Central America Costs

At the start of this trip Dana decided to write down all our expenses, so that we’d have some idea how much money we are spending. After a bunch of tedious spreadsheet work, the final statistics are now ready. We thought we’d share them here in case anyone is interested.

Our average cost per day, for two people, was 86.97 USD. The cheapest days, at $56.83 per day, were spent studying Spanish in Xela, Guatemala. Curiously, the most expensive days ($116.87 per day) also occurred while we were studying Spanish, in Copán, Honduras. In both cases the school tuition fee included accommodation with a local family, three meals a day, and some after-school activities.

The breakdown of average daily expenses per country appears below.

Daily budget breakdown (click for larger imager)

Clarifications and disclaimers:

The sample size is rather small. The most time we spent in any one country was 16 days. Therefore, isolated events such as the $90-per-person cave tour in Belize can skew the results quite a bit.

This is far from a minimal budget. We stayed in private rooms for the most part, and usually ate out. Of course you can travel for less, and some people make a point of stretching their dollar as far as it will go, but that was never our concern. To put things in perspective, the lost income from 3.5 months out of work is much higher than the total cost of the trip.

No separate category for booze. Our alcohol consumption was less than one drink a day on average, so here we just lump that expense together with food. Clearly, for some people the “liquor tax” would be much higher.

There are other budget-affecting factors which are not accounted for here, such as local weather, high season vs. off-season, and our state of mind at the time. For example, the Costa Rica leg of the journey coincided with Semana Santa - the busiest, most expensive week of the year by far. The budget in Panama was driven up simply because it was the last leg of the trip, so discipline was becoming lax. The spending on ice cream alone in Panama City was quite substantial!

Finally, these figures exclude pre-trip expenses such as flights, travel insurance, vaccines, and new travel gear.

The authors wish to thank the Israel Tax Authority for sponsoring our trip with a substantial refund :-)