Two-Week Family Trip to Guatemala – Budget vs. Actual Spending

After deciding to take a trip to Guatemala, I immediately got to work making a budget. Rather than just save up a random sum of money and hope it would be enough, I did lots of research and created a meticulous, well-thought-out budget. If you missed it, you can check it out here. Not only does that post give details into our specific trip, it will also walk you through my process of planning a detailed trip budget. If you have a big trip that you’re planning and you want to understand the financial implications, I definitely recommend planning your budget this way.

In this post, I’ll show you how our planned budget compares with what we actually spent, including a couple of things we didn’t budget for at all initially.

How we kept track

Since we use a credit card for most of our everyday spending (outside of vacation), it’s pretty easy to track where our money goes. A quick look online makes it impossible to forget any transactions.

Vacation in a country that operates heavily on cash makes keeping track of finances a little trickier.

First, when we take money out of an ATM the exchange rate is decided by the bank. , You don’t know quite how much the transaction is in US dollars until you look at the transaction with your bank. This wasn’t something we worried about too much because I had done the research and planned our budget ahead of time, so I knew approximately how many Quetzales we would need.

I really wanted to know how my planned budget compared to our actual spending, though, so just knowing how much we pulled out of the ATM, plus how much we put on credit cards was not enough information. In regular life, I use cash so infrequently that I don’t track it super faithfully. I knew that if I wanted to know the outcome of my careful budgeting, I would have to track all of our cash spending.

Each night (or during the day while riding a bus), I would make note of every time we spent cash. I recorded how much we spent and a note about what it was for. If you don’t record this right when it happens, or at least daily, you will definitely lose track of how you spend your money.  I didn’t bother noting the credit card transactions, as I could easily access that information after the fact. Most of our credit card transactions were for predetermined amounts anyway (hotel reservations, bus tickets, etc).

A few days into my system, I started adding an emoji next to each transaction to show what budget category it fell into so I could keep tabs on the categories that were the most open-ended (food, spending, etc).

Cash vs Card

Before traveling, I read up on the debate of cash versus card when traveling, with a focus on which costs less. The general feeling from what I read (and I researched Guatemala in particular) was that it costs less to get cash from a bank or ATM, than the fees and exchange rate associated with using a credit card. Of course this advice varies by country.

Our experience, though, proved otherwise.

The exchange rate was much better when we used a credit card than when we used an ATM (or when we got foreign currency from a US bank before we left). We did make sure to use a credit card that has no foreign transaction fee. We used a card where we could, but often cash was the only option.

If you are heading to Guatemala want to know the details, comment below and I’m happy to elaborate.

Now let’s compare our budget to our actual spending.

Major Air Travel

This was the easiest category to track, because we made the purchase long before our trip and nothing changed. Our travel expense includes 5 tickets to and from Central America and 3 tickets to and from Phoenix (for our three younger kiddos who stayed with my parents during our trip).

Budgeted: $3,560 

Spent: $3,560

Activities

I planned an itinerary packed with adventure and we were able to do almost everything. There was one thing we didn’t do (visit the Fuentes Georginas), but we added a few other things (an additional hike and a few museums. There weren’t many surprises in this category since everything was well researched ahead of time.

Budgeted: $1,164

Spent: $1,110

We spent $54 less than anticipated.

Accommodations

In our two-week trip, we stayed in 8 different accommodations. I found 4 of them on Booking.com and 4 of them on Airbnb.

Budgeted: $960

Spent: $890

We spent $70 less than anticipated. Why? Because there was still some question of how long we might stay a few places, I had added $100 of wiggle room to the lodging budget. In the end we made one change, but only used $30, so ended under budget.

Transportation

As we travelled all over Guatemala, we spent time in taxis, Ubers, microbuses, chicken buses, pickup trucks, ferries, boats, and airplanes. I was able to research all of the different routes online, mostly from travel bloggers who shared their experiences in detail. This sort of useful information was not available when we traveled there 18 years ago! Online information was super helpful both for planning and traveling. I should also add that we did quite a lot of walking, both as a mode for transportation and a way to see a city up close.

Ironically, the discrepancy in transportation spending came from the in-country flight that I purchased about 6 weeks before our trip. I had been watching the flights from Flores to Guatemala City and saw them consistently at $42 per person. I didn’t want to buy them too soon for fear that other parts of our itinerary might change, but there is a very limited flight schedule, so I also didn’t want the flight we wanted to get booked up. One day I looked and saw that the flight we wanted went up to $82 per person. I thought I must have waited too long and figured the price would continue to increase as the date approached, so I bit the bullet and spent $410 on our tickets instead of the $210 that I had budgeted for the flight. The price for the tickets did go back down again. Hindsight is 20/20. I assured myself that I did the best with the information that I had at the time.

The really frustrating part came when we were checking in for our flight. Apparently I missed the fine print that if you don’t check in online the day before your flight, you have to pay $12 per person for them to check you in at the counter. Grrr! That was $60 that I really didn’t want to spend like that.

Budgeted: $950

Spent: $1,099

Even with those issues, we only overspent $149 on travel.

Food

Our food category was our biggest wildcard. We are normally solid members of Team Buy-Ingredients-And-Cook-At-Home rather than Team Eat-Out (even on vacation),  but we knew this would be different because we were always on the move, staying just one night at most places, and rarely with a kitchen. We did stay in an Airbnb with a kitchen for three nights where we made a couple of our own meals, but other than that we ate out. We got lots of good street food and food from small home-based restaurants. Our most expensive meal  ($53) was our one “American” meal eating in a Pizza Hut restaurant when we were walking through the business district of the capital on our way to the airport for our return flight. Normal meals for the five of us ranged from $12 (yes we all had a large, delicious, dinner for $12 from a street vendor in Belize!) to $40. Of course you could definitely spend a lot more on food if you ate at high-end restaurants aimed at wealthy travelers, but all our food was both excellent and a great experience. We also ate with friends twice and had breakfast included in one of our accommodations. Along with actual food, our food budget also includes the water that we drank. You absolutely cannot drink the tap water in Guatemala. There were a few nights where our accommodations provided drinkable water.

Budgeted: $845

Spent: $597

We spent $248 less than anticipated.

Gear

Most of our gear was purchased well before leaving on our trip. I linked to many of the exact items we bought when I shared everything we were packing to backpack in Guatemala. We had hoped the rain jackets/windbreakers that we brought would keep us dry, but we quickly learned that wasn’t the case! Sure, they kept us dry in a light sprinkle, but not in a constant downpour when you’re on foot for extended periods of time. We decided that we should invest in ponchos before our big volcano overnight hike. We were happy to find some the night before our hike. As luck would have it, we didn’t end up needing them (but if we hadn’t bought them we probably would have needed them, right!?). I was happy to be prepared instead of wet. The only other “gear” item that wasn’t on our initial list was SIM cards so that we could use phones in Guatemala. Four 30-day eSIM cards cost us $65. Three of them even worked!

Budgeted: $900

Spent: $892

We spent $8 less than anticipated.

Spending/Giving

I wasn’t sure how much to budget for spending and giving, so it really was just a wild guess. We purchased at least one wearable item for each of us, including our younger kids in Arizona and our Ukrainian family. We got some other smaller souvenirs as well for our kids and others. I also bought a nativity for our family and one for my parents as a thank you for watching our kids. When it came to giving, we tried to generously tip those who served us and gave to those in need who crossed our path. There were a couple times that I would have liked to give something but at the moment we didn’t have any cash and were far from an ATM.

Budgeted: $800

Spent: $565

We spent $235 less than anticipated.

Other

There’s always something you didn’t think of, right?

In my original post where I outlined our trip budget, Katie commented about travel insurance. That’s something that we hadn’t looked into. The more I read about it, the more I decided that was something I was interested in. Mike checked into how our health insurance would handle international accidents, emergencies, and illnesses (one of the main reasons people look into travel insurance) and found that our insurance actually covers everything even if it happens abroad. Still, I thought the travel insurance would be helpful in case there was trouble with transportation delays, bad weather (a hurricane just missed us), or something else to put us off schedule and cause us to miss activities and accommodations that we had already booked and were not otherwise refundable. Having spent so much time planning this trip, knowing that a hiccup in plans wouldn’t set us back financially brought me peace of mind. I was also glad that travel insurance was less expensive than I had expected. For our two-week trip, the cost for travel insurance was $179.

If you read our family budget update for July, then you know that Mike decided to buy a new mirrorless camera to bring to Guatemala. (The camera was not part of our trip budget; we actually borrowed the funds from our car replacement budget.) Traipsing across Guatemala with our $4,900 camera made me more than a little nervous. While our camera is probably more likely to get stolen here in the US, I was still afraid that we might accidentally lose it as we rode in so many crowded busses and vans. We looked into camera insurance and found that insuring our camera costs only $49 (basically, one percent of the value of the gear) per year! That was totally worth it for my peace of mind! And this insurance will last for the other 50 weeks of the year, too!

The other thing that falls in the “other” category is something I thought about and researched before we even bought our flight, but I forgot to put in the pre-trip budget! When deciding what airport to fly out of, I included the cost of parking into consideration. Flights out of San Francisco are much cheaper than out of Sacramento, but the airport is further away (we wouldn’t want to ask anyone to drive us all the way to San Francisco!) and parking is more expensive. Still with the cost of parking taken into consideration, the San Francisco airport was a better deal. Only I forgot to add in the cost. We chose an outdoor third party parking lot with a free 24-hour shuttle that cost about half of what the airport charges. The total was $250 for airport parking.

Budgeted: $0

Spent: $477

We spent $477 more than anticipated on things we left out of our initial budget.

Grand totals

In some categories we overspent and in others we spent less than we had expected. And some things I forgot to budget in completely. So how does it all shake out?

(…drum roll please…)

Total Trip Budget: $9,179

Total Trip Spent: $9,190

We spent $11 more than we had anticipated on our first international family trip, which is actually mind-blowing to me. I had NO idea that it would come out SO close. Maybe all that watching Price Is Right when I was a kid is finally paying off! Honestly, while we were on our trip, it felt like we would come in a few hundred dollars under budget because it seemed like almost every day we spent less than what we had set for our daily spending for food. If you look back at our pre-trip budget, I put a cushion of $100-$150 extra in most categories to give us some wiggle room. It turns out that extra came in handy for the categories I didn’t budget for at all!

On top of memories, renewed friendships, adventure time with family, and photos to remember by, for a budget nerd like me, running this final tally was a wonderful part of a wonderful trip!