Budget recap: Chattanooga, TN mini vacay

I pride myself on usually being thrifty and staying on budget. Vacations are a little different as in I still have a budget but we do not get anxious about each dollar spent so I planned the budget for our 2 days in Chattanooga accordingly. My budget for this mini vacation was $600 which seems high for just 2 days but our family of 6 was going to eat out and visit the aquarium.

Free fun and small savings

Here are a few ways we saved money:

• we ate our free hotel breakfast which was pretty nice since it was a Hilton Garden Inn
• we got our parking for free (usually daily cost of $10 being downtown) because our room was not ready when we arrived (we were trying to check in a little early)
• the kids and I drank water with our meals
• the boys enjoyed the pool at the hotel (even though it was very small, it was heated and gave them about an hour of fun each day)
• we ate a a fun pizza place one night which was a cheaper meal than each of us ordering entrees.
• visited a state park (admission: $5 per car)
• walked accross Walnut Bridge

Budget recap

I had planned a budget of $600 for this trip. We ended up spending  about $535 dollars.

• Tennesee aquarium: still not sure how I miscalculated the cost of our visit by overbudgeting $100 so I was very glady surprised that the cost for our family of 6 was $148. Because the family yearly membership was $175, I went ahead and purchased it since just having one person visit the aquarium would bring us to that price. Now we can visit even just one time and make the membership worthwhile. We can even bring our nephew since the membership is for up to 5 kids. The aquarium is about 45 minutes from church so it would be a fun Sunday afternoon outing or it will be a fun day outing in summer. I will be devoting a blog post to the aquarium next Wednesday.
• Since the aquarium was less than I expected I went ahead and got the State park year parking pass for $50 when we visited Cloudland Canyon State Park. We have a state park 10 minutes from our house which we just hiked 2 weeks ago and there are many other parks in Georgia we want to explore or hike at. Parking will now be free for those outings.
• We ate 2 dinners and 2 lunches at restaurants: one dinner was $92 including tip, one lunch was $82, another was $47. I do not remember how much our dinner pizza was but it was around $40 dollars. One afternoon hot dog snack meal was $20ish dollars.
• I spent $25 on souvenirs.

So while I was not counting every penny and we did not look for the cheapest restaurants, we stayed within budget. We actually enjoyed our meals a lot and I would recommend eating at Urban Stack, Lupi’s Pizza Pies and Pucketts (right next to the aquarium). The hot dogs at Good Dog accross the bridge were very tasty too!

Long term savings

As a reminder our hotel stay and breakfast were free and Chattanooga was only 45 minutes from church so we did not use much gas to get there.

The 2 memberships will allow us some free fun for the next 12 months so maybe a little more upfront will allow us some great savings this coming year.

I find it interesting that I am not so tight with the budget on a small trip. I actually will be a little more tight with money when we go to St Louis for 5 days but that is because there are so many free activities there that I will be able to save lots of money on fun!

A bientôt!

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