This nice gadget shopping guide over at The Technium inspired these rules of thumb for household purchases at The Simple Dollar. Since I'm still fresh off my trip, here is my list of vacation spending tips:
Do pay for location – One of our best decisions of the entire trip was deciding to pay a little extra to stay in downtown during our time in Chicago. We had originally planned to stay outside the city and just catch the bus into downtown until one of our friends who lived in the area convinced us that it was worth the extra cash to stay downtown. Being in the middle of all the action allowed us to easily catch a little breather back at the hotel between our day activities and night life. We didn't have to worry about catching the last bus out of town, and it was nice to be able to walk outside and find something to eat at any time of the day or night.
Don't pay for tours – This doesn't include specialty tours like say a tour of a baseball park where they bring you on the field, in the press and luxury boxes, and even in the club house. When I say don't pay for tours, I mean don't pay for someone to take you around to see the Empire State Building, Central Park, and Statue of Liberty while you're in New York. You can research all the hotspots of your destination before hand and check it out yourself. You will find time and time again that you're spending unexpected amounts of time at places you wouldn't have thought were that interesting. Something you don't have the freedom to do on a scheduled tour. One of my experiences with this was an impromptu rock skipping contest a friend sucked me into while checking out the Mississippi River (I won two orange juices).
Don't pay for a travel guide – We ended up throwing out the travel guide when we followed some bad advice it gave us in Harlem. Instead we relied on yelp for our dining choices, which has a much wider range of places to choose from anyway, and we relied on our previous research of the city to find things to do during the day. For the second time in this post, the value of great planning and researching your destinations is priceless.
Do bring plenty of cash – The most annoying repeating charge I ran into was ATM fees. I brought about $150 in cash thinking that would be plenty for a three week road trip. Many of the restaurants we stopped by during long driving stretches were in the middle of nowhere and accepted cash only. The restaurants that did accept credit card would often put our entire table on one tab, forcing us to split it using cash. Add in the public transportation cost, parking, and hotel tips in the bigger cities and we were all out of cash within the first week
Do risk it all – risking it all became our motto on this trip. It didn't always work. We ended up wasting money and time trying to get into the Jimmy Fallon Show, and ball park tour in D.C. But most times it was well worth it. In Boston we risked buying front row seats for a Red Sox game that had an extremely high chance of raining out again just like the night before. It turned out to be a great game, we got a ball from one of the home team players, and it turned out to be one of the best experiences of the trip. As a rule of thumb, I would say if you have a chance at a lifetime experience, it's worth the small risk of some wasted time or money.
No comments:
Post a Comment