Holiday Budgeting Flick’ n Dee Style

I’ve been rather remiss in reporting on the holiday except to allude to the wibmeet with Chops and the Lovely One…

You might think this may be because it was a bust.

It wasn’t!

It’s because I’ve been meaning to knock a little table (below) up to figure out exactly how much we managed to save given that we took every opportunity to save a buck while we were away!!

I know… a bit daft but it was good fun seeing just how much we could extract out of all the stuff we did!!

It started off with the budget airfares… Achieved by booking in September… Cha ching!!!

Moving right along we get to the car hire… I cashed in some of my Altitude points and got $100.00 off the car, couple that with the ‘life in your hands’ choice not to take out excess insurance meant the car cost us $100 bucks each for the week… bargain… and a good external discipline to drive carefully given that a $3000 excess was at stake whether we caused the accident or we didn’t… every reverse park, every choice of lane, every decision to overtake… $3000 dollars… and a promise to split it regardless of the driver… An exercise in trust and fear!!!

Dreamworld was a real bonus.. initially we had achieved a 15% discount through Flick’s medical insurance but she’d heard a rumor that car hire places give out discount voucher books with their car hire so we grabbed one from Avis in the hope of finding bigger and better bargains!!

Sure enough in it there was a Dreamworld voucher offering a ‘buy one get one free’ deal… needless to say a quick phonecall was made to the fun park and a query as to a refund due to a ‘change of circumstances’ was answered in our favour!!! So cha ching again!!! %50 off!!!

Myer was a bonus in shopping for new clothes… gotta love the summer sales!!

With the exeption of the Nut and Ginger Factories on the Sunshine Coast which were vouchers from the Avis book the others were discounts down to Flick’s bargain ingenuity and hotdockets.

You know those vouchers you get on the back of your dockets from the supermarket shopping trips? Well, she cottoned on to the website where you can download vouchers for all over Australia… Buy one get one free seems to be popular, or get one half price as in the dinner we had… Of course we could have been driving all over Brisbane to find the various outlets but when we were in the neighbourhood we made the most of it!!!

There’s a lot to be said for swallowing your pride and handing over the occasional slip of paper which’ll save you a spot of money… I guess it’s true what they say… It all adds up…