I hope you have enjoyed the past few days of pictures from our trip to Michigan, because now it is time to talk numbers. I was very excited this trip to stay under budget! The extra money we ended up using for Christmas gifts and clothing so that will help our overall budget as well.

One of the ways that we managed to stay under budget was by finding a hotel that offered a nice breakfast each morning. We ending up eating all 5 breakfast at the hotel and took cups of juice for snacks as well. I did learn that most times you can get a better deal when you book and deal with a hotel directly. This particular hotel, we found a better deal online.  We also enjoyed the heated pool which provide free entertainment each day for us as well.

Gas was a huge expense. My budget was for $500. By using gas buddy on my phone and also filling up at Costco, we ended up spending only $419 for gas!

Food was the final area of the budget. I talked earlier about bring snacks for travelling as well as drinks.  One afternoon we found ourselves far from the hotel with no drinks so we stopped at Burger King, ending up spending over $10 just on drinks for everyone. This was our only extra expense, otherwise we ended up saving around $150 from our inital budget of $100 per day. Several things that really helped up besides having lots of snacks was using a gift card I won in the basket from Lily’s school. We ended up eating 4 meals in our hotel room, which allowed us to use our own drinks. Finally, we purchased 2 meals at Costco, these were the ones we ate in our hotel room. The kids loved the food and we didn’t have to brave a restaurant and it wait to enjoy a meal together. The third meal in our room were pizza, the resturant was in the hotel parking lot, the kids loved walking to get the pizza. The pizza itself was awesome!