Oregon Part 8: Numbers
A good trip wouldn’t be complete without some analysis of our spending and numbers. To give you an idea of the trip, here’s a quick breakdown in one graphic:
Cost Estimate
For this trip, we made a cost estimate of 8 days, 7 nights driving 3,000 km for $3,587.30 CAD ($3,228.57 USD) or $149.47 CAD per person per day. We expected to be staying in Hotels that would cost 60–80$ per night and that eating out would be about 15$ per person per meal. It turns out that we over estimate by quite abit. This was probably my worst estimate ever.
Actual Trip costs
We spent a total of $2,124.9 CAD over 7 days. This is $101 CAD per person per day. This is astonishingly good for a road trip with hotels. For comparison, in 2014 we spent a total of about 55$/day for living + entertainments each. Meaning that the road trip, disregarding the cost of insurance and the vehicle, is only twice as expensive as living in Vancouver just to go to work 5 days a week.
Our trip costs are broken down as below in $ CAD:
I expected hotels to be the largest category and it was, probably because we had two rooms each night. I was surprised that we spent so much on Souvenirs but isn’t very concerning once we consider that $170 USD was at Powell Books and $90 was on instax film.
Ultimately, we were only 66% of our initial estimate, over $1,000 USD less than expected. This makes me feel good even though I acknowledge that the initial cost estimate was pretty poor to begin with. Better under than over right? Should I have put more into the initial cost estimate? I don’t think so. I think we were prepared to spend more on this trip and while we weren’t frugal, coming out well below is a good bonus.
Payment Methods
For this trip we planned on using a combination of cash and the new Amazon Chase Visa that I’d recently acquired. Most “regular” visas and master cards charge a percentage fee, typically around 2–5%, when paying in a different currency in addition to daily the conversion rate. The Amazon Chase Visa does not have a percentage fee so one only pays the conversion rate.
We suspected that it would be better the paying by cash but we didn’t know how much. So, knowing some places would require cash (state parks), we withdrew 1,000$ USD and went on our way.
This is how the spending between Cash, the Amazon Chase Visa, and my BMO Mastercard (used once) compares.
While we used cash for 36% of our purchases, it was the worst exchange rate on record at 1.1869. It is worth pointing out here that Yuki has a US checking account at BMO so the Canadian funds are transferred first to this account (paying the conversion rate of the bank) and then withdrawn as USD. This is slightly better than straight up buying USD from the bank.
The BMO master card faired slightly better, but was only used for 1 hotel purchase on-line. This is surprising because documentation on this MasterCard says that they charge 2.5% for exchange rates. I suspect that because I bought the hotel through hotels.com in Canadian currency, the website made their own exchange rate and billed us in CAD. This is a conversion on the price not the exchange.
The Amazon chase was, as expected, similar to the average exchange rate of the trip indicating that yes, it does only the exchange rate without any other fees. The only problem we ran into was hitting the credit limit and not being able to use it anymore. The Chase Amazon has a credit limit of $1,200 and it takes 5 days to transfer funds from our bank to Chase. This meant that we got halfway through the trip and were unable to use the card further because we’d reached the credit limit. The end conclusion is that the Amazon Chase Visa is the best way to make purchases in a different currency while traveling if credit cards are accepted.
We paid $314.12 in exchange rates which is 14.8% of our entire spending. Yes, the Canadian Dollar was quite low at the time of our trip, about 84 cents, but another 2% just for using the wrong method of payment is an easy way to keep your pocket change. That’s a savings of $40 if everything was bought with the visa instead of everything being bought with cash; that’s enough for a good meal and maybe a nice souvenir.
Ending
Thus ends a highly successful and fun trip! It was a great ride and has given the urge to explore the Okanagan region at the next opportunity. It wouldn’t have been possible without Dad and we hope we can get him to come on another road trip in the future. Since we still don’t have a car, we haven’t figured out how to tour the Okanagan but are looking at the possibility of doing some adventure camping this summer; though that’s still a long time away because we haven’t been skiing yet!
