Expenses
Below are our expenses and how they compared to our budget (in USD):
Cost of Transportation: $1,087 versus Budgeted: $1,000
Cost of Visa: $30 versus Budgeted: $0
Cost per day: $38 versus Budgeted: $59
Our days in Mexico will be unforgettable, not only because it was our last country of Our First World Trip, but also because it was a great country to visit. The country is large, therefore we did have to spend the entire transportation budget plus a little more. We did not anticipate paying any visa fees and the reality is that that fee was paid to Belize authorities since we crossed through Belize from Guatemala to get to Mexico. We did have another option of getting into Mexico without crossing Belize, but we think that would have resulted in more transportation fees, so the Belize visa fee was worth it.
We did a good amount of CouchSurfing that helped with the daily expenses. Overall, these numbers do not look so bad, but if you take into account that we spent three times longer than anticipated the budget goes through the roof. We were 58% over budget in the overall country budget, which was not bad considering the circumstances of staying longer.
As the last article in expenses, it is a good time to look back at how we did in our overall trip budget. We spent almost half the time in Latin America and prior to arriving we had a surplus on our overall trip budget. It seems like we let loose, we visited 17 countries in Latin America and of those, we spent more than a month in 14 of them. This definitely hurt our budget, but fulfilled our dreams! This resulted in being 8% over budget in the overall trip budget.
