#Reverb12, Day 2: Spending

For the month of December, I'm working on doing the daily series of Reverb prompts to help me reflect on the prior year and hope/plan for the upcoming year.  If you're interested, join in; I found this to be a very useful exercise when I did it two years ago.

Day 2 – Your Most Significant Spend?

What was your most significant expenditure in 2012? It doesn’t have to be necessarily the biggest expenditure, just the one with the most impact. What difference has it made to your life?

This one is easy for me -- most significant in terms of dollars and impact -- we dropped several Gs on our trip to China.  Airfare alone was over $2k, and then we spent nearly 3 weeks traveling around China.  It was one of the most amazing and interesting places I've ever been.  I am very bad about doing recaps (it always seems so daunting), but I definitely need to post pictures.  Financially, we were lucky that food and many daily expenses (transport, entrance fees, etc.) were very cheap.  But since we only travel when we can afford it (hubby and I take turns financing trips each year, and the rule is no credit card debt), it took some planning to make sure that we'd be able to swing it. 

The one problem was that I pretty much live my daily life on a credit card.  I think I spend about $80 cash all year.  The same $20 has been in my wallet since at least September.  I seriously put everything on my credit card.  I love having it all tracked, so I know where my money goes, and I love having a thinner wallet and not being worried about losing money if I lose it (which incidentally, I've never done). 

Well, the plan for China was that our plane tickets to and from China were purchased and paid for.  And our Beijing hotel had been booked through hotels.com and was also paid in advance.  Everything else was going to be paid for while we were there.

I figured I'd put most everything on my credit card, but if necessary, I'd have access to about $1,000 cash from my ATM.  That would be plenty.  I knew we'd take out a few hundred dollars for cabs, cheap meals, etc., but I figured I'd put the bulk on my card.

Oh, we were wrong.  Very few places other than hotels seemed willing to take credit cards in China.  I suspect many of them just want to avoid paying the fee, but many of the types of things I pay for here with cards all the time just didn't have that as an option. 

Panic.  I realized very soon that we would spend over $1,000.  Unfortunately, about $1,000 was all I had in the bank; the rest was in savings and I really didn't want to log in to my bank account and do a transfer from China (I'm fairly paranoid about hacking).

But instead I came up with a good plan -- I sent an email to my coworker who was mailing various things for me while we were gone.  I asked her to hold off on mailing in the mortgage payment.  We pay about 45 days ahead of schedule usually, so holding it a few weeks isn't a big deal, and gave us access to a couple thousand more dollars in cash. 

And that made the trip just perfect.  We didn't worry about money (though we're pretty good about always watching what we spend).  We had a few splurges (we stayed at the Ritz in Shanghai), but we had cash to pay for our day trips, train tickets, meals, and everything else. 

It was a lot of money, but 100% worth every penny.  Anything that I refrained from buying during the year -- things like not eating out much, not getting my nails done, not going for post-run massages, not buying new clothes or things for the house -- was a valid sacrifice to be able to pay for this trip.  Things like hiking on the Great Wall are experiences I'll have forever.