I really jumped into FIRE in September last year between our awesome trip to see the eclipse and my 2711 mile drive back to California. When driving by yourself for 2711 miles you need something to listen to, or at least I do.
After my life changing eclipse experience, I figured some personal finance podcasts would be a great way to pass the time (3 days, 2 nights). I downloaded a few different ones, some were good, some were okay, but most had too many advertisement/sponsors. One of them kept me entertained/educated for most of the journey, ChooseFI. A lot of their content is really good and keep the interviews and roundups entertaining and informative, but as with any podcast not everything they talk about will be applicable to everyone (and sometimes you just don’t know you need it yet).
Travel Hacking
Right off the bat, they mentioned one of the pillars of FI was travel rewards. My gut reaction was “that’s dumb, I never travel I can skip this episode I won’t learn anything useful.” However, my mind kept turning and I realized we had just burned a lot of airline miles, hotel points, and money for an anniversary trip to see the eclipse.
We have decided we want to travel more so I was ready to give this travel rewards thing a try. In January I signed up for the Southwest Rapid Rewards Premier Card and the Southwest Rapid Rewards Plus Card, on the same day. I got both (50,000 sign-up bonus offered on both at the time) and we achieved our companion pass in April (required $10,000 of spending which based on our unexpected expenses and normal spending wasn’t an issue).
Now that we had the method of travel locked down we had to decide on where.
Southwest travels to a lot of US locations (and soon Hawaii) and some Central America locations. We initially narrowed it down to Belize, Costa Rica, and the Bahamas.
Eventually, we decided on Costa Rica based on what we wanted to do and recommendations from others.
Helpful Resources (No affiliate links here)
Like we have done for all our travels we planned the trip ourselves. Some of the tools we used:
Our first step was figuring out our flights. We couldn’t find a fight to Liberia, CR only to San Jose, CR and we needed to fly from Oakland, CA. I think it would have been really funny to fly from San Jose, CA to San Jose, CR but that option didn’t exist for us. By going at the beginning of the wet season we avoided a lot of crowds and cost of the round trip airline ticket was cheap (35,568 points).
Red Eyed Tree Frog in La Fortuna, Costa Rica
What did it cost?
Here is the breakdown of our expenses:
- Airline Tickets: $161.08 ($80.54 in taxes each)
- Rental Car: $212.25 (includes mandatory liability insurance)
- Hotels (8 nights): $577.2 (average of $72.15)
- Gasoline: $72.96
- Parking: $89.71 (at the airport in Oakland)
- Food: $340.05
- Tours and Touristy Things: $732
- Taxi: $60 (Remember to verify the meter is zero before starting your trip, pretty sure I got ripped off)
- Souvenirs/Gifts: $68.96
- Pre-Trip Items: $125 (swimsuits, bug spray, sunblock, etc.)
- Extra Costa Rican Currency: $35
- Grand Total: $2474.21 ($275 per day)
What could we have done better?
- We didn’t stay in the cheapest hotels (I’m sure there is a better way than booking.com)
- Not getting ripped off by the taxi on the first day
- Less leftover currency (I wanted to keep one of each denomination though as their money looks really cool)
- The touristy things were the biggest expense (which there really isn’t any way around it for things like zip-lining, kayaking, etc.)
- Pre-booking the parking could have saved us some money
- Spending less on food would be good too, it seemed like every meal was 20 dollars
All that being said we had a great time and it was well worth the money we spent, though I will try and do better for our next trip.
