Costa Rica: Final Budget Round-Up


Costa Rica was the one country that seriously concerned me during the budgeting for our trip. I knew that it definitely wouldn't be cheap but I struggled to figure out in advance just what our daily spend might look like.

Trabee App 

I've used the Trabee Pocket app throughout our trip for tracking every single penny (or peso, colones, ringgits etc!) so that we have an accurate idea of what we're actually spending. This is critical for us as we're not earning during our year away so when the cash runs out, that's it!

The Trabee app lets you log your total budget for your trip, then you can log each item you spend on, assigning each thing to a category (such as accommodation, transport, food etc). You can then download this data into an Excel file or view the stats in the app to see how you're doing. It's been a great way for me to stay in control of our spending and make sure it lasts us all year!


Initial budget

So, after a huge amount of trawling the internet, I attempted to come up with a budget that I separated out in to different sections: accommodation, 'big' ticket transport (such as flights and private shuttles), daily costs (including food and local transport) and activities. I found it easiest to separate out the activities as I could research these before we left and allocate a total amount to them (and add things in/take them out as the budget allowed). 

So for 36 days in Costa Rica, I budgeted the following:

ACCOMMODATION = £2,520

ACTIVITIES = £1,262

MAJOR TRANSPORT (inc flight back to Cancun) = £1,050

FOOD/LOCAL TRANSPORT/MISC. = £2,628

TOTAL = £7,460


Actual spend

You can see from the screenshots below what we *actually* spent during our time in Costa Rica. The totals make it look like we've gone waaaay over budget, but these also include my Mum's costs for her 16-night stay with us (it was just easier to add it all in, and then bill my Mum at the end!). Once you take these off the total, we managed to come in at just ever so slightly under budget :)




This is largely down to having my Mum with us for those 2.5weeks - it meant we could save on accommodation by all sharing and she also insisted on treating us to a few meals/activities etc which otherwise would have come out of our budget (thanks Mum!).


And finally.....

All in, I was pretty darn pleased that my number-crunching didn't end up being far off the mark. The activities we did were expensive so planning these out in advance and allocating a separate amount to them really helped when we had to take the plunge and pay for them!

Eating out was also expensive for the four of us, so whenever we could we self-catered and mostly lived on a diet of rice, beans, eggs and the odd bit of pasta now and again (even that wasn't cheap!). Suncream and insect repellent are REALLY expensive so make sure you pack in loads of these if you're planning a trip! 

And although we initially thought that hiring a car would be a massive expensive, it actually saved us money over the 9-days that we had it (bearing in mind that there were five of us, so the cost of bus tickets/private shuttles (which you really do need to get to some spots)/Ubers was pretty high to start with).

Costa Rica was the most expensive country on our world trip, so I was mega relieved to have come out of it unscathed budget-wise! It was also an amazing experience from start to finish, and worth every penny :)




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