November was a super busy month and it is important to note here that we are making lots of choices that we wouldn’t make if we were on a tighter budget. The pull (for me) to continue to live frugally and sock money away is definitely there, but I also feel like we are making up for all that time we spent living on so little. It’s an interesting mental struggle to be sure, but as you can see from the $7,263 in monthly expenses in November having fun won out. For more details see below. (For what it’s worth, we are still putting some money into savings every month. So even though we are spending more than we have in quite some time, we are also saving. – Lee)
Campground Fees – This is an area that shows what it costs if you really don’t pay attention to the cost of where you are staying. Several of the places we stayed were $50 a night which definitely adds up. $1,297 is still cheaper than a mortgage 🙂 (This is what it looks like when you have to stay somewhere, as opposed to being able to stay wherever you want. It’s also a very accurate reflection of the absurd prices people charge on the eastern seaboard. – Lee)
E-Cigarettes – Because we were in Virginia and the prices were the absolute cheapest I have seen them I stocked up. Trying to stay ahead of the curve here because they are getting harder and harder to find. When we get to Charleston I am going to try and find another solution. (I have nothing to say. I am a model of self restraint. – Lee)
Clothing – T-Shirts, T-Shirts, T-shirts !! $300!
Dining Out – We spent $575 which wasn’t that bad considering.
Entertainment – At $217 this was a bargain for all we did. We saved a ton of money by using our America the Beautiful pass and many other things we did were free or near free.
Gifts – This was definitely my contribution to the big month at almost $1K. It’s nice to have money again and I want to share it. Trying to share the wealth a little though so it’s not all going to Oliver 🙂
Groceries – It’s $891. I know, I know …don’t ask me why this is so high. We eat what we want though which is super nice. (Costco. I also don’t always strip out things that are non-grocery from Walmart. I am going to really focus on that in 2021. – Lee)
Home Repair – We spent $812 on this category. It’s pretty weird how many things are breaking at the 6 year mark. The biggest part of this is Lee bought a new to him phone. It was $482 which was much better than the $800 price it could have been. His phone was super old and just wasn’t working properly anymore so it was time. (The largest expense that wasn’t the phone was our TV antenna, which broke off and cost $129. Another $100 was a stove cover and LED ceiling lights. – Lee)
Personal Care – I got a pedicure (they had partitions around every station which was cool) and a wax. Lee by the way is cutting his own hair now and doing a tremendous job.
Tolls and Parking – I talk more about this in a later post but we spent $14 every time we crossed the Chesapeake Bridge and that added up. $254 in tolls…I miss the west. (Oh my God don’t get me started on tolls. I LOVE paying for roads I already paid for. Such BS. – Lee)
Truck Fuel – This was incredibly reasonable at $286! Super happy about this category. (I tried to go mostly downhill all month. – Lee)
(Well, that was boring, here’s the cool stuff! – Lee)
Additional monthly data from Lee…
For October we used 362 GB of data on our AT&T unlimited plan, across all of our devices. (Total for the year is 40.321 terrabytes)
We took3,655 pictures, bringing our total for the year to 16,687.
This month 100% of our nights were spent in only five places, because although we are traveling, all of our travel is short hops, which is a new way for us to travel, so we’re not staying anywhere just overnight, but for at least a week at each stop.
The least expensive was the first two days we spent at the NC state fairgrounds at $30 per night. Our favorite was Delaware Seashore State Park at $32 per night. The most expensive was the Four Seasons at $51.42 per night.
The total cost for our “rent” was $1297, which averaged out to $43.23, a 15% increase over last month.
We put a total of 723 miles on the trailer, pulling it for only five days! Our shortest travel day was only 115 miles, and our longest was 189 miles. Our total travel miles year to date is 5,640.
We put a total (travel and non-travel) of 2,459 miles on the truck over 46 hours of engine time, with a year to date of 13,784 miles on the truck.
Year to date we’ve traveled 13,784 miles, 5,640 of which was pulling the trailer, with year to date engine hours of 442 hrs, 35 mins, 33 secs.
We burned a total of 121 gallons of diesel, and averaged 13.8 mpg for all of our travel, with a year to date total of 1306 gallons at 11.9 avg mpg.
We used the TSD Logistics card four times this month!
Here’s the breakdown of our visits to truck stops using the TSD card. The “street” price is the price on the pump, and the actual price is what we ended up paying, including the fees.
| DATE | Gallons | Actual PG | Street | Actual | Savings | % Saved | |
| 11/1/2020 | 18.64 | 1.92 | 49.56 | 35.78 | 13.78 | 27.80 | |
| 11/7/2020 | 30.52 | 2.00 | 82.38 | 61 | 21.38 | 25.95 | |
| 11/24/2020 | 30.19 | 2.00 | 80.28 | 60.53 | 19.75 | 24.60 | |
| 11/29/2020 | 27.67 | 2.09 | 73.6 | 57.86 | 15.74 | 21.39 |
We LOVE using the card. In those four visits we saved $ 70.65, more than an entire fill up!!!
If you haven’t already read about the TSD Logistics card, you can read our post about it here.
Before the travel map, let me explain why the map has stuff that hasn’t been in the blog. There was so much going on in Washington DC that the posts about just that one stop has taken us all the way through November and into the first week of December. We left the Goose Bay Marina November 1, so all the stuff that we did and saw while we stayed at Four Seasons, Delaware Seashore, Kiptopeke and Americamps will be coming up in blog posts. So there are already ten posts in the hopper for you.
Here’s our travel map for October…
And our year to date travel map. In 9 days we will be rolling in to Charleston to see Kyrston and Jeremy and Oliver, having made a giant loop!
Jack says Merry Christmas, everyone!
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