Well, the family had a blast this weekend. We tried to budget roughly $100 a day at the fair, which honestly seems reasonable for a family of five aiming for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. The question is, how much did we spend on this event, and was it worth it?

To start, we bought twelve entry tickets at a discount rate online — $7.50 each instead of the $10 cost for ages 13 and up cost Friday through Monday. That was $90. Then we bought four all-day ride passes for the kids and my wife, which was $112. We secured a very coveted reserved parking pass — some people wait up to five years before they can get one of these parking spaces! The price this year was $100, but we used it every day of the fair which is about $17 per day. My wife also wanted to go to the concert with the big country music band that was playing and take our son to his first concert. Two tickets cost $157 after tax.

We allowed each child to take $20 of their own money to spend on anything they wanted — food, games, toys, etc. Then, between several grandparents, they each ended up with $70 more over the course of the weekend to spend on things.

That didn’t alter our $100 daily family budget for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. We also bring back every year the family sized fry buckets and drink cups to pay refill prices. One stand had French fry refills at $5, while all the other stands had refills for $10. My oldest worked her first job parking cars at the fair this year, which meant we didn’t even need to buy tickets for her to get in, and we ended up giving away 3 of our tickets. Her grandmother also gave her $20 per day for food, so that was nice.

So, that was $459 before we walked through the first gate. Then a $300 budget, of which we maybe kept about $50, but the kids then spent roughly $90 worth of their own or grandparent money on things. That puts the total spend right around $1,030. Which seems high for 6 days of fair-going, but then I think about the Renaissance Faire, where we spend half that in gas, hotels, and entry fees on just one day, so maybe this was relatively frugal.

My son decided not to enter anything into the competitions this year, but my oldest took 3rd place for a wooden table she made, and 1st place with Best in Show for a ceramic dragon she painted. My youngest took 2nd place in both chocolate candy making and dot painting. Which is always awesome. My mom took 1st place in one of her baking entries, too.

I hope everyone else had an awesome Labor Day Weekend!

~~Miniwing~~
Tired, Broke, Back to Work