This is Optimal Finance Daily.

100 countries or an SUV by Chris Gillibow of chrisgillibou.com.

Traveling between Budapest and Prague in the summer of 2004,

I suddenly realized how comfortable I felt with the process of moving from place to place.

I was 26 years old and beginning to travel independently.

It no longer felt strange to fly between continents or change currencies three times in a week.

Adding up my adventures up to that point, I found that I had been to about 35 countries.

Nearly a third of them were in Africa, and I knew I'd be going to at least five more

over the next year. That same summer, I began writing out my life goals for the first time. As a part of

the list, I decided to set a goal of visiting 100 countries sometime before I die. At the time, I thought

that was a fairly ambitious goal, which is funny considering what I've

decided to do later. When I set goals, I like to map out what they will cost in terms of time,

money, and other resources. I did the math for my 100 countries goal while riding through

Slovakia. Considering I had already visited about 35 countries and factoring in

flights, lodging, visas, and incidentals, I tried to set a budget for what the rest of the

adventure would cost. This kind of travel goal can be hard to budget, because some countries are

relatively cheap and others are expensive. For example, it cost me only $25 to get to Luxembourg when I was

already in Belgium. Done. The same is true of lots of small border countries. Once you're in Denmark,

Sweden is easy. From Singapore, you can visit Malaysia in a day. But other countries, of course,

are a lot more difficult to get to, and therefore

expensive. If I hadn't been working in Liberia, it would cost me nearly $2,000 to fly there.

To go back and forth across oceans usually cost at least $700 just for a ticket to one city.

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