Another month’s come and gone and this time we’re halfway through the year. I wrote the other day about some lessons we’ve learned from our first six months of traveling full time, so check out this post if you’re interested in knowing what those are.
The start of a new month also means it’s time to look back at our stats from the previous month. May was savage when it came to going over budget, so would that continue in June or did we managed to rein in our spending?
Read on to find out…
Miles Driven
Our 2004 Toyota Corolla started June with 90,845 miles and finished the month with 92,509 on the clock, so we drove 1,664 miles last month.
In last month’s stats post, I’d predicted that our June mileage would be much less than May where we drove almost 3,000 miles. In the end, we drove just over half the number of miles as the previous month. That’s because nearly the entire month was spent in Wisconsin, so we didn’t have many long journeys.
Money Spent
Our budget’s always the most interesting part of these monthly stats posts. As I mentioned earlier, May was simply terrible – we ended up going almost $2,000 over budget for a variety of reasons.
I’d predicted at the beginning of the month that June should be on budget and that prediction was pretty accurate. With a $100 daily budget which has to cover everything, we had $3,000 to play with for the month. By the end of June 30, we’d spent $2,925.04 and so we were $74.96 under budget – phew!
It doesn’t go very far to counteracting the overspend from the previous month, but at least we didn’t overspend again.
Here’s a breakdown of our costs by category…
…along with a line graph showing spending so far this year:
I’m hopeful when it comes to July that we’ll be a few hundred under budget, although August might go over as our accommodation costs look like they’ll be higher.
Points Earned
All of our stays in June were in hotels rather than Airbnbs, with only a third of those being booked using points. That means we earned points on a number of stays, helping boost those balances.
We earned a lot of points with IHG in particular. That’s because my five night stay at the Candlewood Suites South Bend Airport completed my Q2 Accelerate challenge (check out my post on Frequent Miler to see what my tasks were). Completing the challenge earned more than 30,000 points which was a great return for just five nights seeing as that effectively got us two nights free at the Candlewood Suites La Crosse in Wisconsin.
- IHG Rewards Club – 37,842
- Hilton Honors – 7,948
- SPG – 2,888
- Marriott Rewards – 183
- World of Hyatt – 50,247 (50,000 transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards balance)
- Radisson Rewards – 54,250 (40,000 from renewal of credit card)
- Choice Privileges – 10
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 5
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 14,498
Points Redeemed
As I mentioned above, we redeemed points for 1/3 of our nights in June. Some of those had been booked in previous months, which is why the redemptions don’t all show up this month. The World of Hyatt redemption is for a reservation in October – we needed to book now as most hotels in that city are becoming sold out.
- IHG Rewards Club – 90,000
- Hilton Honors – 0
- SPG – 0
- Marriott Rewards – 0
- World of Hyatt – 50,000
- Radisson Rewards – 0
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 50,000 (transferred to World of Hyatt account)
Total Points Balances
Taking into account all the points earned and redeemed, here’s our total balances at the end of June.
- IHG Rewards Club – 387,649
- Hilton Honors – 749,880
- SPG – 116,353
- Marriott Rewards – 313,492
- World of Hyatt – 15,474
- Radisson Rewards – 327,783
- Choice Privileges – 34,913
- Wyndham Rewards – 45,000
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 14
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 357,029
Here’s all that in table format for those who prefer:
Blog Stats
Some of our readers have shared in the past that they’d like to see some stats specifically about the blog, so here they are for June 2018:
- Number of blog posts published – 25
- Page views – 13,114
Final Thoughts
After May’s truly awful figures on the budget front, June was a welcome return to being under budget. We also earned more points than I’d expected which helped balance out the points we redeemed for a free stay this month and an upcoming free stay.
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