It’s hard to believe that December has already come and gone, which nearly brings us to the end of our two-month stay in Merida, Mexico.
In a couple of days, we’ll be off to the town of Palenque for a quick visit. And then onward to our next home base for 28 days – San Cristobal de las Casas.
So the next several days are going to be pretty busy for us!
But now it is time for our December 2023 Budget Report, which is the first month since we restarted traveling internationally that we spent entirely out of the USA.
Let’s survey the damage and take a look at how things turned out.
Accommodation: $881.86 USD
Ouch. This was our most expensive month for accommodation since August 2023, when we stayed in a Panama City, Panama hi-rise!
But even still, we feel we got a lot of bang for our buck at these places!
We suspect that this cost will decrease for January, but might increase spectacularly during February when we are staying in Oaxaca, Mexico with friends.
We’ll see.
Alcohol: $64.33 USD
Nothing terrible here. Just 7 bottles of supermarket wine and a couple of beers over dinner at a restaurant.
Eating Out: $283.16 USD
Honestly, were it not for an extremely overpriced beach lunch in Progreso, Mexico ($63.67 USD) and dinner out with a Canadian expat couple we met ($41.05 USD), this would have been a pretty cheap expense category.
Previous examples aside, most of our eating out was for local lunches, street food, and snacks. And we didn’t usually do that sort of thing more than two or three times per week.
We’ll see how expensive Eating Out is in future months.
Groceries: $373.91 USD
Seeing that we ate at home 80% of the time, it was no surprise that Groceries were more expensive than Eating Out.
We’ve done a good job figuring out the Grocery leverage points in supermarkets where we can find the best bargains for specific foods. But still, we are a little surprised that Groceries aren’t much less expensive for us than other countries we have visited, at least in the big picture.
Perhaps this is because Merida is a larger city in Mexico, but perhaps not. We’ll test this hypothesis when we settle down in San Cristobal de las Casas, which is a smaller town with vibrant local markets, so we’re told.
Medical: $301.54 USD
Another busy month!
The vast majority of this cost was from our dental examinations and cleaning ($201.24 USD) and a bunch of routine blood tests ($94.46 USD) performed at a local lab. The remainder was just for small OTC purchases.
Supplies: $48.90 USD
Nothing noteworthy here. We just bought normal disposable apartment supplies, as well as a few portable kitchen upgrades (frying pan, spatula, knife, corkscrew), which we will carry around with us while we travel within Mexico.
Transportation: $112.71 USD
This expense category is made up mostly of bus and collectivo fares to different day trip locations in the Yucatan region. The remainder is a couple of Uber fees and Va-y-Ven metro card recharges.
Tough to say if our transportation expenses will go up or down in future months, considering we have several longer (and more expensive) relocation ADO bus rides scheduled in our future.
Utilities/Upkeep: $120.46 USD
The majority of this expense category was from taking advantage of a Black Friday 3-year + 3-month deal to extend our AtlasVPN subscription ($67.77 USD). A great bargain, and we won’t have to think about that for at least 3 more years.
The remainder of this category was from recharging our Telcel Amigo Sin Limites cell phone data plans, buying 20 liter purified water carboys for the apartment, suntan lotion, and public bathroom fees.
Total Expenses for December 2023 = $2,424.56 USD
Here is a pretty graph summarizing our December 2023 budget report:
Not bad, considering all of the things we did in Merida in December.
This brings our current monthly spending average to $2,638.07, which is still a little over budget for reasons we explained in our last Quarterly Budget Report.
It is slowly creeping down, but we still have work to do. We are hoping that two free months of accommodation in Spain this year will help!
We’ll see.
Until next time…
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