October Budget: Cost for a Month in Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos for a Family of Four
- We have been moving from place to place much more in October, which added additional transportation costs (including four extra sets of flights).
- We opted to splurge on a three-day Ha Long Bay cruise this month.
- We had lots of shorter stays at hotels this month, which increased our nightly accommodation rate significantly over September’s monthly Airbnb rental and also required us to eat out at restaurants more often since we often didn’t have kitchen facilities of our own.
However, while much of this increase in spending was expected, some of it is also due to lifestyle creep and a bit of a haze around how much we were actually spending when using cash for purchases in foreign currencies.
What we propose to do this month is to break down our expenses into a few general buckets, and show how much we have spent on average in three main categories: meals, goods, and services; accommodation; and transportation.
Meals, Goods, and Services Costs
Our spending on the following items came out to around 2300 USD in total:
- food (mainly restaurant and Grab meals)
- ground transportation (including excursions)
- services (massages, nail salons, barbers, etc.)
- entry visas
- shopping
While this figure is not horrible, it did surprise both Mr. and Mrs. WorldSmith, as it is more than we thought we were spending (and a fair bit more than we’d spent in September).
Given that this level of spending creep is not sustainable for us, we have elected to set ourselves a daily spending limit on food and restaurants going forward (since meals were the culprit of most of our spending), just to try to keep things in check in the long term.
While in Southeast Asia, our family budget for food will now be limited to 50 USD per day (12.50 USD per person). We will adjust our daily food budget in the future based on reasonable costs for the country we’re in.
Accommodation Costs
Another major component of our spending this month has been accommodation. The spending in this category has increased largely due to our two-night cruise through Ha Long Bay (approximately 1200 USD) and by virtue of the fact that we have not benefited from a long-stay discount this month like we did in Bali (where our total accommodation expenses were under 2000 USD).
In total, our expenses for accommodation this month were 3400 USD, with our time split between Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang, Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, and Huế.
Transportation Costs
The final large category of spending we had this month was flights.
While we technically had no flight expenses in September (although we did have a 3100 USD flight for two adults and two kids to get to Indonesia at the end of August), in October we flew from Indonesia to Thailand to Laos to Vietnam (each time with a fair bit of checked luggage), which added some incremental costs to the calendar month.
Overall, we spent 1,752 USD on flights this month, which is not outrageous given the number of flights for four people.
We are certainly looking forward to an upcoming long-stay after all of the movement in October. It’s exhausting and costly, so parking ourselves in one spot in Thailand for a month is just what the doctor (and our pocket books) ordered!
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.
October Spending Breakdown
Total Spend Over 31 Days: 7452 USD
