July Travel Expenses

Now that I no longer have the wonderful privilege of closing the books at work (sorry finance friends!), I will be re-directing a portion of my time at month-end to closing our own travel expense budget. I should clarify by defining “travel expense budget” as all of our expenses. Since we sold our home and fired our criminal-like wireless service providers, we have little to worry about or pay for back in the States. July was a short month for us, traveling only from the 24th to the 31st. These dates also coincided perfectly with all of our expenses from Ireland.

Overall, I am pleasantly surprised by how little we gave up to see this lovely country. Naturally, our biggest expense was housing. We spent our first night on a short plane ride over, 6 nights in the countryside at traditional Irish B&B’s, and one night at a Hilton in Dublin paid for with 30,000 Hilton Honors points.
                                                


Transportation came in second where we booked one way flights from DTW to DUB using 60,000 Delta Skymiles plus $11 for taxes, rented a Toyota Yaris to get around the country (a total of 1,550 miles worth), and used public transportation to get around Dublin which was cheap, clean, efficient, and even had free wifi.

                                            


Third was food. We dined out for a handful of meals, but found ourselves so busy (and jet lagged) during the day that we would often miss the short windows for “meal time” in pubs and ended up just picnicking at the beach, park, or atop scenic outlooks that happened to be close when hunger struck. A huge breakfast was included with all of our B&B’s which I haven’t included in our meal cost since it was paid for as part of Housing. We also took advantage of our Priority Pass membership (free with one of our credit cards) and had complimentary dinner and drinks in the Wingtips lounge at JFK on our way over. I’ve categorized all of our alcohol cost into entertainment, which this month consisted only of...Guinness.

Health and Medical costs were 8 days of amortization of our travel/medical emergency insurance policy which I’ll talk about more in a future post. Several trips to various grocery stores, including our personal favorite of Aldi, added up to basically nothing for Groceries. Our lowest cost this month was Attractions which include various charges including admission to Cliffs of Moher, Geokhan Mountain, and a tip we gave to our tour guide of a 3 hour free walking tour around Dublin. Under Other, I’ve included the $300 annual cash credit we received on our credit card for travel expenses. We receive this credit each calendar year to offset the cost of hotels, airlines, or anything else that qualifies as travel so long as we stay exceptional customers of Chase Bank.

In summary, we traveled for a total of 8 days and spent $88.78 per day for the two of us. Our budget benefitted greatly from the $300 travel credit which was a welcome surprise and posted instantaneously after our rental car and B&B purchases. While we won’t get another $300 travel credit until 2018, I suspect that overall, our travel expenses will reduce as we move on to Spain.