It's Not A Bender, It's A Lifestyle.

The final pre-Vegas MGM Rewards points from the CC dropped in today. After a good earning month I'm sitting at a little over 52K pre-trip. So assuming I'll earn something like 3K points in December (conservative, being I'll be earning 3X points in town), that gets me to 55K w/o gambling a penny the rest of the year, so I'll just need to earn 20K points in town to keep Gold. Better than I thought it would be, and very doable. With the tier accelerator in play on the trip, if I earn 10K in a calendar day that will bump up to 15K. I may need only two decent earning days of the week to get there. I may just try to take like the Saturday and really start to pump at 12:01am, keep it going through the day and I might be nearly there. I can keep track on the app during the trip so I'll know in real time where I am. It'd be a relief to get it done early, like by Monday latest, so I can just be free to roam and gamble at will at other resort groups later in the trip. Woul...

Whelp, though I can scarcely believe it, we are T-minus one month from Vegalagalus. Time to do the obligatory plan post, that gets almost always uniformly ignored once I'm in town, but I'm a creature of tradition, so here goes. Night one, Thursday: Leave work around 1p, drop the car in the work garage, Uber to SFO and off we go. Fly in time if all goes well with United is around 6:30p. In a cab, over to Cosmo, check in, dump the bag, freshen up and hopefully out to the strip by 7:30-8p. May come down and hit Vesper first for a couple "get started" cocktails, then it's off for a light dinner somewhere at Aria or Bellagio, to start racking up the MGM tier credits. Maybe the food hall thing at Aria, dunno will play it by ear.  Then it's off to drink on strip, nowhere in particular. Probably somewhere mid-strip as I may be wearing down a bit after having been up since 7:30a. Some gambling at Aria or Bellagio maybe on the way back to the room, I will hold off on FB...

It being a worst case scenario post. As I have previously pissed about, the save will not be sufficient this trip. I write this as a plan to deal with this, assuming there is no work bonus this year (which there may still be, making this post moot). By hook or by crook I will have $5700 minimum on the trip. Scenarios: -I get a bonus of maybe a couple grand, and this post is meaningless. Yay! -With my next three paychecks, after paying all normal life expenses:          I have $3500 Vegas save on 11/24 paycheck.          I have $4400 Vegas save on 12/8 paycheck. This is the amount that flies with me.          I have an additional $1300 on the 12/22 paycheck when I'm already in town. The last one is the dodgy one, as it means I float whatever is left on my December CC balance and pay interest on it, which I hate to do but hey, it's Vegas! Assuming I pay $1000 on the 11/24 and 12/8 checks, there shouldn't be more th...

Concerned a bit about the save for the Xmas trip, because there's cause to and because that's what I do. The save is not going great. Various factors have contributed to that. The $630/month I've had to dump into having the car certainly hasn't helped (lease payment, insurance, gas). The IRS payment of $200/month wasn't helping, though that's gone now, thankfully. The cost of life has gone up too, prescriptions, food, essentials, the $100 rent increase etc. All those things factor in. But the main reason is I just spend too damn much money. I spend $250+ on an average Saturday out. I pay $30 4-5 times a week on Door Dash. I make 2-3 weekly $50 Target runs for other shit. It adds up. The June trip hurt too. I'm done obsessing over it but it literally took me 2-3 months to recover from how broke that trip left me, to even begin to save for Xmas. As it stands I have $2900 saved for the trip. I only have 3 checks left before going, and will have 1 more hit the d...