After our quick stop in the US, we jetted off to New Zealand, with credit card points, thankfully. We are now two-thirds of the way through the year, so unfortunately (or fortunately when we go way over budget), each additional day of spending has less and less impact on our running daily average.

Our two-week long work exchange was able to make a solid dent in getting the average down. We stayed with a super cute retired Kiwi couple and worked 4-5 hours a day (with weekends off), in exchange for 3 meals a day and free accommodation. We were able to have quite a few $0 spend days. We then headed to South Island after our work exchange where we rented a car with a pop-up tent to explore South Island.

Some notes:

– The car rental was our most expensive category at $1,547, however this is also the majority of our accommodation costs since it came with a rooftop pop-up tent. The daily rental rate came out to $65/night. We spent $385 on gas as we covered a large chunk of South Island.

– Besides car camping, we spent $907 other accommodation. Our most expensive place we stayed at was 2 nights in Auckland for $128/night (Auckland is so expensive and for what). Our campsites while we drove around South Island ranged from $18/night to $37/night. Lodging would’ve been much higher had we not done the work exchange for 2 weeks in North Island.

– We used points to fly to New Zealand from Houston. We redeemed 88,000 points for 2 one-way tickets

Everything we did while in New Zealand can be found in our New Zealand Itinerary.

Click here to see what we spent in Australia.