After a dodgy first eight months of the year budget-wise, we did much better with our spending in September and October. However, I was a little less confident that we’d be able to maintain that low spending in November.
I was overseas for 10 days during that time which helped reduce our road trip spending, but nearly the entire month was spent in an Airbnb which meant our accommodation spending wasn’t as low as it had been the previous two months.
Did we still manage to stay under budget? Read on to find out about that and the rest of our road trip stats for November 2024.
Miles Driven
November began with our car’s odometer reading at 236,457 miles. By the end of the month it was at 237,150 miles which means we drove 693 miles in November. I’d predicted in last month’s stats post that we’d drive 1,300 miles, so I was way off with my guess. To be fair, we’d initially planned to visit places like Death Valley National Park and the Hoover Dam, but we didn’t end up doing that which is why our mileage stayed so low.
As for our mileage in December, there’s not much point in guessing that as it’ll be very low. We drove from Las Vegas to Denver as we were leaving our dog Truffles and our car with friends there, so that’s all the mileage we put on our own vehicle before flying to Hawaii. We have rented cars on the islands, but we haven’t been keeping track of that.
Money Spent
Our road trip budget is $125 per day which has to cover accommodation, food and drink, activities, etc. With 30 days in November, that meant our total budget for last month was $3,750. By the end of the month we’d spent $3,429.40 which means we stayed $320.60 under budget.
One of the reasons we managed to spend less was because our gas expenditure was so low as a result of driving fewer than 700 miles in the month. The other key factor in staying below budget was that we didn’t have to pay any hotel pet fees as a result of spending much of November in an Airbnb.
Here’s a breakdown of our spending in November…
…and a chart tracking our spending so far this year.
Interestingly, that underspend in November means that we’re $31.43 under budget for the year as a whole so far. That’s a significantly better situation than we were anticipating in early September seeing as we were so far over budget at that point. We have pretty much zero chance of staying under budget by the end of 2024 though unfortunately. We’re spending nearly the entire month of December in Hawaii and things aren’t cheap here. Although all of our stays were booked with points and so we didn’t have any cash outlay there, we’re renting cars on each of the four islands we’re visiting, plus food and activities are pricey.
As a result, I’m expecting us to end up over budget by the end of 2024, but hopefully only by a few hundred bucks rather than anything too crazy.
Accommodation Cost
Seeing as most of November was spent at the same Airbnb in Las Vegas, this section will be nice and quick for once!
November 1-4: Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe, NV. We redeemed 17,000 Hyatt points per night.
November 4-December 1: Airbnb in Las Vegas (this one). We’d actually booked this stay from November 3-December 4 despite not needing a few of those days because it was cheaper to book a month-long stay (and thereby receive a larger discount) than it was to book the specific dates we needed. The total cost was $1,999.64, but we paid with Airbnb gift cards we’d bought at a discount which reduced the cost to $1,779.40. That means it effectively cost us $65.90 per night for the nights we actually needed it for.
Hotel Points Earned
We had some good boosts to our hotel points balances last month, but for a variety of reasons. The large influx of Hyatt points primarily came from a cancelled award stay, while the Hilton points came mostly from credit card spend.
- IHG One Rewards – 4,772
- Hilton Honors – 105,497
- Marriott Bonvoy – 3,363
- World of Hyatt – 112,959
- Choice Privileges – 100
- Wyndham Rewards – 8,870
- Hotels.com OneKey – $16.47
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 23,040
- Capital One – 379
- Citi ThankYou – 2,566
Hotel Points Redeemed
On the redemption side of things, there wasn’t much on that front other than redeeming some Hotels.com OneKey Cash towards a hotel stay.
- IHG One Rewards – 0
- Hilton Honors – 0
- Marriott Bonvoy – 0
- World of Hyatt – 0
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com OneKey – $25.26
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0
- Capital One – 0
- Citi ThankYou – 0
Total Hotel Points Balances
Based on those changes, here’s how our total hotel points balances were looking at the end of November.
- IHG One Rewards – 275,315
- Hilton Honors – 388,697
- Marriott Bonvoy – 256,925
- World of Hyatt – 195,995
- Choice Privileges – 24,351
- Wyndham Rewards – 109,298
- Hotels.com OneKey – $22.35
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 477,775
- Capital One – 270,335
- Citi ThankYou – 79,849
Here’s that information in table format:
Hotel Free Night Certificates
There were a few changes to our lineup of hotel free night certificates in November. I redeemed an IHG certificate during the Frequent Miler Million Mile Madness challenge, while on the earning side we got a new Hilton certificate from a credit card renewal and a Marriott certificate from a different credit card renewal.
- IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 1
- Hilton (any property worldwide) – 1
- Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 3
- Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 0
- Hyatt (category 1-4) – 3
- Hyatt (category 1-7) – 0
Blog Stats
Flying literally around the world for a third of the month of November meant we only managed to get 10 blog posts published last month, although that’s still more than I might’ve originally expected considering how busy that month was!
- Number of blog posts published – 10
- Page views – 8,340
Final Thoughts
It was awesome that we managed to stay under budget again in November, especially because it also put us under budget for the year as a whole. With our spending in Hawaii to still be confirmed though, it’s doubtful that 2024 will end with us being under budget, but it’s been a pretty good run overall.
Leave a Reply