It’s been a while but now that things are settled, I’m going to start doing my monthly summaries again.

This summary covers nomad living expenses for 1-31 January 2018.

Location(s) Visited This Month

  • Mexico City, Mexico

I ended up in Mexico City because I was job hunting and I wanted to be somewhere reasonably priced with reliable internet for interviews as well as easily accessible flights if I needed to get back to the US for a face-to-face. I don’t love it here as it’s generally too big for me but I have found some areas I really like and I have some friends here. So it’s nice to have people to hang out with regularly and be social. 🙂

Transportation – $32.19

  • Having Uber in town can make me lazy. Thankfully it’s cheap here.

Lodging – $279.11

  • This covers renting a room in a shared apartment as well as a membership to MindMyHouse for house sitting opportunities. I’m not generally a fan of shared apartments for longer terms, but DF is relatively expensive and when I booked this, I was jobless and really trying to keep expenses down. But, it’s clean, comfortable, and I have a private bathroom, so it works for me. It’s not the nicest place I’ve ever stayed but it’s far from the worst and I’m paying about half or less than what most of my friends are paying so it allows me to focus on some of my other financial goals now.
  • Breakdown *

Food & Entertainment – $351.17

  • This kind of food bill is what happens when I’m in a town where I have friends and want to be social. 🙂 Much more eating out than is typical, and Uber Eats is the devil.

Miscellaneous – $73.30

  • 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:  $735.77
Daily Average: $23.73

Average monthly spend: $735.77 ($264.23)**
Average daily spend: $23.73

* 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: