October Budget Report

October budget report

It’s Deena and I'm here to talk numbers again.  October turned out to be a good month for us coming in at $108 per day.  Now remember, we earned a $500 credit for travel purposes from a credit card sign up bonus to add to our lodging expenses, and that money helped out a good bit in keeping our daily costs low.  We are finishing up our time in Italy and will be heading to Greece for about fourteen days.  I have kept our city-to-city transportation expenses out of our daily budget, but they are low, and I still keep track of it.

We arrived in Italy from Budapest on a Wizz Air flight - Michael came up with all kinds of jokes about Wizz Air, but I won’t include them here.  The flight was $17 per person—yep, you read that right.  We then traveled from Milan to Venice, Venice to Florence, Florence to La Spezia, La Spezia to Rome, and Rome to Naples using a mix of buses and trains.  The trains were a bit more expensive than the buses, but our average cost per person per trip was still only $20.

I have previously discussed our long haul flight from the US to Ireland to get this trip going, and I was able to book it for practically free due to a credit card sign up bonus.  There are many more flights to come in this trip that were free as well, but I will cover them as they come up.  Here’s a tease:  our January trip from Jordan to Thailand which costs thousands under normal circumstances was free—more on that later. We most definitely would not have been able to take this trip if it had not been for the free flights that saved us tens of thousands of dollars through travel hacking.  If you are interested in travel hacking, here are some links to a few of my favorite sites:   Mommy Points , The Points Guy, and The Frugal Travel Guy.  All sites have good newbie sections—I would go there first.

We have been invited by friends to visit them in Beijing China in January, and because we have been under budget this month, we are going to go for it.   Airline tickets have been purchased, and we are now trying to get visas.  Off to the Great Wall we go!!!