Managing Finances

Just FYI, this is my first early morning post.  On the ship, I will be writing most of my blog posts early in the morning because the ship internet is veeerrry slow, and the morning is the best time to upload any photos.

But, about money and finances.  It's best to start this voyage with a war chest. Figure out if you can do it before you commit. My travel expenses are paid by Semester at Sea, but Nancy's are not.  She did manage to get a part time job on the ship as an assistant to student life (or something like that), so that covers her cost of the voyage, ie. room and board. Then we have to get to South Hampton, England to get on the ship.  That will be a little over $1,000, and we have to get home at the end of the voyage. There's also that matter of logistics of getting from the airport in London to the port in S.Hampton and the overnight at the very expensive hotel there.  Don't worry, I'm not setting up a "FundMe" campaign, but it's a concern for some of the students, and they have set them up. 

Another expense that is quite variable is what you do in the countries.  I have already blogged about the SAS trips, and we have signed up for trips in seven countries and are still under our budget, so we will be adding a few more.  We have mapped out some independent travel which includes a couple of nights in Paris, but we haven't arranged accommodations yet. If you want to save some expenses, you can hang around in the port city and spend the night on the ship.  We enjoy experiencing how people live in different places, so we will do this in some ports that have interesting things to do.

The pre-voyage expenses include things like needed medications for malaria, Visas, camera memory, back-up computer memory, new walking shoes, travel insurance, etc.

While we are gone, we will have the expense of a house/barn sitter which will mostly be covered by the barn income.  But, I will not incur the weekly cost of driving to work or grocery shopping, so some of that will even out for our port trips and meals in ports.  Our utilities, internet, phone, TV satellite, insurance, mortgage, etc. will still need to be paid, but we have set up auto pay for all of those, so that worry is taken care of.

The thing that we took care of this week was to let our banks know that we would be traveling to a bunch of countries so that they would not flag our credit cards and ATM cards as suspicious and suspend them.  My bank guy even suggested that I set up a separate travel acct. with a dedicated ATM card that is not linked to my checking account.  We had friends who had their Debit card info stolen when they made a withdrawal in Brazil back in 2010.  The thieves wiped out their checking account back home.  We will keep a low balance in our special ATM account and move money as needed.

After talking to some other former SAS librarians yesterday, I'm going to order some foreign currency.  You can do that online, and it will get delivered to your house, but you have to be there to sign for it. Alternatively, you can order by phone and get the currency delivered to your local bank office.  I think we will do that since it's nice to get off the ship and be able to take a taxi somewhere without first seeking out an ATM.  I've already go some Euros, but I think I'll need some British pounds and some Polish Zloty and definitely some Brazilian currency.