Hot Takes - bookmark these sites to save money on eSIMs, travel/health insurance, and make an easy travel budget.

Hi friends! A month in Warsaw has gone by way too quickly - we’ve absolutely loved it. Here are a few shots from this week - it’s berry season, the peaches and nectarines have just arrived, and it's always donut season… they are all DELICIOUS. Warsaw is not a city known for its street art, but it can be delightful and found in some of the most unexpected places.

This week, I’m sharing some terrific new tools (or at least new to us) that are saving us loads of research time. I hope these will help you, too.

Find the Best eSIM for your travels

I’ve recently discovered two eSIM search engines to find the best eSIM for our travels. If you are aren’t yet using an eSIM when you travel, I’ll bet you are paying way more than you need to for your cell data (I’m looking at you, Verizon).

📱mobimatter.com

📱toomanyadapters.com/esim-finder/

Both were easy to use. Mobimatter let me keep a sample search very broad, with options to narrow it after getting the results. Too Many Adapters made me narrow the search from the start. Both tools were fast and worked great. I liked how Too Many Adapters let me choose a shorter amount of time (and thus came up with the best 7 day option), but I like how flexible the MobiMatter site is. They both had lots of options and not all of the same. So the next time we need an eSIM, I’ll search both databases.

Travel and Travel Medical Insurance Quotes

I recently discovered Expat Den with a wealth of information on health and travel insurance. It’s a company that started by helping people find resources in Thailand but it has now grown to cover over 30 countries. They have partnered with CiC Insurances, specializing in insurance for expats and nomads, to build a pricing search tool that offers travel medical insurance quotes for expats, nomads, retirees, and anyone staying abroad longer.

🔎You can find the tool here.

Here’s what my search looked like to see what would cover our upcoming travels:

And here’s a sample of the results:

Pros

• You can search for more than one country at the same time, which is great since our rocks continue to grow no moss!

• I love seeing all of the prices in the results. So much easier than searching each company separately.

Cons

• This site covers a lot of companies I had not heard of after researching options for the last three years (is that good or bad?)

• A couple of the better known companies like SafteyWing and World Nomads were not included in my search results, so I don’t know if they are included in the database. We have essentially aged out of SafteyWing being an affordable choice for us, but it’s a great choice if you are under 50 years old. World Nomads is a great option for anyone who is into adventure sports. Levon will get short term policies from World Nomad the next time he goes ridge sailing/paragliding/paramotoring.

We are considering moving over to Genki this summer for our annual health insurance (using their Travelers policy). I really appreciate Expat Den’s really thorough review of their policy. If you do decide to explore a Genki policy, please use this link from our friends at Eat Walk Learn. You and they will get a little discount.

Easy travel budgeting

We just discovered an interesting travel budgeting tool and I really like what I see so far. Budgetyourtrip.com helps travelers plan and track travel budgets. The site was created by a couple who has traveled to over 50 countries, originally building manual spreadsheets to budget for their travels. I hope that this may replace our own manual spreadsheet budgeting pain (or at least be an easy starting point that we can then personalize).

The site gathers travel costs from tens of thousands of travelers who have ventured to every corner of the globe. They also partner with major travel companies to obtain travel pricing data for hotels, hostels, tours, activities, and sightseeing tickets. The result is a website with a huge repository of average and typical travel prices for thousands of global destinations. They also provide travel tips and advice for new and experienced travelers alike and have a number of interesting tools, like being able to look at regions around the world to compare costs between countries and cities in one view.

Travelers who are planning a future trip can register and create a travel budget to plan their future expenses based on the average costs of their destinations or their own established costs. Then, once their trip begins, travelers can enter their expenses, thus contributing to the repository of travel costs. These expenses are then anonymously aggregated, averaged, and run through various statistical models to determine the average daily travel prices for countries and cities around the world.

Categories included in the total daily averages are:

• Accommodation

• Local Transportation

• Food

• Water

• Entertainment

• Communications

• Scams, Robberies, and Mishaps

• Tips and Handouts

• All Inclusive Tours

• Intercity Transportation (at the country level)

If you're in the beginning stages of planning your trip, you can search for your destinations here, find your favorite place, and see what others have spent on low-end, mid-range, and luxury trips and vacations. Alternatively, you can select a country from the list of countries to find out what the typical mid-range travel costs are for that area.

What I really like is that you can search by your general budget-type - budget, midrange, or luxury. It’s also great to see in one place a simple comparison of multiple cities to look at the estimated costs per day. The list of countries is really comprehensive - every place we plan to travel in the near future is covered.

Below is an example for Warsaw, Poland where we’ve just spent a month. Based on our experience, I would say this tracks pretty close to our own experience.

We will still used Numbeo, Expatistan, and Nomads (formerly Nomadlist) as part of our travel research toolbox when needed, but Budget Your Trip promises to make our travel resarch, planning, and budgeting a whole lot easier.

✈️🚢🚅

We are off to Krakow on Tuesday and then on to Vienna, Austria for about a week each before flying “home” to Mexico for the summer on June 27. If you’ve got any recommendations for either of these cities, please share!