MARCH BUDGET: COST FOR A MONTH IN AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, AND FRANCE FOR A FAMILY OF FOUR
As such, our transportation costs for this month were off the charts, with multiple international flights and multiple car rentals and associated fuel costs. The shorter stays at our Airbnbs also increased our accommodation costs substantially, as we did not benefit from any monthly or weekly accommodation discounts. While we did manage to keep our meals costs down, opting to rely heavily on grocery stores for food and eating out at restaurants as seldom as possible, this was still quite an expensive month for us.
Now, on to our breakdown:
MEALS, GOODS, AND SERVICES COSTS
Our expenses for meals, goods, and services in March increased fairly significantly from our comparable expenses in February, to 1537 USD, although they still remained within the range of what we would consider reasonable, again due to our efforts to avoid restaurants. On travel days, we did need to use restaurants more often, which accounts for some of our increased costs in this category. We also did a number of excursions this month, ranging from funicular and cable car rides, a visit to the Australia Zoo, and a cruise on Milford Sound in New Zealand, which would seemingly account for much of the remaining cost increase. New Zealand was also fairly expensive in general when it came to grocery costs.
ACCOMMODATION COSTS
This month, we moved around A LOT. Every few days we relocated to a different stop. From our perspective, to properly visit New Zealand it was not possible to establish a single base and explore – we felt it was better to move from location to location in a rental car. As such, we did not get any long-stay Airbnb discounts in March, which led to a significantly increased nightly spend for accommodation. All of our accommodations had at least 2 bedrooms and were usually pretty comfortable, although most were not fancy. All told, in March, we spent 4,805 USD on accommodation.
TRANSPORTATION COSTS
This category is where our spending increased the most in March. With two international relocations (one with flights halfway around the world) and rental vehicle expenses in both Australia and New Zealand, this was unavoidable and, to a certain extent, this escalation of expenses relates largely to the timing of our flights being in March. However, our spending of 5,290 USD in March on transportation still smarts, ringing in at more than five times our transport expenses in the month of February.
SUMMARY
Overall, we spent a total of 11,632 USD in March of 2024, which is almost three times more than we spent in February and, for the first time on this trip, is more than we would spend in a normal month back home in Toronto, Canada. Our one ongoing fixed expense back home is for storage, which costs us 140 USD per month and is excluded from our totals.
If you’re interested in seeing how this month’s spending compares to that of previous months, you can check out all of our monthly budgets here.
So far, our expenses for our travels as a family of four since the start of September have been approximately 39,485 USD, which excludes our flight to Bali in August (just over 3,000 USD).
MARCH SPENDING BREAKDOWN
TOTAL SPEND OVER 31 DAYS: 11,632 USD
