Investigative Blogging: Saving $1000 in two months on a student budget

The Coromandel in summer is very, very pretty. via We Heart It.

I want to go on holiday.

I have two weeks off in the middle of the school year and am determined to make the best of the situation. The Boy and I have discussed and worked through a number of different possible options for places to stay and things to do. I haven’t been away for any length of time for some years, and it turns out that to go anywhere in New Zealand for eight days is pretty expensive. Stewart Island was an idea, but the overall cost of accomodation and travel blows my budget out of the water, and it isn’t a great time of year to travel to the far south anyways. We thought about repeating the awesome campervan holiday we went on a few years back, but the costs for that have skyrocketed - petrol is 30c more and the deposit on the campervan itself has increased by (I kid you not) $6500. Which brought us to - the public service union holiday houses in Whitianga, which we can stay in for $31 each a night. Huzzah for the unions! Travel is still not cheap, but we’ve budgeted about $1000 for the eight days which is conservative, and allows us to have a car and petrol so we can explore the Coromandel.

The major obstacle to any holiday is my teeny-tiny income and subsequent lack of savings - any spare money has been channelled into paying off the credit card debt, and there hasn’t been very much of that. However, if there is only one thing learnt from the Debt Unicorn (and there’s defo more than one) it’s ways to control my expenditure. It will be a squeeze, but I KNOW that I can win. It’s a project, and I do so love a project. Also, it gives a nice patina of excuse to my hermitness.

So far my money responsibility includes:

• Making a very conservative estimate of the money I’ll need for my holiday. The Boy and I have sat down and worked out how much we’ll need to save, and knowing how much is very, very liberating. I’ve been terrible with budgeting in the past, covering up the money anxiety with a blase “meh, I can always dip into the credit card” - which, for me at any rate, is a surefire way to end up in yet more debt.
• Being much, MUCH more strict about my espresso coffees. I’ve slipped back into the habit of having a coffee every day and it’s too too expensive. Again, I’ll only be consuming espresso on Mondays and Fridays.
• Using up my yarn stash. I do love a good crafty project, and projects are very good for hermits. However, yarn is very expensive and too easy to spend money on. For the next couple of months, all the crafting will be done with the yarn I already have, or the yarn that I’ll spin with the fibre that I already have. Time to get spinning again.
• No more sneaky bottles of wine on a weeknight. Sigh.
• Only paying the minimum on the credit card. Not ideal, but better than paying off the credit card and then “borrowing” money from it.
• Eating lunch at home. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t, there’s always heaps of food and we all put enough money in the flat account each week to eat really well. In fact, I usually enjoy my at home lunch more than a sandwich from a cafe (but not more than a pie from Trisha’s).
• Trying to make the whole prospect of saving money sound fun. Hence, this blog post. Yeah! Rock on saving!

Really, it’s just about tightening my belt even further. It’s pretty tight already, but HEY HO.

Any suggestions as to how to save more or how to get my hands on some more money? (selling my body is strictly out of the question).