December.
The month of Christmas AKA the month of increased spending.
Our budget hasn’t been too healthy over the past 12 months at the best of times, so adding Christmas gifts into the equation didn’t bode well for our budget last month.
In addition to that, only four nights of the month would be in hotels booked using points – the rest would be paid hotel and Airbnb stays.
As a result, I predicted last month that we’d end up going over budget in December 2018. Did this prediction come true, or would I be overjoyed to be wrong on that?! Read on to find out.
Miles Driven
We started December with 104,302 miles on the clock. By the end of the month it was showing 107,021, so we drove 2,719 miles in December. That’s quite pleasing as I guessed last month we’d drive 2,750 miles in December, so I was almost spot on!
We’re in Denver for another few days, then we’re heading on to Kansas for about 6 weeks. Although we’ll be moving states, I don’t think we’ll be doing a ton of driving over the coming month. I’m therefore predicting we’ll drive about 2,100 miles in January 2019 – we’ll see next month how accurate that is.
Money Spent
I already laid the groundwork at the beginning of the post to explain why, because yes – we went over budget again in December!
If you’re new to this monthly stats series, our daily budget is $100. That has to cover all our full-time travel costs – accommodation, gas, hotel pet fees, food, activities, etc. With 31 days in December, that made our budget for the month $3,100.
By the end of the month we’d spent $3,463.20 which means we went $363.20 over budget. It sucks that we went over budget yet again, but I’m not too despondent. One reason is that the majority of that overspend related to Christmas which is still likely less than most people spend on Christmas.
Another is that December is a great month for a couple of the websites I created a few years ago. They get a lot more traffic leading up to Christmas which in turn leads to greater ad revenue. That means our income in December is higher than any other month of the year, more than offsetting how much we overspent.
A third reason is that some of our paid hotel stays earned a ton of points. The free hotel stays we’ll get from those points should easily outweigh how much we overspent in December.
Here’s a breakdown of our spending last month…
…along with a chart showing our spending over the course of the past year.
Points Earned
I mentioned in the budget section above that we’d earned loads of points. Most of those came from IHG as we took advantage of last quarter’s promotion. We earned close to 80,000 points with them which should be enough for at least 10 free hotel nights the way that we redeem those points.
We earned points in several other hotel loyalty programs too, so here’s a breakdown.
- IHG Rewards Club – 77,687
- Hilton Honors – 29,000
- Marriott Rewards – 12,692
- World of Hyatt – 12,155
- Radisson Rewards – 0
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 17,831
Points Redeemed
I spent quite a bit of time in December researching our accommodation options for Kansas where we’ll be staying from January 6 through to the middle of February. As a result, we redeemed quite a few points for upcoming stays.
Here’s a breakdown of all the points we redeemed in December.
- IHG Rewards Club – 0
- Hilton Honors – 0
- Marriott Rewards – 120,000
- World of Hyatt – 60,000
- Radisson Rewards – 56,000
- Choice Privileges – 18,000
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0
Total Points Balances
Based on all the changes above, here are our points balances at the end of December 2018.
- IHG Rewards Club – 476,766
- Hilton Honors – 726,186
- Marriott Rewards – 560,594
- World of Hyatt – 104,396
- Radisson Rewards – 320,883
- Choice Privileges – 21,251
- Wyndham Rewards – 45,000
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 10
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 258,483
Here’s that information in table format too:
Blog Stats
If you’re interested in how this blog is coming along, here’s how many posts we published last month and how many page views we had.
- Number of blog posts published – 17
- Page views – 13,742
Final Thoughts
Going over budget in December was a little disappointing, but with our income exceeding our outgoings, it didn’t put a strain on our savings.
We have a lot of hotel stays using points coming up in January which means our accommodation costs will be lower. I’m therefore mildly optimistic that we’ll manage to stay under budget this month – we’ll see how that goes!
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