![\"Charlie](\"https:\/\/ourtourmedia.s3.eu-central-003.backblazeb2.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/IMG_20160229_132226184-1024x738-1024x738.jpg\")
Charlie isn’t a big fan of the rain<\/p><\/div>\n
We had a long debate in Chamonix about money; are we spending too much, too little or just the right amount? The truth is as we don’t know what the future holds for us, all we can do is take an educated guess of how much we can afford to spend each day, week, month, year without stealing from our future selves. If you’re new to our blog you might not realise that our lifestyle isn’t funded by a lottery win or an inheritance from a long-lost relative, instead we spend our residual income, that is money we earn from our investments and the business I run back at home<\/a>. Jay has written loads on the topic, so if you want to know more this<\/a> would be a good place to start.<\/p>\n We\u00a0watch what we spend to make sure we won’t be broke in six months, with our current gelato habit that could be a possibility, and the\u00a0way we had things set up it was hard to see what we were spending on travelling as it was mixed in with fixed costs from back home (letting agent fees, insurance, etc), so I re-jigged our spreadsheets to split out the costs. With that done, Jay did a bit of number crunching to see how various levels of spending would affect the future projection of our money. All very boring to some, but to us it gives us peace of mind that we can carry on doing this for as long as we want.<\/p>\n Our daily spend target to cover all our day to day travel costs is \u00a341, that’s just under \u00a315k a year. We started our new spend tracking method back in August of last year, and after applying the \u00a341 per day spend target we’re only \u00a3300 over budget in total – since August last year. That is amazing considering what we have been up to, and a very expensive January with van repairs and our friends’ wedding!<\/p>\n To celebrate our new found financial reassurance, when the rain finally stopped we headed off into the town for a walk around. Having already been here before it was a bit strange as I was\u00a0looking to see what had changed (not a lot as most of the buildings are hundreds of years old), so I hardly took any photos as I’d taken loads when we were here over 3 years ago<\/a>. It is a lovely little town though with a big entrance gate either end, loggia-lined streets, caf\u00e9s and restaurants and a viewpoint across the valley of the river to Bra (yes that is the name of the town). Sadly most of the places were closed, it was only just after 4pm, so they could still be having\u00a0dinner or observing the ‘closed on Monday’ tradition which we’ve found in Italy.<\/p>\n Charlie has a quick sniff of one of the local wine stores<\/p><\/div>\n This was the first place we experienced a milk machine in a car park, below is the video of how excited we got back in 2012 when we discovered it. Of course we couldn’t resist another play again on it today and I got the opportunity to replace my souvenir milk bottle which got broken when we were back in the UK.<\/p>\n![\"DSC01108](\"https:\/\/ourtourmedia.s3.eu-central-003.backblazeb2.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/DSC01108-1024x768-1024x768.jpg\")
![\"DSC01111](\"https:\/\/ourtourmedia.s3.eu-central-003.backblazeb2.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/DSC01111-1024x688-1024x688.jpg\")
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