A few weeks ago, I shared how we were planning on changing how we calculate our road trip budget. You can read more about that here, but as a quick reminder we’ve decided not to include business expenses that are unrelated to the road trip itself in our monthly budget.
Before December 2019, we’d always included costs like website hosting, domain names, email service, etc. in our budget. Those costs had been included since January 2018 and we’ve now reversed them all out, so our budget this month looks different to how it would have without that change and the same goes for the year overall. The good thing is that all our future budgets will be accounted for this way and it gives us a little more money to play with each month – another benefit!
Anyway, here are all our stats from December 2019.
Miles Driven
I have a reminder set up for the last day of each month to take a photo of our odometer. Seeing as it was New Year’s Eve and our car was parked elsewhere, I set up a reminder for New Year’s Day to take a photo before we left Nashville, TN for New Albany, MS.
I completely forgot to take the photo when we left Nashville though, so the photo of our mileage below isn’t what it was at the very end of 2019. I’ve worked out where we were when I took that photo though, so it seems like we’d driven 34 miles which means our odometer reading on December 31, 2019 was 132,027. We began December with 128,934 miles on the clock which means we drove 3,163 miles in December. That’s significantly more than the 1,850 miles I’d predicted as we ended up driving around Tennessee far more than I’d expected.
I don’t think our mileage will be as high as that for January, so I’ll guess that we’ll drive 1,925 miles this coming month. Hopefully I’m a little closer with that guess!
Money Spent
Tennessee had some really good food (especially Memphis), so we spent a ridiculous amount on food during December – more than 40% of our budget 😮 Despite that, we still managed to stay under budget for the month as we only spent $3,049.17 versus our budget of $3,100, so we were under budget by $50.83.
Here’s a breakdown of our spending in December:
Our overall spending for 2019 looks much healthier than it had though due to us stripping out the business expenses. With 365 days in the year and a $100 daily budget, our road trip budget for 2019 was $36,500. Our final expenditure was $35,295.26, so we were under budget by $1,204.74 during 2019.
Here’s a breakdown of that overall spending for 2019:
Removing business expenditure affected our 2018 figures as well. We overspent fairly significantly during the first year of our road trip and originally had it down as $39,719.30 which meant we were $3,219.30 over budget during year 1. Stripping out those business costs makes that a little better and reduces that year 1 overspend to $1,932.14. That means that we’re still over budget by $727.40 over the course of two years, but that’s not bad as it effectively works out to be $1 per day extra that we’re spending. Our income is higher than the budget we’ve set for ourselves, so that’s not going to cause us any hardship.
Points Earned
We had a decent month when it came to earning hotel points. Shae recently got the IHG Premier credit card which had a 125,000 point signup bonus, so those points hit this month.
Our Hilton Honors points increased due to points from last month’s paid stay being credited this month, we earned some Hyatt points (mainly thanks to getting 10,000 bonus points for hitting 90 nights with them during 2019), our Radisson Rewards balances increased after getting a 20% rebate on points we redeemed during this promotion and more.
Here’s a breakdown of all the points we earned last month:
- IHG Rewards Club – 140,615
- Hilton Honors – 42,734
- Marriott Bonvoy – 4,338
- World of Hyatt – 18,774
- Radisson Rewards – 33,600
- Choice Privileges – 2,002
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 18,389
Points Redeemed
I booked quite a few of our upcoming hotel stays over the last few weeks, but most of those are paid stays. As a result, we redeemed very few points during December other than a 10 night stay at a Residence Inn which is only costing us 50,000 Marriott Bonvoy points.
That makes this breakdown much more straightforward:
- IHG Rewards Club – 0
- Hilton Honors – 0
- Marriott Bonvoy – 50,000
- 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 the points we earned and redeemed last month, here are our total points balances at the end of December 2019:
- IHG Rewards Club – 595,705
- Hilton Honors – 526,728
- Marriott Bonvoy – 340,433
- World of Hyatt – 61,463
- Radisson Rewards – 220,350
- Choice Privileges – 28,456
- Wyndham Rewards – 46,600
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 18
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 244,931
Blog Stats
A couple of months ago we took a hit with our traffic when we added an SSL certificate which made the site more secure. Our traffic took another dip last month, but it seems to have started recovering this past week, so hopefully January’s traffic will be better.
- Number of blog posts published – 21
- Page views – 17,001
Final Thoughts
Shae and I spent more in December than I’d been hoping, but we managed to stay under budget for the month and were under budget for the year overall, so that’s a decent result.
I’ve a feeling we’ll be going over budget a little in January 2020 due to higher accommodation costs. We have quite a few paid stays this month which are all relatively cheap, but it all adds up as a proportion of our budget. The good thing is that we should earn a good number of points from all these stays which will reduce our accommodation expenses in future months.
Norma says
I remain so impressed by all you do with points, etc. Could there be a how -to book in your future?
stephen says
That’s a tricky one as the world of points and miles changes all the time, so as soon as something was published it’d likely be out of date! It’s the kind of thing where it’s best to read sites like https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/ all the time to keep updated 🙂
Jeannine says
How are you deciding when to use points for a hotel stay vs. paying cash?
stephen says
I try to only use points when staying at a category 1 or 2 property. Hotel chains have different categories which cost a different number of points, so this means we can stretch our points as much as possible. For example, a category 1 Hyatt property costs 5,000 points per night and category 2 is 8,000 points per night.
Different hotel chains charge a different number of points for each category, so that’s something else we have to take into account. For example, IHG (Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, etc.) charges 10,000 points for category 1 and 15,000 for category 2. Having said that, every few months they publish a PointBreaks list where they have ~100 properties where they drop how many points you need to redeem per night to 5,000, 10,000 or 15,000 points per night.
I also take into account how much points are worth before redeeming them. You can get a good ballpark idea of how much points and miles are worth here: https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/reasonable-redemption-values-rrvs/
Whether or not we use points can also depend how long we’re staying somewhere. Hilton and Marriott both offer every 5th night free when using points, so we try to stay either 5 or 10 nights when using points with them to maximize that benefit. IHG offers the 4th night free to people who have their credit card, so we tend to stay 4 or 8 nights when redeeming points.
Even if a hotel is cheap points-wise, we still sometimes pay cash if that’s good value too due to the extra benefits you can get from that. For example, you can sometimes get up to 10-15% cashback when booking IHG stays after clicking through from a cashback portal like Rakuten/Ebates or TopCashback. You also earn points on paid stays, hotel chains often run promotions that can get you bonus points, plus paying with a hotel chain’s credit card can earn you lots more points. Other times there are Amex Offers that give you a statement credit when spending a certain amount (e.g. spend $250 at Hyatt Place and get a $75 statement credit).
There’s a lot that goes into the equations which is why I spend waaaaaaaaaaay too long trying to pick where we should stay in each place!