After doing so well with January’s budget (we managed to stay under budget by more than $500), I wasn’t too optimistic about how well we’d do in February.
When compiling our stats for January, I’d mentioned that we’d only booked our accommodation up to February 20. Those remaining 8 days therefore had the potential to make or break our February budget depending on if we paid for a hotel room, booked using points or stayed with friends.
How did we end up doing with our budget last month? Keep reading to find out.
Miles Driven
We began February 2019 with 109,137 miles on the clock, while it was reading 111,523 by the end of the month. That means we drove 2,386 miles during February.
I’d predicted last month that we’d drive 3,200 miles during February, so I was way off with my estimation. The reason there was such a difference is that we ended up spending the last week of the month not really going anywhere. We’d planned to visit Washington D.C. and thought we might be driving back and forth, but ended up spending the week in and around the hotel sleeping and catching up on work.
Our mileage in March is going to be very low. We’re currently up in New York having taken a Greyhound bus, so that’s a week we’re not driving. The last two weeks of the month will then be spent overseas in the UK, so I doubt we’ll drive much more than 1,000 miles in March.
Money Spent
I mentioned at the start of the post that staying on budget in February would likely be reliant on where we stayed the last week of the month. In the end, we booked a stay using points, so that reduced our accommodation costs.
Our budget for the month was $2,800 ($100 per day) and we spent $2,436.41. That means we managed to stay $363.59 under budget which was much better than I thought we were going to do at the start of last month.
The main reason we spent so little is because our accommodation costs were extremely low. Hotels only cost us just over $300 for the month as most of our stays were paid for using points. We spent more than average on activities and eating out though, so we’d have been even further under budget if we’d curtailed some of that spending.
Our budget for March isn’t looking too healthy though. We’re off to the UK and so we have some one-off costs – dog boarding, car rental, flight taxes & fees, etc. Truffles is also staying with a dog boarder while we’re up in New York, so all those expenses alone come to ~$1,000.
It’s therefore almost inevitable that we’ll go over budget, so I’m glad we did so well with our budget in January and February to help offset that.
Here’s a breakdown of our spending from February 2019…
…and a chart showing our overall spending so far this year.
Points Earned
Seeing as most of our stays during February 2019 were booked using points, we didn’t earn many points last month. We did earn a few points here and there though, so here’s a summary of how we slightly replenished our point balances.
- IHG Rewards Club – 8,569
- Hilton Honors – 3,000
- Marriott Rewards – 1,029
- World of Hyatt – 916
- Radisson Rewards – 0
- Choice Privileges – 100
- Wyndham Rewards – 1,600
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 2
- Chase Ultimate Rewards –2,837
Points Redeemed
Quite a few of our February stays had been booked in previous months, but we did make a few redemptions last month. Here’s how many points we redeemed last month across all the different hotel loyalty schemes:
- IHG Rewards Club – 40,000
- Hilton Honors – 168,000
- 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
Based on how many points we earned and redeemed in February, here’s how our hotel points balances looked at the end of the month.
- IHG Rewards Club – 445,335
- Hilton Honors – 561,354
- Marriott Rewards – 613,575
- World of Hyatt – 107,521
- Radisson Rewards – 320,883
- Choice Privileges – 24,288
- Wyndham Rewards – 46,600
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 12
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 267,621
Here’s all that points information listed in a table:
Blog Stats
In case you’re interested in how our readership is going, here are some stats for that:
- Number of blog posts published – 17
- Page views – 14,266
Final Thoughts
Any month when we stay under budget is a good month. Any month we stay under budget by hundreds of bucks is an excellent month. Last month was excellent!
As for March though, I’m less positive about our budget, so stay tuned next month to find out how badly that goes.
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