How Much Family Vacation For 5 Months
If you’re planning on taking a family vacation for at least five months and don’t live in your vehicle, these tips will help you plan for the financial side of a long vacation. How much vacation time should you take for family vacation? That’s a question so many of us ask. All of us could use an extra escape to recharge and reconnect. Now imagine if you could get away with your family more often, what would that do to your mental health and relationships?
What if I told you I could save you hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars on your family vacation? Would you be interested? Of course! That’s why I’m here. The primary goal of family vacations is to have a good time with your spouse and the kids. But incase you had forgotten it can raise a lot of questions. This article will address the main concerns people have about such trips.
Heading off on vacation is both an exciting and daunting experience. Did your boss give the office the week off or do you have to make up those days before school starts? Whatever the case, families need to plan ahead and make sure that their trip is not just fun for the adults but also kid-friendly.
How Much Family Vacation For 5 Months
Budget Area 1 – Home Rental and Moving Costs
We have a condo in downtown Toronto. It’s a pretty desirable location and we initially thought that it would be easy to find a renter. We advertised the unit as a fully furnished short term rental, initially setting the rent at $3,500 per month. After getting exactly 1 inquiry during the first week of the listing, we decided to lower the rate to $3,000. Interest was still low. After discovering the limitations of the short term rental market in Toronto, we contacted a realtor to help us find a tenant, which would cost us a ½ month’s rent if the realtor found a renter. We also spent $164 to list the unit on various sites, and in the end, it was with a $5 boosted listing on Kijiji that we found a tenant to rent the place for $2,400. We were lucky, since paying the realtor would have cost $1,200.
To prepare the place for showings, we had moved out most of our clothes and personal belongings. The movers cost $600 and we were fortunate to have friends who generously offered to keep our stuff in their basement, saving us the cost of a rental locker. We also needed to forward our mail through Canada Post, which was $135 for 6 months. The money we made from renting the unit was about $200 less than what we pay for condo fees, property taxes, and our mortgage, but I am not going to factor that figure into our trip budget as those are sunk costs that we pay anyway.
Total Home Rental and Moving Costs: $934
Budget Area 2 – Transportation
Over 148 days, we visited 35 cities, and also journeyed into the Sahara Desert. We used every available mode of transportation, including Ubers, taxis, subways, streetcars, buses, ferries, planes, trains, and automobiles, oh, and camels. Since this was one of our biggest expenditures, we worked hard to keep these costs low. We walked any distance under 3 km, took subways rather than taxis when we had the option, and even opted for long distance bus rides over high speed trains (if the time difference was reasonable). Had we more of a set schedule, we likely could have saved money buying plane and train tickets well in advance of our departure date.
We do regret renting a car to drive through Southern Spain when the train would have been a cheaper, and possibly more comfortable, option. The price of gas and highway tolls are steep in Europe. Plus, parking in European cities is a nightmare; I am pretty sure there is no Spanish word for ‘parking garage’. The European rail system is excellent. If we were allowed a do-over, we would have have skipped two of our car rentals periods. The first was a 9 day rental in Southern Spain and the second, a 10 day rental in Southern France. The only rental we were thankful for was the car we used to travel through the beautiful La Rioja wine region in Northern Spain.
Total Transportation Costs: $10,948
(includes 5 flights, 3 coach rides, 9 train journeys, 2 ferries, a 5 day Moroccan tour, 19 car rental days, plus various taxis and subway rides)
Budget Area 3 – Meals
Let’s start with dining out. Living in Toronto, we tend to eat out a lot. The food here is so good that the expense is unavoidable. We spend about $600 per month living in the city and would happily spend three times that. Over our 5 month trip, we spent an average of $1,050 per month, so our family was spending an average of $450 more per month eating out. We realized early in the trip that we would have to largely ignore the Michelin star restaurants we frequently passed and so the trip was not the culinary adventure we had hoped to experience. That will have to be for another time. However, we had a lot of great meals and, as you can see by the budget difference, we did indulge on a regular basis.
Most of our accommodations included a full kitchen and that gave us an opportunity to cook at home quite frequently, keeping our dining out costs in check. We discovered that the cost of groceries varies widely in Europe, with France and Croatia being generally more expensive than Canada, Germany and Spain being about the same, and the UK and The Netherlands a little less. Over the 5 months, we spent $600 per month on groceries, compared to the $525 we average in Canada.
Total Meal Costs: $8,389
Budget Area 4 – Accommodations
Thanks to a service we worked with called HomeExchange, our total accommodation costs over the 5 month trip were just $2,300. The FREE home share service allows users to generate points by sharing their home. It’s similar to AirBnB except no money is exchanged. Anyone with a house or apartment that they are not using while on vacation (or a second home) should consider this service, as it allows users to accumulate points that can be used to rent accommodations while on vacation.
We spent all but 15 nights of the 148 trip in a HomeExchange, frequently getting the opportunity to meet our hosts while being afforded the luxury of a cared-for home with a kitchen, and often a bin full of toys, to the kids’ delight. We were fortunate to be working with HomeExchange for our trip and so we did not have our home open for an exchange during the trip, but we’ll be doing so in the future (Canadian Thanksgiving is available if you’re looking!). Given that we paid $2,300 for the 15 nights that we did not use HomeExchange, we realized substantial savings with the service. If you do plan on city hopping through Europe using AirBnb or Booking.com, expect to pay in the vicinity of $125 to $200 per night.
Total Accommodation Costs: $2,306
Budget Area 5 – Insurance
The main insurance we purchased was a comprehensive travel insurance plan, which included coverage for emergency medical expenses, trip delays/cancellations, and baggage loss, including theft. Most banks offer this type of insurance but we liked the rate as well as the coverage provided by World Nomads. The plan cost $1,157 for our five month trip. When signing up, we needed to indicate our destination countries but were later able to add Croatia and The Netherlands to the package for no additional fee. Happily, we never had to use it, but I felt secure with the insurance.
Perhaps the best item included in the package was the coverage for theft that included items kept inside a locked car or on our person (but not those in a locked hotel room). We had heard that cell phone theft is rampant in Spain and even experienced it first hand when a friend had her phone stolen at a restaurant in Marbella.
We also purchased an insurance plan on Yashy’s laptop, a decision we made two days before we left, after our son spilled water on her old laptop. The Geeksquad protection plan we bought for $28 a month from Best Buy seemed prudent. We never had to use that insurance either but it was a wise decision, given how frequently we moved and how wild the kids can get. Our last insurance item was called LugLoc. It’s a little device that I put into my backpack that has a built in SIM card. The device can provide its GPS location almost anywhere in the world. At a cost of $90, which includes six months of coverage, I enjoyed the peace of mind that it gave me.
Total Spent on Insurance: $1,362
Budget Area 6 – Phone Services
We actually saved money on cell phone usage! Both Yashy and I were able to put our Canadian cell phone service on hold. I am with Rogers and was only able to put the service on hold for 4 months at a cost of $7 a month, saving me $400 total. Yashy was able to stop her services for the entire trip and saved $45 a month. The $625 we saved was far more than the $137 we paid for SIM cards and data services in Europe and Morocco.
Total Savings: $488
Budget Area 7 – Activities
Most of the activities we did were blog features for which we we received complimentary access. In general, the tourist boards, museums, and amusement parks we contacted were happy to host our family in exchange for a couple hours of work. Other cities, like Manchester, had a number of free museums, while many places, like Madrid, offered free admission during certain days and times, usually on Sunday. For the whole trip, we manage to spend just $256 on museums and attractions by working remotely.
Total Cost: $256
We had a few other small expenditures here and there, like the $23 we spend on a new backpack after the zipper on Yashy’s $150 Lululemon backpack broke early in the trip. Of course, we also spend some money to buy a few gifts for friends and family back home and bought the kids the occasional toy. Those expenditures aside, the costs outlined above provide a comprehensive look at what you might expect to spend on 5 month family trip through Europe. I think that, had we not been working with GuestToGuest, we would have limited the number of cities we visited to between 5 and 15 and looked for monthly rentals. This approach would have reduced our transportation costs by roughly $3,000.
Or course the biggest expense of all is lost salary. If you are able to convince your workplace to take you back after a trip like this, then what do you have to lose? For us, we are likely faced with 6 to 12 months of lost salary each and so the cost of the trip is significant, despite a few contracts we completed while working remotely. However, we have always viewed the trip as a sort of mid-life retirement. We are using some of our savings now in lieu of spending them later in life, when we may not have the energy to embark on such an adventure. We are living the MasterCard commercial. The expenses are listed above; the experience was priceless.