The month of January was split between Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam (22 days) and Chiang Mai Thailand (9 days). This was anticipated to be one of the cheapest stretches of the year with these locations known for their lower cost of living, and no long flights to travel between them. However, we managed to drive up our expenses through food expenses and tourist-like activities in Vietnam. Compounding the problem, our income was down because of a rental situation. I’ll walk through all of that in our January international travel FIRE budget below.

Income

On the income side of things, there’s nothing different compared to prior months. I mentioned that our income took a hit, but that hit is included as an expense in the expenses section. It can be called an expense or a reduction in income depending on how you want to look at it. What it amounts to is that our property manager told us the tenants missed a water/HOA payment. That’s only relevant to us because we cover the HOA portion of that bill. Because they missed one, this month we have two HOA fees to pay.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense to us because we have no gap in the HOA fee being deducted from our rent proceeds. Even the breakdown of what is HOA vs water is lopsided in the tenants favor, and really just flat out wrong. That’s a fight we choose not to fight though, and we will let this double HOA thing slide as well. We feel the tenants are paying a more than fair (to us) amount of rent, so we aren’t worrying about the small things that go in their favor.

Rental	$3,500.00
Investment safe withdrawal	$3,803.13
Interest earned	$60.99
Total	$7,364.12

Expenses

As I already previewed in the intro, we got a little carried away with our expenses in Vietnam. The cost of eating out was low enough that we ended up doing that often. However the cost wasn’t so low as to be inconsequential to our budget. This drove our food spending to about double of what it should have been.

In Vietnam we intentionally deviated from our core mission of this year. That mission was to live much like locals do in the different places we visit. In Vietnam we went full blown tourist mode due to the rich history, and that drove up our discretionary spending costs.

Total: $8,801.43 Withdrawal Rate: 5.51%

Accommodation	$1,845.03	$1,263.77 is Vietnam and $581.26 is Thailand.
Cigna Global Silver w/ US	$558.42	Sinking fund
Grocery Store / Food	$1,167.84	$441.46 is food from grocery stores for meals at home. We ate 44 meals at home which is $10.03 per meal. $726.38 of this is food not at home (e.g. restaurants), 49 meals at $14.82 per meal. In upcoming expat cost of living posts I will break this down in detail between Vietnam and Thailand, but for now consider this the Vietnam value since it is mostly Vietnam, and Thailand food costs are substantially similar.
House Escrow (taxes 4091.68, insurance 1518, Rent Profit Tax 3115)	$867.22	Sinking fund
Discretionary	$899.18	This included many tourist-like activities in Vietnam. We visited the Cu Chi Tunnels, took a motorbike food/sites tour, and made a trip to the beach in Vung Tao for two nights. Many other micro-adventures as well.
Transportation	$125.35	This was MANY grab rides getting to and from our many activities.
Storage Unit (10′ x 20′)	$232.00
Clothes	$100.00	Sinking fund
Visas	$0.00	No fee to enter Thailand
Life Insurance	$99.81
Vaccines	$91.58	Sinking fund
Phone (Google FI)	$43.18
Gifts	$60.00	Sinking fund
Sponsor Child & Giving	$83.42	This was our sponsored child plus several small donations we made in Vietnam.
Auto escrow (non-owner)	$41.50	Sinking fund for non-owner car insurance
Duolingo	$20.00	Sinking fund
E-Sim (Airalo)	$20.00	Sinking fund
Virtual Mailbox (PostScan Mail)	$21.00
HOA	$100.00	Bi-annual HOA fee, making for three HOA related costs this month.
Amazon Prime	$11.59	Sinking fund
Cloud Storage	$2.99
Prop Mgmt Monthly Fee	$350.00
Prop Mgmt Maintenance	$759.66	Double HOA fees that our property manager said was due to the tenants missing an HOA payment. Also our dryer required a fix for $380.
Flights	$963.72	To Columbo
Kid Purchases	$203.26	This is their money but flows through our accounts.
Kids Invest	$77.00	This is their money but flows through our accounts.
Haircuts	$3.81	BC haircut in Vietnam
sunscreen	$13.34
currency conversion loss	40.52	We took a beating converting our VND to THB at the Bangkok airport.
Total Expenses	$8,801.43

Postmortem

The end result from this budget is a 5.51% withdrawal rate from our investments. That’s way outside of the 4% sustainable withdrawal rate. It gets worse when you consider we originally projected a 3.1% withdrawal rate for this portion of the year. This is reminiscent of our first travel month where we started overspending by sliding into this same tourist mode.

To mitigate some of that spending, we pulled from our discretionary savings fund. That’s an account I have mentioned before, which is a side savings account that we have built through the years. It is completely separate from our investments. The purpose of that fund is for any spending we choose to do which is unnecessary and not part of the budget. It’s really with this fund in mind that we allowed ourselves to indulge in this extra spending.

Two things from this month fall into a discretionary classification. One is the spending on food not cooked at home, and the other is all of our tourist activities. We paid the full amount of those categories from our discretionary account, and that brings our withdrawal rate to 3.8%.

A couple weeks ago I re-projected the rest of the travel year to see if we were still on track to afford the expensive trip to South Africa. The answer was yes, but only if January were to have a withdrawal rate of 3.8% or less. It’s pure coincidence that covering our excess spending with discretionary savings worked out to exactly 3.8%.

The year marches on no matter what the numbers are. We will be more aware and intentional with our spending in the coming month I’m sure, and Thailand also doesn’t have the same sort of must-do experience list that we had in Vietnam.