Heading into last month, I wasn’t positive we’d be staying on budget in November. Accommodation and pet fees were due to take up more than half our budget, so that didn’t leave much room for spending on other stuff.
We also knew we’d be driving all over Texas, from Abilene to Houston to Corpus Christi to San Antonio to Odessa to Terlingua, so gas would likely take up a fair proportion of our budget.
So the question is: did we go over budget? And if so, how far? Read on to find out.
Miles Driven
In last month’s edition of our road trip stats, I predicted that we’d drive 3,250 miles in November given all the cities we were due to visit and how spread out they were.
At the start of the month, the odometer showed 101,395 miles, while by the end of November it had 104,302 miles on the clock. That means we ended up driving 2,907 miles – not too far off what I predicted. We didn’t end up doing much while we were in Houston, so if we’d explored the city more (we were staying on the outskirts), we’d likely have ended up even closer to the 3,250 mile mark.
Heading in to December, I might as well make another prediction. This one’s a little harder though as I’m not entirely sure what we’ll be doing. We’ve already done quite a bit of driving in the first few days of the month as we’ve visited both Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park. We’re moving on to El Paso today, then on to Canyon (near Amarillo) and then on to Denver, Colorado for the last two weeks of the year.
It’s the Denver stuff that’s throwing me. We don’t really have anything planned for there yet, so I’m not sure how much driving we’ll be doing – a large part of that will likely depend on the weather. Shae’s parents are also coming to visit us there, so it might mean we hang out at our Airbnb, or we might go out and do stuff together.
My prediction might therefore be way off, but I’ll predict we’ll drive 2,750 miles in December. As always, I’ll be happy if that’s an overestimation as it’ll mean we’ll be spending less on gas.
Money Spent
Once again it’s time for the juicy part of our stats – our spending! I already got my excuses in early above because, as you might’ve guessed, we went over budget.
Given our accommodation and pet fee expenditure though, it wasn’t terrible. Our daily budget is $100, so our November budget was $3,000. In case you’re new to our stats, that $100 per day has to cover our accommodation, food, gas, activities, phone bills, car insurance, etc.
By the end of November, we’d spent $3,331.94, so we were $331.94 over budget. That’s disappointing, but not unexpected.
In addition to accommodation and pet fees at hotels, gas took up a fair chunk of our budget at ~$240. We had two credit card annual fees hit which came to $190. We get more value from those cards than $190 so it’s worthwhile, but it sadly has to be accounted for. Our eating out expense was actually more reasonable than I thought it might be though at “only” $314.81.
Here’s a breakdown of our expenditure from November…
…along with a chart showing our spending so far this year.
Points Earned
This section is why I wasn’t quite as concerned about our overspending. Like I mentioned, we had slightly higher than average spending on accommodation, but as a result we earned a ton of hotel points.
A lot of those were World of Hyatt points – we maxed out their promotion and so earned loads of bonus points along the way. Those stays also helped me earn their top tier Globalist status. That meant we got a nice upgrade at the Grand Hyatt San Antonio and we’ll be using some suite upgrade awards for our stay at the Hyatt Regency Bali for our 15th anniversary next year.
We also earned quite a few Radisson Rewards points – 40,000 of those are anniversary bonus points for renewing their credit card which comes with an annual fee. That’s almost enough for three nights at one of their category 2 properties, so it’s well worth the fee.
Here’s a breakdown of all the points we earned in November:
- IHG Rewards Club – 3,901
- Hilton Honors – 12,715
- Marriott Rewards – 1,826
- World of Hyatt – 68,939
- Radisson Rewards – 40,500
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 9,100
Points Redeemed
All our stays through to the end of 2018 were already booked some time ago. That means we didn’t redeem any points in November.
Now that we’ve started planning out 2019, we’ll be starting to book hotels for January and February. We’ll therefore likely redeem points in December.
- IHG Rewards Club – 0
- Hilton Honors – 0
- Marriott Rewards – 0
- World of Hyatt – 0
- Radisson Rewards – 0
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0
Total Points Balances
Taking into account all of the points earned last month, here are our total points balances as of the end of November 2018.
- IHG Rewards Club – 399,079
- Hilton Honors – 697,186
- Marriott Rewards – 667,902
- World of Hyatt – 152,241
- Radisson Rewards – 376,883
- Choice Privileges – 39,251
- Wyndham Rewards – 45,000
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 10
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 240,652
Here’s all that information in table format:
Blog Stats
Here are some stats about the blog as I know some people are interested in that. I took it fairly easy on publishing posts over the entire month – and especially over Thanksgiving – so there were far fewer posts than normal.
- Number of blog posts published – 13
- Page views – 13,131
Final Thoughts
It was disappointing to go a few hundred bucks over budget in November, but all our hotel stays ended up earning points worth far more than that. I’ve a feeling we’ll be going slightly over budget in December too, primarily for the same reason – we have more paid stays than points stays, but we’re maximizing those hotel stays and so will be earning even more bonus points.
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