Well as promised, here is my recap of my trip to Toronto/NYC/New Jersey. I’ll break it down into 2 posts (one detailing the money, and one recapping the trip).
Let’s start first with the money breakdown.
Flights & Rental Cars:
$257.73 Vancouver-Toronto (flight)
$48 Toronto-Niagara Falls-Buffalo (1 day rental car, including gas)
$90 Buffalo-NYC (flight)
$19 New Jersey (1 day rental car, including gas)
$240.12 New Jersey-Vancouver (flight)
TOTAL = $654.85
Accommodation:
$208 Toronto (4 nights)
$325 New York City (5 nights)
$25 New Jersey (1 night)
TOTAL = $558 ($55.80/night)
Shopping:
$519.62 (seems like a lot, but considering I’ve been on a shopping ban for 5 months, and am now on one again for the rest of the year, that’s pretty decent. It will work out to spending approximately $43/month on clothing this year.)
Entertainment, Restaurants, Cabs & Miscellaneous:
$781 (unfortunately with so much cash being spent on subway/cab fares, plus miscellaneous expenses, splitting bills, etc., it was very difficult to break down my cash spending into categories – so it all gets lumped into one.)
TOTAL COST OF VACATION: $2,513.47
Halfway through my trip to NYC, I thought that there was no way I could make the original $2,400 trip budget with all of the shopping that I had been doing. But, you know what? I really didn’t do too poorly. Considering the cost of the trip – minus the shopping – was $1,993.85! In the grand scheme of things, that’s a lot of money. But considering I spent pretty freely, ate out for every meal (and had drinks with almost every meal too), and did lots of touristy things in very expensive places, I’m actually impressed that overall, I was only about $100 over budget.
13 Responses to “Toronto/NYC/NJ Recap (Part 1): budget breakdown”
Author comments are in a darker gray color for you to easily identify the posts in the comments
Leave a Reply
As seen in…
Recent Comments
Categories
- annual goals (24)
- banking (27)
- blog (192)
- budget (96)
- car (41)
- contest (26)
- credit card (20)
- credit score (10)
- debt (28)
- design business (37)
- down payment (28)
- education (15)
- EI (16)
- emergency fund (18)
- entertainment (194)
- fitness (165)
- guest post (19)
- health care (56)
- housing (59)
- investing (43)
- job (301)
- making money (55)
- miscellaneous (308)
- monthly challenge (52)
- monthly goals (118)
- motivation (38)
- property (43)
- recipes and food (27)
- relationship (121)
- retirement (30)
- saving money (179)
- scooter (24)
- spending (447)
- sponsored post (10)
- tax refund (23)
- travel (313)
- vlog (2)
- weekly spending recap (93)
You didn't have a drop charge for a one-way car rental?
We did, but it was actually quite affordable. I split the price of the rental with my friend.
sooooo what did you buy?! :)
My recent post Yosemite Budget Wrap-up
LOL! I will probably post a photo of all my purchases. Maybe. :)
Holy crap those are cheap flights! How did you swing those deals?
That is totally awesome considering how great a time you had, only $100 over and you did some shopping for the first time in a while. You basically stuck to your budget and still had a blast. Your budgeting and planning skills are top notch.
My recent post Net Worth- May 2011
Thanks! :)
Killer prices, eh? WestJet was having a seat sale on the Van-TO flight ($185 + tax one-way), and the other flights I booked through Expedia. I planned quite far in advance, and just kept watching the prices. Then when I didn't think they'd get any lower, I booked.
I keep hearing about expedia but every time I've used it I never seem to get particularly interesting deals. Do you use it regularly? Is there some trick to using it that I'm missing?
I use Expedia for about 75% of my flights. Maybe I'm just getting lucky, or I just plan ahead enough so that I can keep watching the prices? It's always been really good for me. I even booked a cruise once off Expedia!
I`m so glad that you had a great time and was able to stay under budget!
I`m looking into car rentals for the east coast and I`m hoping to score some good deals even though it`s high season.
Those are some kick-ass deals for flights! I'm kinda jealous. Have you ever tried Priceline and their name your price feature? I love that I can plug in what I want to pay and as long as I am a bit flexible, it will find something with my price range. The only problem with it is that it doesn't list flights from Canada.
My recent post Credit Score
I have looked at Priceline before when looking at hotels, but I really dislike how you don't get to know what hotel it is – just the hotel class. I would prefer to know all the details before randomly booking a place.