MARCH 2023 EXPENSE REPORT
Introduction
This is my first ever Expense Report and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be posting this! This report took me hours to create so get cozy, grab a cup of coffee and spend the next 10-15 minutes reading about my expenses.
Going forward, it’s my plan to publish these on a monthly basis. While it’s currently just an Expense Report, I hope that it will soon be an Income & Expense Report. It’s rather clear to me that unless my youtube channel goes viral for some unexpected reason, I won’t be making money from Youtube anytime soon, so it’s essential I create other income streams so I can stay on the road.
Without further ado, I’ll go into my expenses for the month of March, which was a truncated month of travel for me, given that I arrived in my first country on this year of travel (#32/100) on March 23rd.
Expenses
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The transportation section of my expense reports will include any pre-booked transit journeys from destination A to destination B: these are flights, trains, buses, ferries, and rocket-ships if need be. Excluded are public transportation, metros, taxis, ubers, buses to/from airports, etc.
Transportation - $503.10
Notes:
Including my flight from the U.S. to New Zealand certainly drove up the total transportation cost, and I probably shouldn’t have included it, but I wanted you guys to see the killer fare I scored on my flight to New Zealand. Kindly note how incredibly low that fare is and please feel free to look up a one-way flight from Kansas City to Auckland to get an idea of what this flight typically costs.
Other than that positioning flight, my cash expense on flights was very low, given 2 of 3 flights were award redemptions. This will be the case going forward on most of my flights and it’s the only way I’m going to be able to stay on the road for as long as I will.
Accommodations - $454.96
This section is inclusive of all nightly accommodation expenses.
Notes:
My average nightly expense in New Zealand was $33.42, which is exactly what I would’ve expected in one of the notoriously-most expensive countries in the world.
Spending $110.51 per night in Melbourne for a hostel bed in a 10-bunk room however felt like wedging a nail under my big toenail and kicking a door as hard as possible.
Ok, not actually. But I was wildly concerned at the hostel prices when I was booking my accommodations in Melbourne and I was convinced that Melbourne was so expensive it made NYC feel like Nicaragua. I called and emailed several hostels and was surprisingly informed that I was visiting the city the same weekend as F1 Melbourne…
At that point I considered going a different weekend or going elsewhere in Australia, but I had already made other bookings on surrounding dates, so I had no option other than to pay an exorbitant accommodation price.
Thus, the average nightly expense of $55.55 in the month of May will undoubtedly be the most expensive for such stat of any month in 2023.
All Other Expenses (AOE) - $971.23
The All Other Expenses (AOE) section of the expense report includes all expenses outside of transportation and accommodation. Perhaps in the future I’ll break this up into multiple sections, but for now I’m just lumping these expenses into one section.
Categories are ordered from largest expense to smallest expense.
Notes:
Much like my accommodation expense, my average AOE for the month of March was likely the highest it will be for any month in 2023. New Zealand and Australia are activity-dense countries that excel in the rural, outdoorsy category more-so than urban. For that reason, I felt that I was doing something fun and exciting every day, but I certainly paid for it.
I spent an average of $60.85 per day on activities alone; and I wouldn’t have done it any other way.
I’m pleasantly surprised by my dining expense, averaging just $23.20 per day on food & drinks.
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I calculated my ADS for March by taking the sum of all expenses (exclusive of my positioning flight to New Zealand) / 9 days.
I have no doubt in my mind that this will be the highest ADS for any month this year for me! I went into New Zealand and Australia knowing that they’re two very expensive countries with plenty of activities that one must do, so this was no surprise. Additionally, visiting Melbourne during F1 certainly didn’t do me any favors!
average Daily Spend (ADS) - $165.18
Summary
total spend - $1,929.29
March, although short, was exceptionally expensive and I know that spending at this rate is completely unsustainable for the cash budget I have. It’s all sort of difficult… I want to strike a balance of seeing the essential sites in the places I visit but also not being careless with my spending. Of course New Zealand and Australia are very expensive, and in April I also visited very expensive countries, but I’m confident that my ADS will decrease on a month-over-month basis for the next few months.
I’m utterly grateful for all the great experiences I had in March and I sincerely wouldn’t have done it any other way. I got to see the Milford Sound, I went bungee jumping over a river, and I got several skydives in when I was on New Zealand’s North Island.
It’s wild to me that even with staying in hostels, eating from street food vendors, and taking the most inexpensive methods of transportation available, I’m still struggling to keep my ADS around $60 per day. Despite what all these influencers say that are congesting your social media timelines, make no mistake, traveling is expensive.
I realize it’s a very real possibility that I exhaust the money and miles I’ve saved, I don’t establish sufficient income streams in the next 8-12 months, and I end up back in the United States applying for jobs. While it wouldn’t be my preference, there’s no shame in that possibility becoming a reality. But as long as this dream is still alive, I’ll continue to work as hard as I am able and count every blessing I have!
Thanks for reading this, it’s you people who keep me going!
P.S.
If you want to support my journey, please consider following the socials linked at the bottom of this page, primarily my Youtube channel.