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Argentina - Savings are Ready!12 09 05 18  26
-------- An example of short terms savings and debt avoidanceI will be visiting Argentina on November for around two weeks. I may even get a chance to visit Chile and Uruguay. This is exciting for me, as I have never gone to the lower part of South America on vacation (it has always been to work, and it has been in Brazil). I will also go to Patagonia to see active glaciers. To avoid incurring into credit card debt that haunts me long after the vacation memories start to fade I have to put my finantial life in order first. And this Sunday I finished doing it! I needed three things I didn't had:
First of all, I needed to get plane tickets to Argentina. Those are quite expensive, as it is a really long flight. This is a long flight (New York to Buenos Aires is 11 hours, plus the time to get to New York). I must say these where the easier to acquire, but the ones that took the longest to accumulate the resources for. I do travel a lot for business. More than half of my travel is using American Airlines. Thanks to that I could get enough miles to fly my wife and myself to Buenos Aires for 60,000 miles each (120,000 miles) in coach. That leaves me with almost 164,000 miles - a bit short of my goal for the next big trip: Australia, which goes for 125,000 miles for a Business Class ticket (250,000 miles). That puts me almost 100,000 miles short of it -- my travels will have to get creative fast! Something I must stress is that the best use for miles is long trips. These trips to Argentina cost upwards of $1,000 dollars if I had paid with cash. The 60,000 miles used gets valued at almost 2 cents per mile. Had I used the miles within the US (for about 25,000 miles per ticket), I would have spent them on a ticket that may have purchased for around $250 - giving the miles a value of about 1 cent. Moral of the story: use your miles on long, expensive flights, and use cash on short flights within your own country. Vacation Money: We still don't know how much we will spend on this vacation. The Western Europe 2000 three week vacation we did costed us $1,996 each including plane tickets. The Japan 2003 two week vacation costed us around $2,000 each, not including business class plane tickets which where acquired with miles. We estimate it will cost us $2,000 for internal travel, hotels, food, and attractions. As you can imagine we optimize our spending. Our main vacation goal this time is to see beautiful places, learn about our world, and experience the local culture. We are not looking for five star hotels in this kind of vacation (if we wanted that we would have stayed close to home, or gone to a beach resort like we did in our honeymoon). As for food, we value eating what people eat there (not what tourists do): fortunately, Argentina is very well known for their steaks - large, juicy, aged, and great quality for a low price. Big items in our list is transportation: as we like to stretch our ability to see things that we would not have a chance to see in a long time. Internal air travel will probably set us back around $500 to $800. Yesterday I deposited $2,500 in my vacation money account (I had been saving it in a short term savings account). I take that it will cover the vacation and any incidentals resulting from it. Now I can just plan my vacation and forget about where I will get the money to pay for it. Camera: I got lucky. For a while I had been daydreaming about an SLR Camera. I do not believe we are in a time to be buying a 35mm film camera, so I was going to go for the digital rebel (a good quality and relatively inexpensive digital SLR that still sets you back for $900, not including optional lenses and memory). That would have been a difficult bullet for me to buy. Fortunately, my Aunt has a coworker that spends a lot of money, probably more than he has. He bought a very good Nikon N80 camera with a 28-80mm lens, a 70-300mm lens, and a 60mm micro lens last year for close to $700. It is a 35mm film camera, but the lenses are extremely good - it can take better pictures than most modern digital point and shoot cameras. She bought the camera from him for a small fraction of the original price and gave the camera to my father, which in turn gave the camera to me. I have decided to postpone the purchase of a digital SLR camera. I will save for it on a different account, and I will carry my Nikon N80 camera for this trip. My wife will carry her Olympus D-550 camera with her. Between the two of us we should be able to bring lots of nice pictures to share with friends when we come back. I will be saving money on a side account to buy a Nikon D70 or Nikon D50 later on: both producing superior photos than the low-end Cannon Digital Rebel. But for now, I have my need addressed. As soon as we finish detailed planning, flight, and hotel reservations I will feel ready for the trip. I love traveling. |