December wasn’t so bad, especially considering Christmas.  We spent $6,731 this month with extremely high gift, campground fee, and grocery categories.  One thing I wanted to mention is Lee and I were watching a morning TV show and we saw this idea to make one day a week a completely non-spending day.  We are going to give that a try on Mondays and see if it makes any difference at all in our spending habits.  I also wanted to mention that it is time for my annual budget review.  Hopefully I will have that out soon.  More details for the month of December are below.

Campground Fees – This was one of our highest months ever because of the place we are staying.  It is super close to our daughter and we really like it, but you have to stay at $400 a week (yes per week) until they have a monthly slot open up.  Thankfully it was just one week for us but then we paid the $960 monthly rate in advance, hence the high price in December. 

Clothing – I splurged and got some work shirts this month, taking advantage of the numerous sales.  Thrift stores are great for jeans and more casual wear but I am finding it necessary to buy new clothing for work.

Dining Out – We went over budget by $315.  Part of that was eating out when we were at my sisters, and part was with Kyrston.

Gifts – We spent around $1100.  This included the calendars we gave to friends and family and money and presents for our core family.

Groceries – I am convinced that this category is going up because of the Keurig coffee maker.  Lee said he would start tracking coffee separately so maybe he can give some insight here. Nothing else really stands out.  Again will be working on our annual review so look for that soon.  

Additional monthly data from Lee…

For December we used 557 GB of data on our AT&T unlimited plan, across all of our devices. (Total for the year is 40.154 terrabytes)

We took 553 pictures, bringing our total for the year to 17,240.

This month we only stayed in three locations. The least expensive was the NC state fairgrounds at $30 per night. Our favorite was Ebenezer Park, and it’s only $34 per night for nice big sites with full hookups. The most expensive was Oak Plantation in Charleston, SC at $ 57.98 per night. But those are also huge sites, and it’s a beautiful RV park with lots of massive live oak trees and moss hanging from the limbs. Part of the reason for the price is that they do not reserve monthly sites until you arrive, and so we had to pay the regular weekly rate for the first week. The price goes down considerably when you are monthly. We also had one night where we had already paid for Ebenezer Park but decided to leave a day early and so we ended up also paying for the first night at Oak Plantation. And there was one night where we had a reservation at two different locations in Charleston and had to pay for one night at the location we chose not to go to because I didn’t want to risk arriving in Charleston and having nowhere to go. It was worth the extra expense for peace of mind. The total cost for our “rent” was $1205, which averaged out to $38.87, a little less than last month.

We put a total of only 379 miles on the trailer, pulling it for only two days the entire month. Our shortest travel day was 185 miles, and our longest was 193 miles. Our total travel miles year to date is 6,019.

We put a total (travel and non-travel) of 1,254 miles on the truck, 875 of those miles were without the trailer.

Year to date we’ve put 14,163 miles on the truck , 6,019 of which was pulling the trailer.

We burned a total of 101 gallons of diesel, and averaged 12.3 mpg for all of our travel, with a year to date total of 1,407 gallons at 11.9 avg mpg.

We only used the TSD Logistics card once this month. 

Here’s the breakdown of our visit 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	Location	Gallons	Actual PG	Street	Actual	Savings	% Saved
12/5/2020		34.64	2.17	95.58	75.13	20.45	21.40

We LOVE using the card. If you haven’t already read about the TSD Logistics card, you can read our post about it here.

Here’s the December travel map:

And the map for the full year of travel. One giant circle!

Oliver says Happy New Year!!!

 

---

Supporting our Blog

We very much appreciate your support of our blog.

• You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
• You can purchase our recipe book filled with 80 recipes we have cooked in our RV and taste tested by Lee himself. You can purchase the kindle or paperback version on Amazon or buy the Apple version on iTunes.