Our money status (1 1/2 months in the trip and after Peru)
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008Gina. Bahia de Caraquez, Peru.
We got to Bahia last night and are now settling into life with Planet Drum (the organization Steve´s volunteering with). So far we´ve met the other two people in the apartment and some locals who help out, Steve did a mini day of labor, and we went to the market and had a yummy lunch of homemade (Steve-made) guacamole with chips and half of a cantaloupe. It was yummy, but not as good as our dinner last night at a little oceanside restaurant where we had enough food for 2 more people after eating our fill of seafood rice (Steve´s with shrimpies and mine with tons of squid, shrimp, and baby octopus. I feel a little bad eating baby octopus. I guess I shouldn´t since I don´t feel bad about eating pigs and they´re more human-like in emotions, but I still do. I won´t stop though because they´re really good!). Tomorrow I´m going to try to check out some volunteer opportunities for me and Spanish classes while Steve waters trees.
But this is supposed to be a post about finances. We´ve been really good about keeping track of our spending. I have a little day planner that has really helped. Since I already had our budget broken down by how much lodging, food, and sundries would cost each day (see updated budget post) it´s been easy to keep up with those amounts each day to make sure we stay at or under them. Which doesn´t mean we haven´t splurged from time to time, but my budget has turned out pretty accurate so far so we´ve also ¨banked¨a lot of unused daily budget money that we´ll spend on fun stuff later on. I also took our long-distance travel budget which I had as one big lump sum for the year and broke it down into $500 total for the three months in S. America. And I combined replacement clothes, books and maps, and sourvenirs into one category called Extras and broke it down to $400 total for S. America since they were also lump sums for the whole year.
So, the way we´re organizing things is that on each day block in our organizer we have something that looks like this:
- L (for Lodging)
- F (for Food)
- S (for Sundries)
- T (for long distance travel)
- X (for Extras)
And whenever we buy something we just write down the total and add it up at the end of the day. We then take our daily budget of $32 (for L, F, and S) and figure out if we went over or were under for the day. Then we keep a running tally from day to day of how much we have ¨Banked¨so then we can splurge and not feel guilty. We also transfer the T & X amounts to another page in the organizer to keep a running total of how much we´re spending for those since they´re total S. America amounts not daily amounts.
Here´s how things looked for S. America. Since their currency is nuevo soles we underestimated how many soles were the equivalent of our dollar budget. That way we were being conservative with the exchange rate since it changes. When we arrived it was around 2.6, then it went up to almost 3, then back down to 2.8. We decided to average out that it was about 2.7 soles to the dollar as far as our converting things to dollars in retrospect, but at the time we were working on a low 2.5 exchange rate assumption (we eventually added 6 soles to our daily budget when it got close to 3 soles to the $).
| Category | Budget | Spent |
| Lodging | $16/day (43 soles) | avg. 30 soles ($11) |
| Food | $12/day (32 soles) | 32 soles a day ($12) |
| Sundries | $4/day (10 soles) | Varied daily–usually cab rides |
| Long distance travel | $500 for 3 months (1,350 soles) | 722 soles ($267.50) |
| Extras | $400 for 3 months (1,080 soles) | 623 soles ($231) |
| Banked | (money saved from daily budget) | 295 soles ($109) |
Hopefully for the next month we´ll save a lot of money since Planet Drum is really inexpensive. We´ll need to buy food and anything else we need, but we don´t have to really pay for lodging or any big ¨volunteering¨expenses. So depending on what I end up doing and how much Spanish lessons cost us, we should be able to easily stay way under budget and splurge on some cool jungle time and other touristy things that we´ve done a good deal of but definitely not everything we could have done. I´m looking forward to sleeping in the same bed for more than 1 or 2 nights and just living for a while. Hopefully I won´t get too cranky in the heat! It´s not Alabama quality heat, but it´s still pretty hot and humid especially when you have no AC and no fan! But there are lots of windows in the apartment and it´s on the second floor so it gets a pretty good breeze (or at least it did today). We´re getting closer to the ecuator all of the time and will one day do the obligatory tourist ecuator straddle at the big Ecuador ecuator monument. Steve definitely has a thing for peninsulas since 1) he´s from San Francisco a pretty famous city on a peninsula and 2) he picked Bahia as our place to reside for the next month and it is a much smaller peninsula (we walked around it this afternoon) with the Pacific on one side and a river on the other. He´s just a water guy, I guess. The two other guys in the house are into surfing, so I´m sure there will be lessons or silly attempts in our future. I´ll try to get some good photos of Steve wiping out!
montarsig