van/RV yet - have you got any questions you would like answered? Either myself or if anyone else knows the answer, feel free to reply.

Come and view our very first Video to our brand new channel! This could explain a lot! :P Enjoy PS it is currently only available to you guys, I'll make it a public video in a few hours time.