The funds...

Starting out planning this trip, I immediately came up with a budget.

Knowing how much gas usually costs on our visits, it was easy enough to figure out how much additional to add for taking my car and the extra driving. When we take Shane's car (2008 Ford Focus) We get a little bit better gas mileage because his car is smaller and has a 4 cyl engine. My car, (2005 Chevy Malibu LS) would cost more because it is a midsize sedan with a V6 engine.

We would also be taking a different route than usual because of the stops we were wanting to make and taking into account the trips to all of our Groupons, would add a few miles as well.

Once we had determined that there would be 4 people going on the trip, I quickly added up the hotel costs, estimation for gas and tolls and figured out our base cost per person.

My beginning estimations were as follows:

Gas: $250
Tolls: $10
Hotel: $150

Total: $410

Knowing this was the absolute minimum we would be paying, I decided to add some cushion to the budget. I would rather be overprepared and not need it (extra spending money!) than get there and not have enough for basics.

I quickly decided to have the cost per person be $125. This would give us a total of $500.

There are always bumps in the road and unexpected costs along the way. Since we decided to add another hotel stay, tolls were a bit different on our new route, and some unexpected parking expenses got added, it was a good thing I made those adjustments.

We had to get gas 7 times. The total amount spent on the trip was $237.06.

Parking came to a total of $35.00.

Hotel for all stays was $201.47

Tolls $25

This brings our grand total to: $498.53, which was $1.47 under our budget of $500.

I don't know if I could've been that spot on without seriously planning.

Now, you have to remember, this was only for the basic costs, in addition to that were all of the fun things.

Between Shane and myself we spent $50 on MetroCard for the subway while in NY. We did have a couple of mess ups that caused us to lose a bit of our fares, and we also have some left on the card for our next visit.