We spent a bunch in August but since we were seeing one of our daughters I was happy to do so.  We spent $5,282 overall and the details are listed below.  Lee also entered some information on our travel below.

Campground Fees – Now that we are not work kamping we have to pay for campground fees.  Originally we were going to spend two weeks at Lebanon Park but we liked the fairgrounds campground so much we took advantage of their monthly rate and cancelled our other reservation.

E- Cigarettes – Turns out that the taxes vary wildly from state to state for E-Cigarettes.   Minnesota is one of the worst where the excise taxes almost double the cost.  Seriously it was $27 for three 1.5ml cartridges.  I decided to try buying the liquid in bulk and filling my own, to avoid the high taxes, but the new dispenser was $40.  Overall the whole month was frustrating from this perspective, but Lee found me a map and I was happy to see that Minnesota is absolutely the exception rather than the rule.  Going forward I will be much more careful about where I buy from.  On a personal note this really ticks me off.  I am using the e-cigarettes instead of smoking and although it is not the best choice it is certainly better than the alternative.  Paying 95% of the wholesale price in tax is nuts.  The following map came from taxfoundation.org. which has lots of really good tax information of all kinds.

Dining Out – We took our daughter out to eat several times and we ate out ourselves a few.  We blew our budget by over $400 in this category and our waistlines absolutely show it!

Gifts – I spent a ton of time this month looking for baby clothes for Oliver in thrift stores and garage sales.  We also bought Kat some shelves for her basement and spent other money on gifts as well.  I definitely see a rise in the budget for this category in our future.

Groceries – Not sure what happened in this category as we spent over $1K, except we were able to make a couple of Costco runs.  Groceries in Minnesota really aren’t that cheap especially in comparison to Texas.

Home Repair – Lee took advantage of being in one place for a while to take care of a few home items, and we also bought a dash cam as a result of the accident we had. He read a bunch of reviews and did a fair amount of research and settled on the Kenwood DRV-A301W.

Truck Fuel – The one area we did really well with was truck fuel coming in over $200 under budget.  We are using a combination of the TSD Logistics card and Gas Buddy to find the best prices and it is definitely making a difference.

Additional monthly data from Lee…

This month we used a total of 556 GB of data on our AT&T unlimited plan, across all of our devices. (Total for the year is 39 terrabytes)

For August we did not have a mixture of places we stayed, we spent every one of the 31 nights in a paid spot, water and electric (50 amp) at $14.47 per night on a monthly rate, for a total of $448.

We put a total of 1,143 miles on the truck, which was less than half of what we did last month, because we didn’t do any traveling. In fact the trailer never moved, so no miles for her.

Year to date we’ve traveled 8,550 miles, 2,747.6 of which was pulling the trailer, with year to date engine hours of 242 hrs, 47 mins, 32 secs.

We burned a total of 81.2 gallons of diesel, and averaged 14.1 mpg for all of our travel, with a year to date total of 722 gallons at 11.8 avg mpg.

There’s no travel map for the month of August, because we didn’t travel anywhere!

Starting in September when we start to travel again, and are using the TSD Logistics card, I will detail the savings from that card here as well, because DATA!!!

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