trip financials
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The financials of this trip are a little different than previous trips, since I had a medical event during the trip and also the purpose was celebrating my friend’s birthday. I ended up deciding to exclude the medical and celebratory costs from the vacation spending, since they fall outside normal vacation behavior for me, but…
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This European summer vacation ended up being about $4,000 less than our prior year’s European summer vacation, in large part due to using miles/points to buy our plane tickets. This was partially offset by some unnecessary extra spending (including $200 thrown away on a non-refundable hotel when we switched our departure from Milan to Naples),…
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I’ll open this by saying: this ended up more expensive than I thought it would. I’m not really sure why I thought it would be cheaper, considering the impetus for going on this trip was spending $2000 on plane tickets, but here we are. Nonetheless, once you take out the big categories of airfare and…
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Miami is not a cheap city. Miami-Dade is not a cheap county. Florida is, increasingly, not a cheap state, if the many headlines about areas with the fastest-growing real estate prices are any indication. So we went on this vacation looking to cut costs where we could, while still being able to enjoy what we…
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This trip was kind of a fun trip from a costs perspective, because I am a person who is perhaps bizarrely tickled by being able to get things for a discount or free. With my Alaska Airlines Visa, I get a yearly companion fare, and this was my first time using that benefit since I…
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Oddly, I was less motivated to do this accounting. Sure, I had gone through Monarch already and categorized everything as Travel, and I had even created the tab for this account in my vacation expenses spreadsheet before we took the trip, but something about this was less interesting than our Ireland trip. Maybe because that…
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I’ve gone back and forth about posting this. On the one hand, I love reading the nitty-gritty details of people’s vacations – the number (if any) of points they used, the amount everything cost, anything interesting they did as an activity, how much they used cash, their strategies for booking various things, etc., etc. On…