Travel Log: Day 4 (7/1), Costa Rica

Budget Numbers

Today it rained almost the entire day. The day started with coffee and a marathon budget session for our June budget. The way we run our budget is that at the end of the month we take the projected expenses and income and then plug in actual values to see what surplus or deficit we ended up with. During my working years this was always a surplus. This year it will look a little different, where we are interested in whether we are over or under a 4% withdrawal rate for the month. On the average we’ll be right at that 4% withdrawal and I imagine we’ll have to cut back at times some months to balance out expensive months.

The June budget ultimately looked pretty good despite spending a whopping 19.5K due to many up front yearly costs for the year (health insurance, landlord house insurance, etc). To balance that massive spending, we also had equally large income because of my final payout from work including 320 hours of vacation time. It was ultimately $19,528.05 spent, and an very unusual $22,072.61 coming in.

Rainy Day

With the rain we were mostly inside all day. I thought it was great, very relaxing combined with the non-existent todo list. Everyone else seemed a little more stir crazy than me. In the afternoon we made a trip to the grocery store to get a lime and some snack stuff. JC and I decided to have happy hour at the house, and then we went to a small fast food stand just a couple blocks away.

It was a perfect Spanish experience. BC kicked it off by ordering his food in Spanish, followed by everyone else. We had to work through some back and forth with the lady taking our order. She spoke almost no English. We were able to gather that drinks were included after I originally declined them. We also understood her when she said she only had 3 cokes and had to substitute something else for the 4th drink. AC said some Spanish to ask for the 3 cokes and a grape drink for the 4th. JC hilariously had to count on her fingers to get the Spanish number for the meal she wanted to order. I thought the whole experience was fantastic. It’s not easy, but it feels like positive growth.

We ended the night with BC and I watching some Trent The Traveler, while the girls watched Gilmore Girls.