When we set off on our 50 state road trip on January 1, 2018, Shae and I had a budget of $100 per day.
That had to cover everything – accommodation, gas, food, activities, pet care, pet fees, cell phone bills, etc. We’ve done a surprisingly good job of sticking to our budget overall; there have been a number of months where we ended up going way over budget for one reason or another, but also many months where we stayed under budget. As a result we’ve mainly stayed within our budget year-by-year.
With inflation increasing much more over the past year and that likely continuing for an unknown length of time, we’ve decided it’s time to increase our daily budget.
In 2021 Dollar Tree announced that due to inflation they’d be increasing prices at their “dollar” stores from $1 to $1.25. We’re doing something similar as we’re increasing our budget from $100 per day to $125 per day.
That’s a 25% increase and we do know that inflation hasn’t increased by 25% since January 1, 2018. However, with us recently deciding to increase our 5 year road trip to an 8 year road trip, we figured that sticking to a $100 daily budget for a full 8 years wasn’t going to be realistic. It therefore made sense to us to increase our budget by a higher amount now that we’re at the halfway point of our road trip so that we don’t have to increase it again before the end of the road trip in 2025.
We also have a number of expensive states still to visit – California, Hawaii, Alaska, New York, etc. – so having an increased budget will help mitigate some of those higher cost-of-living expenses in addition to regular inflation.
Despite having this higher budget, our hope is that our spending won’t correspondingly inflate to fill it. Although we have some expensive states still to visit, we still have a number of states that shouldn’t cost as much like Iowa, Arkansas, Nevada, Nebraska, etc. It’s my hope that we’ll still manage to stick to a budget of closer to $100 per day where possible, but having the increased budget will mean there’ll be more activities we can participate in if we want rather than always being so constrained by that $100 daily budget.
[…] daily budget on the road trip last year was $100 (it went up to $125 per day from January 1, 2022). That means our budget for December was $3,100. Unfortunately we spent […]