Right, so staying on budget is sooper important. I think everyone would more or less agree with this. And I know, it’s not just for travel. But when you are traveling it’s somehow usually more important than at home.
Unless you have some way to refill your travel account while you’re out, anyway.
So after saving up a huge pile of cash, what do you need to know or do to ensure a long, happy, and fairly comfortable trip?
You need to be able to keep track of everything in two different ways at once.
That’d be how much something costs in your home currency (in my case US dollars) and how much it’s worth to local people.
How about an example?
So 100Q is about $13, right? I keep that bit of math in my head all the time.
100Q is also about 1.5 days’ wages for your average laborer. Indeed, people working in shops and restaurants would be happy to make that kind of money.
So if you go out and see, say, “typical breakfast” for 20Q…
You might think “wow, that’s a great deal, only $2.50″
When what you should be thinking is “wow, that’s 1/3rd of a day’s pay.”
This seems to be more of a problem for people who are on really fast trips. They never quite set their minds into “local money” land. It’s also why prices go up on days cruise ships are visiting, or around fancy hotels and resorts.
That typical breakfast? Here in Guate it’s got about 1/4C refried black beans, a slab of fresh cheese (sometimes), two eggs (blech), a fried banana (also blech), and some tortillas. You can buy enough of everything to feed 10 people for the same 20Q (or more, gag) you might spend buying it in a restaurant.
If you only think in your home currency, you can run into problems. In expensive places, like Europe, you might run out of cash–after all, you’re expecting to be able to make your own breakfast for $5 or less a day.
Then you’d get to “cheap” countries and wonder why everything cost so damn much. I hear it here a lot, actually.
“I don’t know why everyone says Guatemala is so cheap, it’s really expensive.” They say, eating Burger King.
Or
“How do you spend so little, I’m spending $50 a day here in Antigua.”
Or any one of a dozen other things. At which point you learn that they *only* think in dollars. So $2 for a beer doesn’t sound too bad, and they have 5. Then $12 for a nice dinner doesn’t sound bad. And $3 for coffee, and and and.
And before they know it, they’ve spent $50, and they’re *still* sleeping in a huge dorm.
So to really stay on budget, you spend Q (or pesos, or w/e) like they’re dollars. Don’t think “Wow, this only costs 20Q, that’s like $2.50″, think “Wow, this costs 20Q, that’s like 4 hours wages… That’s a (30/40/400) dollar breakfast.”
It makes the “real” price much easier to figure out.
I apologize if that doesn’t make any sense. I’m full of benadryl thanks to this cold/ allergy thing I’ve got going on right now.
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