I’ve always watched my money closely – in fact, maybe too closely (I should spend more time making money and less time counting it) – and feel that everyone underestimates their spending unless they explicitly enter every detail into Excel or Quicken as demonstrated by nostra.
This is especially true on vacations and construction projects of any magnitude, be they $100 or $100,000 jobs.
The cheapest trip I ever did was $300 for two people camping in Mexico for 7 full days. That includes everything and we went about 600 miles south. This was pre-kids about 9 years ago.
In general, camping is a great low-cost way to travel.
golf – We did a Holland trip out of SD recently. It was excellent. Best thing was being home 15 min after getting off the ship. You’ll miss out on that with the LA trip, unless you live in LA. I hope to do it again, although – back on topic – it was pretty pricey at $3500 for wife and 2 kids in 1 windowless room. It is only something I would do after securing a long-term contract and only once every couple of years. We were very cheap on the shore excursions, though. The cruise line kills you on them. We did watch people swim with dolphins in Cabo and it was pretty neat. We brought our own booze, too. Pack it in water or juice bottles (depending on color) or they’ll take it from you and give it back at the end of the trip. I won $800 in poker tournaments. That brought the cost down to $2700, but not a cost-saving technique one can count on every trip 😉
We’ve looked into Europe trips also and decided that even though we could afford it, we didn’t want to afford it.
