Is it really March already? The first two months of the year have flown by. They say time flies when you're having fun.
For me, February comprised 12 days in Switzerland visiting my daughter, 8 days skiing in France, and 8 days at home in Dubai. Early retirement isn't too shabby😀
But my nerves are jangling wondering what these travels have done to the February costs. After all, Zurich is crazy expensive, evidenced by it's top 3 most expensive cities listing. Vacations are also not cheap. Perhaps, for once I'll feel that Dubai will be my low cost part of the month.
I've now finished my sums, and here are the February numbers:
Not as bad as I thought. Our normal day to day costs (circled in red, and what I'm focusing on this year) were £2,381 ($3,371) which was just a little higher than in January. And almost a quarter of the total February cost was on gifts.
The gifts were a house warming present for Rebecca, and ski helmets for both Rebecca and Sam, although I'm sure Rebecca said she was going to give us the money for her helmet...kids!
Higher spend on car costs in February are a bit misleading as I included my train journeys while in Switzerland. I know it's not a car, but transport, so sort of similar. Swiss residents tend to have a discount card but, for visitors without this, the trains are expensive.
I'm interested to see how the day to day costs continue over the coming months. The comparison is complicated by the affect of foreign currency exchange rates being different in 2018 compared to 2017, but even stripping that out I think our spend is 10% to 15% less than last year at the moment.
The lower section of the table, vacation, overseas running events and round the world trip isn't looking so good though. Wowsers, the spend in two months is £10,584 ($14,942)! However, the running events and the RTW trip are only happening later in the year, in April for Boston Marathon and between July and November for the RTW trip, so hopefully this will even out over time.
I need to rename the RTW trip, at least for this portion, as it covers Australia and Asia only. We'll decide whether to add other parts of the world on once we find out whether we like travelling.
Our ski holiday was great fun, and we loved getting together as a family for it. We paid for the lift passes and equipment hire for the kids which added to the cost. On the flip side, our accommodation for most of the stay was free as the developer of the apartment we are buying in the same town provided us with a very nice apartment.
To be honest, I'm not worried about the vacation, overseas running events and RTW trip costs. The latter two are more than likely one off events, and the vacation costs are discretionary as to how much we choose to spend.
That's it for this month. Nothing too shocking, so here's hoping that March will be much the same.