September 2018 Budget Recap

I’m writing this post from the deck of the Celebrity Infinity cruise ship. We are about to embark on a 15-day cruise that will take us through the Panama Canal, so this will be my “office” for the next two weeks. Not too shabby!

OK, I know that all of you who clicked to read today’s post came to crunch and analyze numbers, so let’s get to the good stuff. 🙂

The month of September was our last full month in Europe before making our way back to the US.

The primary countries that we visited were Switzerland (Zürich), France (various cities), and Cyprus. However, we did also hit Germany, Monaco, Italy, and Greece either on day trips or as stopovers while taking the train or flying.

In terms of budget, we were well under our monthly goal. We came in at $1290 under budget for the month of September, even with some much higher discretionary expenses that included one-time things like a haircut / styling for Alyssa (300+ Euro).

September 2018 Monthly Stats

In the month of September, we hit a total of seven countries. While total miles walked were down, we did some more vigorous exercise at places like Chamonix and Laffrey, France on numerous hikes.

And for those who prefer more of a visual display of budget data (positive dollars corresponds to under budget):

Assuming we maintain our current average rate of being $500 under budget per month, we may be able to finish our year $6000 cheaper than we had been planning – a whopping 10%!

That being said, the coming month of October should put a solid dent into our current buffer, since we will be cruising and spending time at Disney. We’re estimating that we could be as much as $2000+ over-budget this month, bringing us back closer to the expected annual baseline.

September 2018 Expenses vs. Budget

In September, we had two housesits and stayed with friends in Cyprus, so we only had 17 nights of paid housing.

Discretionary spending was the only category that was over budget (assuming flights and ground transportation are lumped together as “transportation”), and the bulk of that was due to a hair appointment that Alyssa made for a smoothing treatment in France.

Without further ado, here are our actual expenses vs. budget for September 2018:

Total Monthly B.A.Livin’ savings from travel points and travel hacks (not included in above budget): $517.99

1. $364.38 for Cyprus flights booked using Chase Ultimate Rewards points
2. $114.81 for Airbnb savings from purchasing discounted gift cards
3. $38.80 for Expedia points discount on hotel night booking in Chambery

And showing our expenses over time for September 2018:

Click the above chart for a link to an interactive version

Lessons Learned and Takeaways

• Food
  • We are consistently under-running our food budget. This gives me confidence that we should be able to be much more frugal with our meal spending when we get back home to the US, since we are able to live so affordably while on the road
• Entertainment
  • Animals (at housesits) and visiting friends seems to mean that we spend much less on entertainment! However, it does impact our discretionary (alcohol) and food budgets
• Travel Points
  • Despite cashing in on some free hotel nights, we still were able to add over $1000 to our bank of travel rewards points, bringing us back over $10,000. This was accomplished by an 80,000 point bonus on a new Chase credit card, which has an equivalent travel-redemption value of $1200 (1.5 cents/point) due to our Chase Sapphire Reserve card!

Notes:

• All monthly expenses are totals for two people
• USD Exchange Rate monthly averages for August 2018:
  • 1 USD = 0.858 Euro

Euro to USD Chart for 2018

Source: https://www.x-rates.com/average/?from=USD&to=EUR&amount=1&year=2018

As we mentioned, while we did very well against our budget in September, we expect October to eat up a lot of the current budget under-run amount. Flights alone back to the US were $1300. We will be at about $60/day over-budget each day of the Panama cruise, and then we will be spending time in Disney.

Join us for next month’s budget update to see what a month of splurging looks like!