Travel Frugality

Jason and I just returned from a trip to Nashville, TN.  It wasn’t a trip we were originally planning or budgeting to take.  However, Jason won a handbell contest in May, which paid for about half of the expenses to experience Pinnacle (a national handbell convention).  Given that his career as a handbell  composer/arranger is still in the developing stages, we saw this trip as more of an investment than an expense.  Still, we wanted to keep costs as low as possible.

Food on the Cheap

For those of you who follow the blog, you know Jason makes our money work for us, and I try to find as many ways to save as possible.  To save money on this trip, we tried to spend as little as possible on food.  First, I called the hotel and found out the “full-service” hotels supposedly do not offer refrigerators or microwaves in the room.  Nor do they offer free continental breakfasts.  (They also don’t offer free wireless access in the rooms, but that’s beside the point).  However, they would provide a microwave and refrigerator upon request, if there were enough available.  We requested.

Because we weren’t certain that there would be appliances for us, we tried to pack food that would work for us regardless of what was available in the room.  We packed grapes, bananas, sandwiches, pretzels, granola bars, and nuts.  Those foods worked well for the drive down (no stopping for lunch) and would work with our cooler if no refrigerator arrived.

When we got there, we requested the refrigerator and microwave three times.  After the fridge came with no microwave, we figured that was good enough.  We headed to Kroger to buy:

1 Loaf of Fresh Italian Bread - $1.00
4 Packs of Deli Meats - $1.96
1 Pack Provolone Cheese $3.99
1 Container Hummus $2.00
1 Box Cereal $3.99
1 Container Mini-Donuts $1.00
1 Quart Non-Fat Milk $1.39
Tax - $1.22 (apparently groceries are taxed in TN)

Total - $16.95

These groceries were enough for us to have 5 breakfasts, 2 lunches, and a dinner for each of us.  This comes out to about $1.06 per person per meal.  That's even with fancier items like hummus and provolone cheese.  If we tried, we could have gotten this even cheaper, but we figured we were on vacation and deserved a few fun items. 

If we had spent just $4 dollars in each of those meals, we would have spent an extra $47 on the trip.  While that doesn't seem like a lot, if you saved $47 on one trip each year, invested into an account earning just 4% interest, in 30 years, you would have $2,883.16!

What other money-saving travel suggestions do you have?  Tell us about them in the comment section below.

Up In Smoke

Driving home last night from my folks' house, I quickly lost count of how many fireworks exploded within my field of vision, or how many cracking reports I heard from behind me.  After a minute or two of this, my mind invariably turned to money, and I realized something truly mystifying -- I wasn't seeing and hearing fireworks; I was seeing and hearing money going up in smoke.

Now I'm not a huge fan of fireworks so that does prejudice me just a bit.  I haven't set foot in a fireworks store or looked at a fireworks display in the local supermarket in years.  But it still occurred to me that what I was seeing was a tremendous waste of money and resources.

Math time -- Even with some of these outlets offering buy-one-get-six-free deals, you have to figure that for the sort of up-in-the-air cloud-burst fireworks I was seeing, we're talking minimum $.50 to $1.00, probably more.  Again, I'm making assumptions here because I have no idea, but I think that's a conservative estimate.  For each firework, figure that to light the fuse, run like mad to get out of the way, watch it fly in the air, then explode, we're talking ten seconds.  That means that, for an hour's worth of continuous firework excitement, we're talking ten seconds a shell, six shells a minute, 360 shells for an hour, at a cost of somewhere around $180 to $360 an hour.

Again, this is hideously rough math: if the shells are more expensive, the cost goes up.  If you take longer to fire a shell, the cost goes down.  I also realize that nobody is going to fire off these shells one after another after another for an hour straight -- the number is just a per-hour cost, nothing more.

Now, let's look at some other per-hour costs:

Dinner - Meal for two, nice restaurant, figure an hour's worth of time and, with drinks and dessert, perhaps $60 or so.  That makes the hourly cost about $30 a person.

Movie - Ah yes, that cheapest of pleasures (he said sarcastically).  Figure $9 for a ticket and another $12 for a vat o' popcorn with drink, you're talking $21 for a two-hour movie, or just over $10 an hour.  Your costs may go down if you share the popcorn, up if you go for a 3-D movie.

Video Games - This is one I'm gravitating to more and more.  My wife just bought me a Nintendo DSiXL for my birthday (a few months early, but who's complaining?), at a cost of about $190.  In that time, we've bought a handful of games, at a cost of maybe another $130 or so.  Total of $320 on a new video game system.  However, the longer we play it, the less our per-hour cost runs.  Even if we only used the system for an hour, we're still only near the high end of our fireworks example.  In the month we've had it, however, we've probably spent, between us, a good forty or fifty hours playing it, at a per-hour cost around $7.  The key is to get a system you'll actually use, and then buy games with lasting play and re-play value.  Our most frequently-played games?  Mario Kart DS (even after you've competed the Grand Prix mode, you can still play online for free with people from around the world), and the EA Sudoku game (which we downloaded for $2.00 from the DS online store).  Even factoring in recharging costs, it won't be long before playing this gets as low as a buck or two an hour.

There are so many more examples I don't have time to go into here, but you get the drift: fireworks may be fun, but the per-hour cost is a killer.  My family and I stood in their driveway for ten minutes and just watched the shells exploding in the sky all around us.  Cost to us?  Nothing.  When it comes to celebrating independence, seems to me that getting that much bang for your buck is right on the road to financial independence.