June 2018 Budget Recap

With our second month of travel behind us, we are finally getting into the groove of the nomadic lifestyle. We are now at a cumulative total of $280 under budget, and feeling good about the coming months.

June 2018 Monthly Stats

The month of June was another busy one, as shown by our monthly stats:

June 2018 Expenses vs. Budget

For the month of June, we were once again right on target to our budget, although we did spend a lot more on housing and a lot less on food than anticipated. We also didn’t have many free nights compared to what we’ll have coming up in the following months, so it will be interesting to see if this is on the high-end of what we can expect to spend.

Even with our visit to the extremely expensive country of Norway, this gives us confidence that we’ll come in under budget on future months.

Here are our actual expenses vs. budget for June 2018:

Total Monthly B.A.Livin’ savings from travel points and travel hacks (not included in above budget): $1,308

1. $768 – free night hotel stays in Visby by booking using credit card rewards points.
2. $176 – free museum admissions by taking advantage of free museums in Florence and the 24-hour Oslo pass in Norway.
3. $140 – free night stay in Munich by redeeming IHG rewards points from my 80,000 point sign-up bonus.
4. $106 –  self-booking fjord cruise tours in Norway.
5. $118 – saving an average of 9% on all Airbnb bookings by using our strategy for buying gift cards online.

And showing our expenses over time for June 2018:

Click the above image for an interactive version.

Lessons Learned and Takeaways

• Norway
  • Is expensive! As soon we told anyone we met in Italy or Salzburg that we were going to Norway, their first reaction was always “Oh – Norway is EXPENSIVE!”. How right they were.
  • That being said, it’s only ridiculously expensive if you A) eat out at restaurants, and B) if you like alcohol. Once we settled in and purchased groceries, it wasn’t that much different from recent locations.
• Housing Budget Overrun
  • Our housing expenses were 163% of our budget for June – $754 over budget. While we were able to make up for this by under-running on food and entertainment, we’ll monitor this to see if we might want to adjust our housing budget allocation in future months to $50/day and drop our food and entertainment allocations moving forward.
• Discretionary expenses
  • Monthly discretionary expenses were primarily alcohol (bottles of wine), small souvenirs, and toiletries. We did not have alcohol at all for nearly 9 days in Norway, somewhat due to the prices, but it was a nice hiatus from our bottle-a-day habit from earlier in the trip.
• Cell Phone
  • The second month of Google’s Project Fi has continued to exceed expectations. Furthermore, WiFi is ubiquitous in the places we have traveled thus far in Europe. We appear on track to only reach 1GB of data combined for the month of June, meaning we may cut our Google Fi Budget from 4GB/month to 1GB/month, saving us $30/month.
  • If you’re interested in signing up for Google Fi, use our referral link to get $20 off!

Notes:

• All monthly expenses are totals for two people
• USD Exchange Rate monthly averages for June 2018:
  • 1 USD = 0.857 Euro
  • 1 USD = 8.120 NOK (Norwegian Krone)
  • 1 USD = 8.806 SEK (Swedish Krona)
  • While the US Dollar still isn’t back at the levels of early 2017, it has continued to gain strength against these currencies so far in 2018, helping us save a little extra on our travels!

Another month under our belts, and probably one of our more expensive months at that. Scandinavia, and especially Norway, are definitely pricey, but we have been able to demonstrate we can still stay within our budget and have a great time touring Norwegian museums, cruising the fjords, eating fancy reindeer steak, and enjoying the sites that nature has to offer. This gives us great confidence that we cannot only meet our budget in future months, but probably spend considerably less – or splurge on more areas that we hadn’t been planning to.

It has demonstrated thus far that our assumptions about being able to still have the full experience of travel without sacrificing for cost is valid! Come back next month to see how we do in July, since we’ll be showing you how to stay at amazing houses for free by doing house-sitting.