It’s been a little over a week since we returned home after a fabulous summer vacation and the return to regular life is a bit of a shock.

Did you take holidays over the summer? Did you do something fun? A trip, travel or staycation? How much did it cost compared to your budget or are you waiting for the bills to roll in to find out? Or perhaps you are hoping to avoid doing the tally 🙂

By the time the credit card bills come in the mail or online, we’ve moved on to the start of school and back to work and it’s easy to avoid comparing what we spent to our budget. It’s also easy to get carried away while enjoying oneself on holidays. 

The good news is that we set a budget at the beginning of the year and planned our summer vacation accordingly. Two weeks camping is not everyone’s idea of a great time but we live in a beautiful province and we saw some amazing places and did a lot of fun things. It was a great holiday. We budgeted about $1,500 for 2 weeks camping and including our food/drinks, activities, gas, camping and 2 nights in a great cabin in Nakusp we came in at just over $1,500. Our expenses were slightly higher than budget because we bought some clothing items and spent a couple days at the IPE (Interior Provincial Exhibition in Armstrong BC) and enjoyed the rides, food and stampede. One could argue that money spent on food, gas and even clothing are part of our regular monthly budget. Either way, we had fun and the slight overage will not break our bank account.

I think we did 2 things right:

1. Set a budget and made our plan based on the budget 

2. Took a minute to tally up the expenses to understand whether we met our plan or not

Good information for next year! A trip to Ontario is in the plan.