This month was kind of weird. I had family visit for a week which covered a week of lodging and food, but I ate out a LOT so my expenses were pretty high. I was just so burnt out on sharing space with others that I just didn’t want to deal with sharing the kitchen. I start house sitting in mid-March and that’s going to help a lot. It’ll be good to be in some solo space. And I miss cooking.
Also this month I spent $918.79 on replacing all of my tech. New phone, laptop, hard drive, and memory cards. I didn’t include that in my living expenses report because they’re business expenses, but I wanted to note it.
This summary covers nomad living expenses for 1-28 February 2018.
Location(s) Visited This Month
- Mexico City, Mexico
I toyed with the idea of traveling a bit during the last 2 weeks in Mexico but I just wasn’t in the mood. I am enjoying being in a familiar space and having friends around even though I’m also very ready to move on and keep traveling.
Transportation – $34.66
- It will be good when Uber is no longer an option. 🙂
Lodging – $327.83
- Because of the cost of renting in areas I want to be in, I’m in shared lodging the whole time in Mexico. Sick of it, but not enough to pay a lot more for a private place. The whole Airbnb in the middle was the one I shared with my family when they came to visit, so I didn’t have to pay for that.
- Breakdown *
- Airbnb Room – 12 nights (https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19273272)
- Airbnb Whole – 7 nights (https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/6952120)
- Airbnb Room – 9 nights (https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/21440168)
Food & Entertainment – $512.56
- This makes me cringe, but I was burnt out on having to share a kitchen so it made it really hard to get motivated to cook. I also had more than one evening of birthday and goodbye drinks with friends, and more working from cafes than typical.
Miscellaneous – $52.71
- This is mostly my cell bill from the USA. I kept it while I was job hunting so I would have a reliable US number, not have to do VOIP. So I’ll be switching to a local SIM for February to save on this. It’ll cost about half and still cover me when I’m in the US in March.
Monthly Total: Â $927.76
Daily Average: $33.13
Average monthly spend: $831.77Â ($168.24)**
Average daily spend: $28.20
* When I published my summary in 2015 I had more than one person accuse me of always Couch Surfing or always staying in 30+ person dorms in order to keep my costs low. So this year I’m tracking my lodging type as an extra data point.
** My average monthly spending target is $1k/mo. This number is the average for the months I’ve been working remotely since January 2018.  The amount in parentheses is the amount I’m over or under my goal.
At reader request, I’m adding a link to a google doc with all of the monthly data at a glance:
