January 2024. The first month of the new year and the first month of the final year of our 50 state road trip.
Heading into January I thought it’d be touch and go as to whether we’d be able to stay under budget. Our accommodation spending wasn’t due to be terribly high, but the hotel pet fees for having Truffles with us were due to be high – almost $600 in fact over the course of the month.
Add in the fact that we have a tendency to overspend, it wasn’t looking too positive for us sticking to our budget. Did we manage it though, or did 2024 start off like much of 2023 went in terms of spending more than our budget was supposed to allow? Read on to find out.
Miles Driven
We kicked off the year with 211,751 miles on the clock, while by the end of January our car’s odometer reading was at 213,802 which means that we drove 2,051 miles last month. I’d predicted that we’d drive 2,200 miles, so that was a fairly reasonable estimate.
We’re going to end up driving more than that in February. We’re currently in Miami and are heading down to Key West tomorrow. After that we’ll be heading up to West Virginia for 1.5 weeks, then across to Indianapolis via Cincinnati. That in itself is due to be more than 2,000 miles, so add on driving to and from attractions, stores, etc. and I’ll guess that we’ll drive 2,950 miles in February.
Money Spent
January has 31 days which means our $125 per day road trip budget gave us $3,875 to play with. By the end of the month we’d spent $4,160.32 which means we overspent by $285.32.
Our main elements of excessive spending seem to have been groceries, eating out and hotel pet fees. If the pet fees had been at an average amount, we’d have stayed on budget. However, that does also mean that if we’d been more careful with how much we spent on eating out and eating in, we’d have been well under budget.
Here’s a breakdown of our spending for last month…
…and a chart with our spending for 2024 so far.
Looking ahead to our spending for February, I’m a little pessimistic about our chances to staying under budget. Our combined spending on accommodation and pet fees is going to be fairly high. The extra mileage we’ll be putting on our car means we’ll likely be spending more on gas, while staying in Key West will no doubt be expensive between parking fees and eating/drinking out.
Accommodation Cost
We stayed in seven different places in January – here’s how we paid for our various stays.
January 1-2: Hyatt House Mt Laurel, NJ. We booked this using 5,000 World of Hyatt points.
January 2-6: Airbnb in Portsmouth, VA (this one). Shae and I lived in Portsmouth, so we stopped off there on our way down to Florida to see family and friends. It cost $114.55 per night, but we paid with Airbnb gift cards we bought at a discount and so our net cost was $97.37 per night.
January 6-7: Hyatt House Charleston/Historic District, SC. The drive from Portsmouth to St Augustine was fairly long, so we decided to stop halfway in Charleston as we like it there and it gave us an opportunity to grab dinner again from Rodney Scott’s BBQ. We had a category 1-4 Hyatt free night certificate expiring, so we used that for our stay.
January 7-14: Hyatt Place St Augustine/Vilano Beach, FL (see my review here). This is a category 3 property in the World of Hyatt program which means it costs 9,000, 12,000 or 15,000 points per night depending on if pricing is at off-peak, standard or peak. We got lucky with our dates as it was off-peak for our entire week-long stay, so we only had to redeem 9,000 World of Hyatt points per night.
January 14-19: Airbnb in Homosassa, FL (this one). We booked this larger home as we were staying there with Shae’s mom and stepdad. It cost $176.67 per night, but paying with discounted Airbnb gift cards and splitting the cost with Shae’s parents meant our share was $79.50 per night.
January 19-27: Staybridge Suites Orlando Royale Parc Suites, FL (review coming soon). We booked this using IHG points and they use dynamic pricing which means the number of points you have to redeem can differ from night to night. For our dates pricing ranged from 17,000-25,000 points per night.
I have the IHG Premier credit card which gives every 4th night free on award stays, plus I have an IHG Select credit card which gives a 10% rebate on award stays. That meant our net cost was 13,613 IHG One Rewards points per night. We bought those points for 0.5cpp (cents per point) when IHG was running a sale, so we effectively paid $68.07 per night which was excellent value for a one bedroom suite with a kitchen.
January 27-February 1: Vacasa rental in Miami, FL (this one). Vacasa has a partnership with Wyndham Rewards which allows you to redeem 15,000 Wyndham points for every bedroom a property has. This property only had one bedroom, plus we get a 10% discount when redeeming points thanks to having a Wyndham credit card, so we only had to redeem 13,500 Wyndham Rewards points per night. That was excellent value for an apartment with a view like this!
Hotel Points Earned
We earned quite a few points in January. The increases in Hilton, Wyndham and Chase Ultimate Rewards points were largely due to credit card spending, while the big influx of Hyatt points was as a result of transferring in 150,000 points from Chase.
Here’s a breakdown of everything we earned:
- IHG One Rewards – 2,777
- Hilton Honors – 103,014
- Marriott Bonvoy – 3,222
- World of Hyatt – 156,183
- Choice Privileges – 8,000
- Wyndham Rewards – 66,410
- Hotels.com OneKey – $0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 97,961
- Capital One – 35,840
Hotel Points Redeemed
I was busy in January booking award stays over the coming months; we now have pretty much all of our accommodation booked through mid-July. That means we redeemed quite a lot of points last month:
- IHG One Rewards – 94,900
- Hilton Honors – 194,000
- Marriott Bonvoy – 240,000
- World of Hyatt – 138,000
- Choice Privileges – 84,000
- Wyndham Rewards – 94,500
- Hotels.com OneKey – $0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 150,000
- Capital One – 10,000
Total Hotel Points Balances
Based on all those changes, here’s how our hotel points balances looked at the end of January.
- IHG One Rewards – 254,706
- Hilton Honors – 280,490
- Marriott Bonvoy – 84,950
- World of Hyatt – 116,577
- Choice Privileges – 135,651
- Wyndham Rewards – 79,002
- Hotels.com OneKey – $19.26
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 273,962
- Capital One – 317,332
Here’s those details in table format:
Hotel Free Night Certificates
There wasn’t much of a change to the number of free night certificates we had in the first month of the year. The only adjustment was getting a Hyatt certificate back after cancelling a stay we’d originally planned to use it on.
- IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 1
- Hilton (any property worldwide) – 1
- Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 0
- Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 0
- Hyatt (category 1-4) – 1
- Hyatt (category 1-7) – 0
Blog Stats
We managed to get caught up on quite a few posts in January, so we got 11 posts published last month versus only 8 the previous month.
- Number of blog posts published – 11
- Page views – 11,610
Final Thoughts
Going almost $300 over budget was disappointing. While most of that can be attributed to having high pet fees for the accommodation we’d booked, we did also overspend on food and drink. Fingers crossed for February going a little better, although I’m not convinced it will be good!
C J says
Happy new year ….always wondered why you don’t post both Citi and Amex points earned as they can be transferred to hotel programs like Chase and C1
Enjoy your last year ….I’m on my 12 th year full time
stephen says
That’s awesome that you’ve been traveling full-time so long! We’re struggling with moving pretty much every week for the past six years – do you do slow travel where you stay in one place for a month or more at a time, or do you move more frequently?
As for why I don’t also include Citi and Amex points in these posts, there’s a couple of reasons. For Citi, I previously only had a Citi Custom Cash card which, although it earns ThankYou points, couldn’t transfer to Citi. I then got shut down by Citi a few months ago, so those points were moot (I did managed to cash them out for a cent per point though). That said, Shae got a Citi Premier card a few months back which can transfer to Choice, so you’re right that I should include that. I’ve set up a calendar reminder to include those in next month’s stats post.
With regards to Amex, although they can be transferred to Hilton, Choice and Marriott, those programs generally aren’t a good use of Membership Rewards and so I don’t really think of Membership Rewards as a hotel transferable currency like I do with Chase and Capital One (and Citi going forward). We have transferred to Hilton once during a transfer bonus for a specific redemption, but that was a one-off; in the future, I doubt we’ll do that.