$40 A Day – Come On Rachel Ray: A Look At My Trip Expenses
Posted on: July 8, 2009 by Matt
Many of you are probably familiar with the Food Network Show $40 A Day with Rachel Ray. If you are not – the basic premise is that Rachel Ray goes out on a trip to a city and tries to get through the day spending $40 for all of her meals. While I was out of town on business I figured I would see what I could do to stay around her benchmark and still eat relatively well for the 10 days I would be gone.
After returning home I promptly went through my spreadsheet of expenses to submit an expense report to my boss. All said and done I had about $565 out of pocket for the 10 days I was gone and another $1325 or so for the base trip expenses (airfare, rental car, hotel) that my boss picked up on the company card. The $565 I spent breaks down like this:
- $112.45 – Parking for the airport I was departing from or 10 days. I used an economy lot with shuttle service to the terminal which saved about $5 – $10 per day.
- $101.28 – Rental car taxes: I guess these were not covered by the reservation booking.
- $74.06 – Gas: One fill up for my car to get to the airport and two for the rental car.
- $23.50 – Parking in Denver: Parking in downtown Denver can run up to $20 per day. Most uncovered lots are in the $10 – $12 per day neighborhood. I generally parked a few blocks outside of downtown in a lot that ran $2.50 per day. I had to walk about 15 minutes to get to downtown but saved the company about $10 per day here as well.
- $253.26 – Food total: That was all of my meals for the 10 day trip plus coffee, snacks and anything else I ingested. That totals out to about $25 per day which is $15 per day less than my baseline. I did have a couple of dinners that spanned two nights but also treated coworkers to coffee as well as one coworker to lunch. This makes me wonder if maybe I should get a show similar to Rachel Ray’s and search out the cheap eats in a town for people that need to spend less than $40 a day. Of course I am not a fan of cameras and have no interest at all in the idea but it is an idea just the same…
So for the entire trip my total came to about $1890 which is $110 less than the $2,000 I set as my goal to stay under. I am not sure what my boss had in mind for a baseline for expenses or what other coworkers have spent while out of town on business but think I did a fairly decent job of keeping costs low. How about you? Do you have a standard amount that you spend while out of town on business?
