The Road to Steem Fest | Budgeting

I've been so excited about this whole SteemFest 4 thing and the opportunity to meet everyone that I sort of forgot about the financial side of things. Yup, nothing is free in this world. You need to pay to fly to Bangkok, you need to pay to stay in a hotel, and yes, you need to pay to join SF4. That's when reality hits and you have to wake up back to this cruel real world. Let's take a look to see how much this is going to cost me.

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Flight

Luckily being in Taiwan, I'm relatively close to Bangkok, less than 4 hours away by flight to be precise. I've just checked the cost of the flights and the return ticket from my local airport flying with a budget airline called Viet Jet Air costs USD420!!!! Shocking!

So I decided to check flights flying out from Taoyuan Airport (the main airport) which is about 2 hours away by coach. As expected, there are a lot more options here. A direct flight with Thai Airways cost around USD200. And even if I factor in the cost of the return coach, which in around USD10 one way, I'm still talking about USD220. Now that's more like it.

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Hotel

I've booked my hotel already, this is the only thing that I've paid for so far for this trip. I'm staying at the Prince Palace Hotel which is where SF4 is held. It's just easier to save the hassle of traveling. And the main thing is I'm a late morning person so staying there means I don't have to get up so early. The cost of the hotel room for 6 nights is USD334, so my share is USD167, that average out at less that USD28 per night. That's good deal!

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SteemFest ticket

This is the biggest chunk of cost and really woke me up when the announcement came out. I've kinda blocked it out from my mind all along. The regular price ticket is Euro 445.55 which is around USD500!!! 😭 There are two ways to reduce this cost. One, is if I win a ticket, but the chances are pretty slim. I know Actifit are doing a contest which is also hosted by @anomadsoul, and did I hear something from SteemMonster? I don't do either so that's out of the question for me. Then there's the lucky draw from @knozaki2015. He's giving away 10 free tickets. 5 winners have been announced already and there are 5 more spots left. I've never won anything before, and there's always a first time for everything. One can only hope. If I do win a ticket, I promise I will donate to the TRF. Blockchain honour.

The second way to reduce the cost, is to get a cheaper ticket. I've got until the end of the month to decide, so let's not think about this for the time being.

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Other expenses

I don't know how much the other expenses will be as most (all?) of the meals and drinks are included in the SteemFest ticket price. I'm not too fussed with this category of cost as if I was at home I would need to spend anyway. Spending in Taiwan vs spending in Thailand is no difference, in fact it might even be cheaper in Thailand. So I'm going to assume USD0 for this.

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Total cost

So my worse case total cost will be USD887, best case (if I win a ticket 😊) is USD387. I'd be lying if I said I don't have USD887 in my bank account and if I spent it, I'm going to get into financial difficulties. But on the other hand, I have no income now so this extra cost is eating into my normal expense for the next couple of months ....

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SF4 Surprise

If you remember from my previous #roadtosteemfest post, I mentioned I'm preparing my own SF4 surprise.. I haven't made any progress in the last few weeks as depressing stuff has been happening in other parts of my life which is making me rather sad. I'm going to have to start on my my SF4 surprise again as I just noticed from the official SF4 website there's only 90 days to SF4!!!

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Check out all my travel posts here on Steemit Worldmap, and also my latest project @LadiesOfAsia where we share fun and cultural diversity across Asia Pacific.