How much are the holidays costing me so far?
$1560 – for three plane tickets to CA from DC and Philly
$162 – for my cabin rental on my camping trip with friends
This does not include the $100 for Christmas presents for the nephews and ~$100-200 for my boyfriend’s present. I’m upping the ante this year because his wishlist looks expensive. Doodads for vintage cars aren’t cheap.
Yeah, I know I said I wasn’t going to spend anymore money on my parents this year after buying them a new roof, but Christmas is my mother’s birthday and it’s really terrible to spend it apart. I’ve bought the plane tickets for my parents, so my sibling will be paying for the hotel my parents will use. I will do a combination of couch surfing with relatives and the hotel suite.
I have to edge in a car rental and trip to LA since it’s an open jaw flight. (Camping is somewhere near Hearst Castle. 5 years of living in CA and I never went. The time is now.)
I got a really bad feeling about this trip in terms of expenses. If I am lucky, I will carpool down to the campsite and crash at someone’s house in LA without needing to rent a car. (For some reason my sibling can always find a car for me to use to chauffeur my parents without me having to spend a dime.)
Oy vey. This is what budgeting is for. Planning stuff out in advance. I hope by my return flight from LA that I will have charged very little to my credit cards from this trip. The plan is to sock cash away for this.
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I feel you on the cost of flying from the East Coast to Cali during the holidays. I’ve flown there three times so far this year (from MA) and the cheapest flight I’ve gotten was $250 round-trip (for off-season travel next month), but I usually expect to pay around $600 during the holidays. I feel obligated to do this because my parents do not have the money to fly here and my huge extended family lives in So Cal. Sigh…Xmas is always expensive, but I will be so relieved when I move back and don’t have to deal with flying anymore!