Las Vegas on the Cheap

I know, I know. The title of this post is already a misnomer. How can Las Vegas ever be cheap?

Read on, dear ones.

We traveled to Vegas over the long President’s Day weekend for The Daughter’s dance competition. It was the first comp of the season and in an effort to save money, we brought all our breakfasts, lunches, and snacks with us. We only bought dinner each night, which became a huge cost savings on food!

The day before we left, The Husband and I went grocery shopping at Winco. We had a vague idea of some things we wanted, but mostly we just wandered around the store and grabbed whatever we wanted.

We knew we needed things to eat for breakfast, things for lunch, fruit and snacks. With that in mind, we decided on apples and peanut butter and pop-tarts for breakfast. We bought pre-packaged individual peanut butters, (which we would never usually do) for convenience. They were great, and made clean-up so easy. We grabbed the biggest box of pop-tarts they had and our breakfasts were taken care of.

Again, trying to make life easy, we picked up Lunchabels and pre-made chicken and tuna salad and crackers. We got 10 of each; enough to have each lunch twice. We also bought bananas and cuties to have for fruit with our lunch. From home we brought Baby-bel cheeses and, voila, our lunches were set too!

We bought several different snacks for the trip: Chex Mix, honey roasted peanuts, pretzels, apple sauce, protein biscuits, and Cheeze-its. And, although I thought we were going to run out, there were enough snacks to last the whole trip and we brought some home.

All told, we spent $104 on food at Winco and, bonus, we got to bring the left overs home! $100 wouldn’t have covered even one day’s worth of food if we had bought every meal. Instead, we planned ahead, fed our family of 5 (my mom traveled with us), and saved a ton of money. 

In addition to bringing our food on the trip, The Husband also packed our individual Keurig machine so we would have tea and coffee without having to buy it at Starbucks. That was another huge savings.

While many families flew, we knew it would be much cheaper to drive, not to mention, because of my mom’s hip replacement, she can’t fly yet. I did not think to budget extra money into my gas envelope this month, which would have been the smart thing to do, but we were able to cover most of the gas. My mom did pay for one fill-up and we did have to charge one, but only one, fill-up. The rest were all covered with our gas envelope. Not too shabby.

For cheap… read, free, entertainment, The Husband got on the waiting list at our local library to borrow book one of the Harry Potter series on digital download. We listened to half of it on the way to Vegas and the other half on the way home. That kept The Kids from asking to download and buy a new movie for the ipad, which was awesome.

We also knew the hotel we were staying at had a Regal cinema. We have, literally, hundreds of dollars worth of gift cards to Regal, so we decided to bring them along. On Sunday, we did go as a family to see a movie and we were able to use our gift cards for the tickets. My mom treated for concessions. It was another frugal bit of entertainment for us.

For most of the weekend, The Daughter’s dance competition kept us busy. When we go to Vegas, we usually only gamble with $20 each and once it’s gone, it’s gone. This time was a little different. As a gift, my dad called us while we were driving and told us he would give us each $100 to gamble with! In all honesty, I told The Husband it was painful for me to spend that much money, but it wasn’t ours and we had fun. The Husband had a lot of luck on an “Uncle Sam” inspired slot machine and we played for a couple hours on my dad’s money. All told, we made about $80 and it wasn’t our money that we were gambling with to begin with! That money paid for dinner out on Sunday night with The Girl’s dance team. (So, if you are keeping track, we really only had to buy dinner Friday and Saturday Night as we were home in time for dinner on Monday night and my mom bought us pizza!)

All in all, it was a great trip; and pretty frugal, too. In the 23 years I’ve known my husband, and the15+ times we’ve gone to Vegas, this was definitely the least we’ve ever spent and it couldn’t have come at a better time!!!