McBerkoBlog

I've mentioned before that we use credit card rewards points to cover some of our travel costs. Since this is a topic I've gotten a lot of questions about, I thought it was worth a post to help anyone who's considering getting into the travel rewards game. Before we jump in, two disclaimers: We are lazy travel hackers. If you want to learn how to get free business-class seats to Bali by churning 6 cards a year, I'm not your gal. More power to those folks, but that level of obsession and planning is not for me. If you deal with open credit the way I deal with open packages of chips, stop reading now. Credit card travel rewards work only if you never pay interest or late fees. Seriously. If you don't pay off the full card balance every month, you'll never make more money from the card than they make from you. Likewise, if you buy stuff that you wouldn't have ordinarily bought just to earn rewards, that's a loss. How much can you earn in rewards? Generally...

I wrote about our RV previously  here , but in this post, I'll focus on the cost. Why? Like with my previous post about our Guatemala trip costs , I'm hoping this info can help others plan since it's hard to accurately estimate travel costs. This was our first time renting an RV and I was not sure what the final costs would be compared to the initial estimates shown on the rental sites. In the end, renting the RV was 100% the best choice for us on this trip and saved us money compared to the alternatives. The total for our RV including gas and campgrounds was just over $4,000 for 8 nights. Whew! That's more than our entire month in Guatemala, and doesn't include food, flights, and activities. Alaska, amirite?! Let's break it down: RV Rental = ~$3,250 Base fee = $2,537 This was for a 28 foot RV with two slide-outs, and the rental included unlimited mileage. We owed a deposit of $634 upfront and the rest at pickup. Options: Six camping/lawn chairs = $90. We never...

Real talk here. Why? Because it's hard to plan trips like this and accurately estimate how much you'll spend, so I always appreciate seeing details about how much it cost other people. Maybe this info will do the same for someone else. Costs of course will vary based on what you value. We wanted to try a lot of local food and experiences so weren't trying to skimp on those, but weren't throwing money around lavishly either. Volcano Pacaya We were gone for 30 days. I won't make you scroll: our total net cost for this trip for our family of 4 was ~$3,050 . That's cheaper than our typical 7-10 day trips, including our prior trips to Germany, Costa Rica, Los Angeles, and Boston/Maine. I'm specifically looking at our net costs to understand how much we spent over  a typical month at home, so am subtracting out any normal monthly costs not incurred to more accurately reflect the true additional cost of being somewhere else for the month. Let's break it down: T...