November Budget Report

NOVEMBER BUDGET UPDATE

Hello everyone.  It's Deena with another budget update for the month of November.  Time to let everyone know how much money we spent and how we're doing.   Our daily average for November was $133 for lodging, transportation, food and entertainment.  Not a bad number considering we had to rent a car for most of our travels in Greece.  UNFORTUNATELY our flying expenses from country to country added up this month and pushed us up to $5000 total for the month.  We flew from Italy to Athens, Athens to Santorini, Santorini back to Athens, Athens to Turkey and Turkey to Israel.  We were not able to redeem points for any of those flights, and some were a little expensive.  One exception was the mainland Greece to Santorini flights—they were around $20 round trip per person.

We are now in Israel for the month of December.  I was able to use some points from the Barclay card to defray some expense of the lodging, but we are renting a car for 10 days in the Galilee region.  I booked the car through autoslash, my favorite car rental site, and was thrilled when it said I would be paying $7 per day.  That almost seems too good to be true, right?  Yep, it was too good to be true.  When we arrived at the car rental desk, they informed us that we would be required to take out LDW on the car, even if we declined the CDW.  This more then doubled the price of the car rental!  It took me all day to get over that one, and I was one angry lady.  This is apparently a requirement of Israel that I did not know about until I searched the internet while the salesman patiently waited for me to acquiesce.  

Later in the week, I found out the border crossing from Israel to Jordan later this month is going to take a lot more time then I had anticipated.  It looks like we will have to leave Israel a day earlier to get to Jordan in time to fly out to Egypt on the same day.   We’ve already paid for the nights in Jerusalem, but now we have to leave one night early, then book a hotel in Amman, Jordan to complete the lengthy border-crossing procedure.  This was a costly mistake, and I bring it up only to emphasize the need for a budget as sometimes things come up that you can not possible foresee no matter how much research you do.

If any of you are single, a couple, or young at heart, there is a way to travel even cheaper then we are doing.  Before we left home, we joined a hospitality exchange called Servas.  They send you a list of hosts in the countries you are interested in and after a lengthy vetting process, you are given the list.  This is an organization that encourages peace through travel and experiencing other cultures.  Once you and a host agree on a time, you have a customary  two-night stay available.  You are staying in the host home to learn about their culture.  We love this type of travel as it is a fabulous learning experience for us and the kids.  We hope to use this organization when we are in New Zealand.

If you are interested in traveling more slowly, there are several options for working while  traveling.  Workaday, Helpex, and Woofing are several sites that advertise hosts that need a little work done for free room and board.  Most require 5 hrs of work per day and then you are free on the weekends to see whatever you can.  This is a great way to travel and see the world with very little money saved up.  There are options for families, but most hosts are looking for 1-2 people at a time, so this works well for couples or singles.

We have not used our Servas lists yet as we want to stay in most places a little longer then two days and have not landed a job because we are not staying in one place very long, and we’re liking the whole not-working thing as well.