Our Cost Breakdown: Two Months in Portugal

Ok ok enough of the fluff with the Portugal itinerary from last post, let’s dig into the fun stuff… the numbers! Ok maybe the numbers is just the fun part for me haha.

Before we dig in, I want to ask you readers to come up with a guess cost before reading this post and sharing your initial guess in the comments below. A family of 4 spending 2 months in Portugal – How much would a non-FIRE-optimizer spend on travelling 2 months abroad?  And then, how much are we, ModernFImily, spending out of pocket?

Ok ready…. think about it….. write it down…. ok keep reading.

So we are in Portugal for exactly 2 months from the end of January to the end of March.  This is not their peak season so if you’re looking to go over the summer, expect to pay much more.

This is actually one of the nice perks to living in Canada.  I do love all seasons but I don’t need winter to be as long as it is.  So whenever we’re looking to travel, it’s always going to be over our winters.  And for most destinations, that means off/shoulder season.  Which means lower prices.   And fewer people.  Two major wins in our books. (Whereas in our former Florida lives, we’d be looking to travel over the crazy hot and humid summers aka peak season for most places.)

Flights

Typically, we would travel hack and pay for our flights with points and only pay the international taxes.  (The points and travel game is always changing but typically a flight from North America to Europe costs ~60,000 points + international taxes ~$200 for a round trip ticket.) However, when I saw a flight sale pop up for $575 round trip direct flights including taxes from Calgary to Amsterdam, I jumped on it (via emails I get from YYC Deals – they have other Canadian airports you can sign up for too).

Originally, we were not even planning to go to Europe but after seeing this we switched gears.  (At the time, we were trying to decide between Mexico and Colombia.)

We also were thinking we’d go early-February to early-April but the last flight option for this pricing was to return at the end of March so we shifted the dates around.

(Notice how *flexibility* is the key here – thanks FIRE!)

For any Canadian reading, getting to skip a layover at the Toronto airport bumps the flight up to next level status.  So getting to Europe without the hassle of a stop is amazing in itself.  And then, as flight prices only seem to be soaring, this pricing comes up??  It’s cheaper for us to fly to Amsterdam then to Denver, CO?! Yes please!

We did decide to pay upfront for seats together and for a checked bag each way (mostly as an insurance with the hopes that we could carry everything on but if not, pay a reduced fee now).

Then once we were in Europe we booked two intra-Europe flights. Although we do love Amsterdam, it’s cold there too and we were seeking something warm.  We were trying to decide between Turkey, the Balkans, and Portugal.  I *really* want to go the Balkans but we thought Portugal would be best with young kids. So we booked round trip flights from AMS-LIS (we’re staying in Amsterdam one night on either end).  And then we are heading over to Madeira Island so booked round trip flights LIS-FNC for that.

Note that Parker is under 2 so we only had to pay for 3 passengers for this trip.  However, in Europe there is a fee for an infant on lap (they seem to range between 15-25 Euros which is a bit wild as some adult flight tickets cost less than that!).

Flight Costs (for our family in CAD):

• YYC-LIS roundtrip: $1,988
• AMS-LIS roundtrip: $529
• LIS-FNC roundtrip: $245

Total Cost for Flights: $2,832

P.S. – Nic still thinks it’s ridiculous we paid for flights when we have over 2,000,000 airline points.

Accommodations

Originally, we were planning to stay a month in one Airbnb location (Setubal, just south of Lisbon) and then 2 weeks on either end in 2 other towns (somewhere down in the Algarve and Aviero in the north) and just use public transit / walk everywhere.  Our logic was that with Airbnb we should get a better rate when we stay somewhere for 28+ days.  While this is true, we realized we didn’t need that fancy of a place. For the same cost, we could be in 4 different locations – still in 2 bedroom places but just not as fru-fru as the month long stay. Everywhere that we booked, we ensured the reservations were 100% refundable up until a day before check-in in case we wanted to make any adjustments.

Nic was the mastermind behind finding all our Airbnb stays.  One of the tips is to look early.  And again, travel during the off-season.  Be flexible with your location and explore places outside large tourist destinations.  Nic also really understands the filters within the Airbnb platform which made narrowing down options quite easy.  READ THE REVIEWS!  Sometimes a new place will be at a lower-than-normal pricing to try to get people in.  For some people, they jump on this and it all works out great.  However, we avoided all of these as we highly respect reviews that prior guests leave.  You also can always message the host to see if they will offer a discount.  (We opted not to as we thought everything was already reasonably priced.)

In addition to the Airbnb’s, we decided to use some IHG hotel points for our stays in Lisbon.  IHG offers a 4th free night promo to certain credit card holders.  So we decided to split Lisbon up into three separate 4 night stays. Meaning we are staying in Lisbon for a total of 12 nights and paying in points for 9 of those nights and the other 3 are free.

For whatever reason, IHG’s system was not registering that we should receive the 4th night free. This ended up being much more of a pain than it should have.  I should have logged how many hours and phone calls I had to make to get this all sorted out.  Easily 20 hours.  Man oh man, IHG, get it together!

It felt like we were changing our itinerary daily for the first few weeks but we finally settled on the itinerary we shared in our last post.  Here’s the costs for our stays (in CAD):

• Madeira: $578 for 12 nights, $48/night
• Lagos: $947 for 14 nights, $68/night
• Peniche: $371/8 nights, $46/night
• Arcozelo: $786/10 nights, $77/night
• Average cost per night: $61 CAD/night (42 Euros/night)

Hotels:

• Amsterdam: $0, 24,500 points. We used free anniversary nights that we both get for our IHG cards for our two nights here.  We also splurged and reserved two hotel rooms each night here as the cost is low (12,000 and 12,500 points per night) and we want to try to get a good nights sleep on either end of a big flight.
• Lisbon: $70 (48€) + a total of 166,000 points for 12 nights (52,000, 60,000, and 54,000 points for each reservation).  Comes down to 13,833 IHG points/night. Lisbon tourist city tax of 2€/person/night.
• We *still* have close to 400,000 IHG points after blowing close to 200,000 on this trip.
• We purposely booked hotels when staying in larger cities as the Airbnbs are quite a bit higher here vs in smaller towns.

Total cost for accommodations (in CAD): $2,752 

This comes out to $1,376 CAD per month.  Considering all utilities are included, this seems like a pretty reasonable rate to us (but not “crazy affordable” like most people shout Portugal is).

Of course, our monthly average would be higher if we were not using points for the 12 nights in Lisbon.

Here’s a bit of a crazy comp.  If we wanted to stay at our hotel in Lisbon exclusively and pay in cash, this same $2,752 CAD ($1,897 Euros) would get us 17 nights there (it averages $110 Euros/night while we are there – then $200 Euros over the summer so even fewer then).  Instead, we’re in Europe for 58 nights.  Wild hey!

Transit

One of the pros to deciding on Europe is because of it’s extensive public transit system and thus eliminating the need of a rental car and lugging along our car seats for the kids.

However as we were digging in, we learned that public transit isn’t as widely used outside Lisbon and Porto.  We also learned that car rentals are quite affordable in Portugal  The key is that your reservation should be under ~3 weeks.  If you make it for a longer duration, the price shoots up big time. This knowledge influenced our itinerary a bit in that we wanted to ensure we would be in Lisbon at multiple points for car rental timeline purposes.

Our ah-ha moment was when we realized that the cost of a roundtrip train for the 4 of us to get from Lisbon to the Algarve area in the south would be the same cost as having a car rental down there for 2 weeks!  For those curious, we used Discover Cars (search engine type website) to book our car rentals.  So, car rentals it is…!

We have 3 car rental reservations:

• 12 days while on Madeira island
  • $337, $28/day
• 14 days while exploring the south before heading back to Lisbon
  • $148, $11/day
• 18 days while we are in the north before again making our way back to Lisbon
  • $191, $11/day

Our credit cards provide rental car insurance so no need for us to purchase that.  We will be using public transit while in Amsterdam and Lisbon so there will be some added transit costs in addition to car rentals.  I’d guess we will spend another ~$100 Euros ($145 CAD) on public transit.  And of course, gas too.  But we figure we’d be paying for gas either in Portugal or Canada during this time frame.

As for carseats, we have the 4-in-1 car seats that are super heavy and not travel friendly. 24 pounds per car seat.  No thanks!!  Thankfully, we found a 9 lb travel car seat that expires at the end of March on our Buy Nothing Group and Nic’s sister has a 8 lb lightweight car seat she no longer uses that she’s letting us borrow.  Phew! Thank goodness!

So yep, we are now travelling with a double stroller and 2 car seats. Triple ugh. Wish us luck!

Total cost for car rentals + public transit (in CAD): $821

Additional Costs

• RentFaster: $80
  • We posted our home on RentFaster.ca a bit early and had to renew before securing our renters so we paid the $40 fee twice. We also posted on FB (Marketplace and our local Rental Properties page).  We definitely got the most traction on Rent Faster (and that is who we secured our renters through).
• Waterproof Mattress Pad: $30
  • We already have one of these on Finn’s bed and wanted to get one on our king size mattress as well.  I’d much rather pay $30 to know our mattresses are protected from any sort of spill vs having to replace a mattress outright.
• Travel Medical Insurance: $185
  • Our credit card that we booked our flights with cover the first 21 days of medical travel insurance as well as all the trip cancelation/delay issues that could arise.  So we needed travel medical insurance for the back end of our trip that was not covered. When we first started looking, prices were in the $400-$800 range for a family of 4 which we thought was a bit insane.  Thankfully our local FIRE friends who also travel for a few months a year pointed us in the direction of Insure My Trip – a travel insurance comparison search engine (thanks Travis and Amanda!). From there, we ended up purchasing with TuGo for $5,000,000 of coverage per person with a $300 deductible for a total cost of $184 CAD.  We were able to select an “excluding USA” plan which helped reduce our costs.
• Switching Our Home Insurance to Landlord Coverage: $74
  • We notified our home insurance provider that we needed help figuring out how to switch our home insurance from us living in our primary residence to renting it out for a short term.  A few emails later we were all set up.  I even asked for a breakdown on the change in price and they were quick to get that over.  We also already have it all set up to go back to our regular premium once we return. Thanks Square One, you da best! You truly made this a very easy process.
• Switching our Car Insurance to Parking Status: -$275
  • Since our car will be sitting parked outside our home with just the occasional start from our neighbour to run the engine (thanks Kat!), we contacted our car insurance broker and asked to switch the status to parking while we are gone which significantly lowers the cost to insure it while we are abroad.

Total One-Off Costs (in CAD): $94

• $369 in costs plus the $275 savings on the car insurance

Rental Income

And now, of course, to help offset all the above costs, we decided to rent our house out while we are gone.  We found a family who is moving from Vancouver to Cochrane (surprise, surprise, isn’t everyone these days?!) to rent our house out for 2 months while they look for a home in our town.  (The majority of people who contacted us about a short term rental were people from out of town looking to move to our town.)

We are renting our house out for $2,700/month with $500 of utilities included (should cover all utilities as long as our renters are mindful of their usage). So let’s wipe off $500/month to go towards utilities (although in reality if we didn’t rent it out we’d still have ~$300 in fixed utility costs per month just to have the house sit idle but we will ignore that for this exercise).

Total Rental Income – Utilities (in CAD): $4,400

Grand Finale

Ok, so what does all this mean when we put it together?

• Airfare: $2,832
• Accommodations: $2,752
• Transit: $821
• One-Offs: $94

Total Costs: $6,499

Then throwing in the rental income of $4,400 into the mix, we get a total out of pocket costs of:

$2,099

Boom!  2 months in Portugal for just over $2,000.

When we were calculating our FIRE number, we used $5,000 as our annual travel related costs (we figured some years would be higher, some lower, but $5,000 on average).  To most people this sounds super low for a family of 4.  Now you see how it can totally be possible to explore the world without breaking the bank.

Of course, there will be other travel related costs.  Bakeries, eating out, groceries, exploring things off the beaten path, entrance fees, etc.  But we also aren’t hermits at home and have various costs for our every day sending.  So we will be shifting over some of our “everyday living expenses” to “travel expenses”.  For example, we canceled our sports centre membership while travelling which frees up $200 over the course of 2 months to shift to a “travel entertainment bucket”. Then of course, we will be eating/driving for 2 months whether we are in Canada or Portugal. Yes, we expect these two categories to be higher while in Portugal while trying out new meals and exploring new areas but overall we’re not looking at nothing vs something. I’d guess we spend an extra $600 CAD over the course of 2 months for these two categories.

This is the power of FIRE. We can be flexible with our travel locations and dates.  We can utilize our home to offset travel costs.  We can avoid peak seasons and holiday vacations.  We don’t fee like we need to cram cram cram everything in a 10 day trip.  We can take things slow without breaking the bank.

What was your initial guess for how much our trip would end up costing us? Was it anywhere close to where we ended up? Any take-aways from todays post?  Cheers!

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We believe in stacking up life hacks to keep your enjoyment levels to the max without depleting your bank account.  Here are some ways to further educate yourself and save thousands of dollars over your lifetime by making some simple adjustments:

• Investing Newbies: Check out our free Investing 101 Series.
• How much are you paying for your phone plan?  Canadians, learn more about Public Mobile, and see how we are paying $3/mo for our cell phone plan.
• How much are you paying for internet?  Canadians, learn more about the various Independent Service Providers out there to see who services your area so you can lower your monthly bills.
• How much are you paying for home insurance?  We were able to reduce our rates by 25% by switching over to Square One Insurance.  If you live in BC, AB, SK, MB, and ON, check out Square One for your home insurance, landlord insurance, and/or tenant insurance.  Use this link to receive an extra $15 off your quote.  (Note that you must use this link to start the process to get the $15 off even if you prefer to pay over the phone.)

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