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This past summer our family of three took a vacation and spent $1,000 for the entire trip. This included airfare, hotel, car rental, entertainment, and eating out costs for the entire seven days of our trip. Over 60% of our expense for the trip was the airfare and car rental with the rest of the trip costing less than $400. Here is how we did it.
Staying With Relatives
On this vacation, we only stayed in a hotel one night so our total hotel costs for the trip were $100. Every other night of the trip we stayed with relatives. Since we had relatives in various parts of the state that we were visiting, we got to see a good portion of the state and spend very little doing it. With an average hotel cost of at least $100, staying with our family members saved us at least $500 on that trip.
Family Entertainment
Because some of the family members that we visited had kids around our child's age, we frequently had built-in entertainment for our child. The kids would go off and play while the adults visited. This saved us money on having to go find something to do every day of our trip. Our child never complained about being bored since there was constant entertainment wherever we went.
Saving on Eating Out
We spent a total of $50 on food and eating out during the entire trip. The rest of the time our relatives were kind enough to feed us or to take us out to eat. We also saved by making sure that the hotel we stayed at for the one night was one that included breakfast in the morning, which also saved us another meal cost.
More Freedom in Entertainment Spending
Because we saved money by spending the night with relatives and on restaurant costs, we were able to spend more on entertainment costs. We were able to spend about $250 on entertainment. With that money we went to a baseball game, amusement park, zoo, lake cruise, and other miscellaneous activities during our trip. We used coupons we found during our trip to also help us save money on entertainment costs. We would not have been able to afford to do all of the things that we did if we had not saved money in other areas of the trip. This made for a trip that was more fun for all of us and created wonderful memories.
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