How much money should one have on hand? | Travel/Culture hacking | Forum

So, this is my first post here – to that end, hi all! Apologies if I missed any introduction thread.

I just had a quick question to put out there in regards to travelling and budget. Naturally this is a question that appears to be often bandied around, but it always appears to get truly mixed replies. In a nutshell, I'm wondering how much money I'll truly need (not counting flights) to survive for 3-6 months out in Europe. I'm only really planning on being in two or three countries – Germany, France, and Spain. And potentially, I may just stay in Germany. I do want to be around the main cities like Berlin and Hamburg for a bit – which I understand will make my trip more expensive. That said, I'm also willing to work… but don't want to rely solely on this to survive (not to mention I have no idea if I'd be able to find work or not in the major cities, especially without being a German citizen… and with aiming to head off toward the end of the year, as winter begins over there. Delaying it a couple of months isn't entirely out of the question, though).

Has anyone made a similar trip and able to share their experience of costs? I'm not venturing over to throw loads of cash away at resorts and so on, but I don't want to be ducking from one couchsurfing host to the next every single night either! I can imagine that while rewarding as it might be to meet all those people, it's potentially impractical for so long a period (not to mention exhausting!). And I want a feel of what it's like to actually live there, for that matter!

If anyone has any thoughts or insight on this, let me know, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the reply! I'll have to look into that airbnb site some more, looks interesting. The activities I'm mostly interested in pursuing are simply seeing sites for free (wandering the city and all), talking to locals, and so on. No skydiving, adventure trips, or anything like that – so I'm hoping that will keep my costs down. 20-40 Euro sounds quite manageable! That would be excluding accomodation costs though, I imagine? I'm happy to try and pursue some kind of short term shared housing as well.

I think I'll have to look into what I need in order to potentially work over there soon, as well. Also looking into the link Benny posted in one of the other threads, for teaching English – just the weekend course, for certification. I imagine it'd be of limited use for Germany, per se, but potentially useful to have up one's sleeve as one moves about Europe, I imagine… hmm.