May 2024 Budget Report (Galicia, Spain)
A new continent, a new living situation, and new opportunities make for a new set of slow-travel rules to live by!
Not to mention new patterns of spending, now that we are in Galicia, Spain.
So how does our May 2024 budget report look, with all of these upheavals in our lives?
Let’s take a look.
Accommodation: $0.00 USD
This is my kind of month for accommodation expenses!
The reason we have no accommodation expenses is that we are Workaway volunteers in May (and most of June), so accommodation is provided by our hosts.
Pretty good deal since a Workaway joint annual membership is only around $50 for us.
Less if you are single.
If you want to read more about what Workaway is and might consider signing up for an annual membership, use OUR WORKAWAY REFERRAL LINK and you’ll get an extra month!
Activities: $24.14 USD
A pretty mild month of activity expenses, and we suspect this will be changing soon. Recovering at home and hanging out doing odd jobs around our property during May kept things very cheap!
Basically this total is only from tickets to the Domus Mitreo archaeological museum (3.30€/$3.52 USD per ticket) and the Museo Diocesano Catedralicio de Lugo (8€/$8.55 USD per ticket). We visited both of these places when we first went to Lugo with our hosts, before our colds set in.
Alcohol: $84.73 USD
One of our “wetter” months in a while, due to the excellent wine, beer, and local spirits offered in the Galicia region.
3 bottles of local distilled liquor, 7 local beers purchased in the supermarket, a wine festival, a few tapas bar pub crawls, and two bottles of wine.
Still, not too bad all things considered.
Eating Out: $156.31 USD
Our cheapest international eating-out month this year.
As you will see in a moment, most of our eating took place at home. But in the 4 times we ate formal dinners out, our meals were absolutely HUGE! This accounted for just under $140 USD of this expense category total.
The rest of our expenses were from various cafe runs we made in the local area.
Groceries: $592.32 USD
Our biggest international grocery bill ever.
And with good reason, since we did most of our eating at home.
As I mentioned in our last post about Galicia, groceries here are surprisingly inexpensive compared to some places we have been.
But we made up for that by buying much more!
Trust me, we aren’t starving.
Medical: $19.21 USD
Nothing really noteworthy here except for some OTC medications we purchased.
Miscellaneous: $82.20 USD
We had some annual expenses pop up this month, like our website domain fee and our Workaway annual membership fee.
We also had to pay to get some financial documents notarized online, as well as buy a replacement handle for a garden tool that broke.
But all in all, nothing crazy.
Supplies: $109.74 USD
All of our supply expenses were for basic home upkeep stuff that everyone buys.
But we also purchased some galoshes, work gloves, and other minor items to make our Workaway duties easier on our bodies (totaling about $61 USD).
Transportation: $348.70 USD
A pretty expensive transportation month, at least compared to the other expenses we had.
The bulk of this total came from our unusually expensive train tickets to Galicia ($173.36 USD) and the International Driver’s Permit we bought and shipped to us for our European travels ($144.44 USD).
The rest of the total came from local bus fares. So far these have been around $5 USD per ride, but the fare is distance-based so the costs will change as we take more day trips.
Utilities/Upkeep: $39.59 USD
A pretty low-expense category total overall, made up primarily of our monthly MyRVmail membership fee ($20.75 USD) and the haircut I got in Taboada ($15.09 USD).
The rest is from our 30-day 1 GB LTE/5G BNE eSIM data plans ($1.94 USD total) and toothpaste.
Total Expenses for May 2024 = $1,457.54 USD
Now THAT is a monthly budget total I can get behind!
Having our spending $1000 lower than our $2,500 monthly goal is a pretty good feeling.
It is amazing how removing accommodation expenses from the equation makes daily living very inexpensive, even in Europe.
And in other news, water is wet and the sky is blue.
Here is a pretty graph summarizing our spending for May 2024:
And this has very quickly right-sized our monthly spending average, which after 10 months is now $2,424.47.
We are finally in the black again. Woo hoo!
And we expect June 2024 to be more of the same budget-wise since our Workaway gig will take care of accommodation again.
That said, our upcoming July expenses could be brutal since this final month of our travel year will be spent in Madrid! And rent there isn’t cheap.
We’ll see how the budget ball bounces over the next couple of months.
Until next time…
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