By the time we made it to the Philippines, our budget was looking good and it really seemed like we could finish out the year under our goal of $123/day. Our last two stops were here and India, which are both pretty budget friendly places to travel.

The first half of the Philippines was great, budget-wise. We were lowering our cumulative daily average pretty seamlessly, getting the daily average down to $126.50 at one point. Hitting $123/day almost felt too easy.

I guess the universe decided we were getting too confident and threw a wrench in our plans. I got sick and remained sick for about 2 weeks. We spent quite a bit of our budget on various medications that did not seem to tackle the problem. Then Peter got super sick and stayed the night in the hospital, and then I did as well. The hospital visits themselves weren’t expensive at all which was a nice surprise having grown up in the US where a hospital visit has the ability to bankrupt you, however, we didn’t exactly make room in our remaining budget for surprise hospital bills. Safe to say these extra costs (although they weren’t crazy high or anything) started to derail our path to $123.

Some notes:

– Lodging was our most expensive category at $876. Hotels ranged from $17/night to $38/night, except two $100+ nights at a 5-star resort to celebrate Peter’s birthday

– Our second highest category was flights at $651. We used miles to fly to the Philippines from Australia but the taxes/fees for using the miles was $130. We transferred 110,000 points. We took two domestic flights, Siargao to Coron ($361) and Coron to Cebu ($160). 

– Third highest category was transportation at $638. The majority of this costs came from taking ferrys between islands. Overnight ferry to Cebu was $113, ferry to El Nido was $110, and a ferry to Coron was $110

Everything we did while in Philippines can be found in our Philippines Itinerary.

Click here to see what we spent in Thailand.