A Spring Break From Spending

It was an easy week in the world of budgeting. The tennis team went on a spring break trip to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. I took out my usual $150 on Saturday before our early departure Sunday morning, and the trip was already looking bright when our coach gave us $30. We were to spend the money on breakfast that morning and breakfast food for the rest of the week. After breakfast, we drove south on the open road and in no time it was already lunchtime.

We stopped at Subway and our lunch bill was again taken care of by our coach—making the trip look even brighter. We arrived in South Carolina around 5 p.m.; we went out for dinner because we hadn’t bought any groceries and in case you haven’t noticed a pattern, our dinner was paid for, too. All university-sponsored athletic trips are typically always taken care of meal-wise, but we did have a limit this week since we’d be gone so long. Every meal wouldn’t be paid for, but for all that was paid for definitely helped my budget.

I spent my $30 on groceries the first night, but even though it wasn’t my own, I still spent my money wisely. I purchases two boxes of Special K cereal—one box of Red Berries and one box of Blueberry; Honey Nut flavored Special K cereal bars; Fat Free Lactaid milk; a bag of grapes; four oranges; and six bananas. I also covered the cost of Piggly Wiggly brand flip-flops for my teammate who forgot to bring her own. With a week ahead of university-sponsored meals and only three meals of our own to cover, I knew this week would be a piece of cake to get through.

We were only left alone to pay for lunch on Monday and Thursday and dinner on Wednesday. Except one of my teammate’s parents came into town and took us out to dinner at an amazing Italian restaurant on Wednesday night—they were so gracious.

Rewind back to Wednesday afternoon and that’s when the personal spending happened. Seven of us girls made our way down to the shops by the beach and also to the infamous tiki hut that sits itself right on the sand next to the beach volleyball courts. It was nice and sunny when we first arrived so we sat ourselves under an umbrella at the tiki hut and ordered some smoothies—all non-alcoholic of course since we were on an athletic trip. There was an assortment of flavors we wanted to try and they were rather small in size so each of us ended up ordering four smoothies. My grand total was only $26—and it was well worth it!

It started to get cold and rainy, as we were finishing up at the tiki hut, so we decided to walk around the shops. I browsed for a bit and chose to splurge on a $25 tie-dye hooded sweatshirt that reads: Hilton Head Island.

I have to admit—I’m very proud with how much money I saved: $99, the most I’ve ever had at the end of a week since my budget started. And when I got home late Saturday night, I took that $99, and put it right into the summer vacation fund.