Ruminations about conventions and costs

Yes, it’s that time of year when I’m thinking about money…even more obsessively than I think about it all the rest of the time.

One of my f-list friends has estimated her projected expense for attending the 2009 Philcon convention–including single-occupancy hotel room, transportation, food and registration for the con–at $1,145.00. I don’t doubt the accuracy of her estimate, although it doesn’t allow for the lower con rate for the hotel, which hasn’t been determined yet.

But as someone who has attended conventions and Pagan gatherings for years on a shoestring, that total seemed awfully high to me. I’ve been going to a convention, on average, every 10 weeks since World Fantasy Convention in November, 2007. In 2008, I went to five conventions. Since I just got By Light Unseen Media’s books for 2008 into shape, I took a look at what I spent altogether on conventions alone.

I attended five cons: Boskone, ConBust, Readercon, 3Pi-Con and Albacon. At four of these cons, I had one or two roommates sharing the hotel room. I commuted to Readercon, so I drove there and back each of four days. For the most part, I took my own food in a cooler, supplemented with an occasional snack from the con suite. I’ve always brown-bagged my own lunches and so on, and now my food restrictions preclude most restaurant food even if I could afford it. My total expenditure for all five 2008 conventions, excluding transportation, was $640.89. That’s registration, hotel, and incidentals, with the hotel being the bulk of the cost.

As far as transportation goes, I logged 1,013.9 miles driving to all these events. My car gets an average of 33 mpg, so taking an average cost of gas over the past year of $3.50/gallon, I spent about $107.00 on gas. If I want to take the IRS “standard allowance” for all that mileage, however, it would come to $571.95 transportation costs.

Add all that up, and it comes to an average total expenditure of $242.57 per convention. It goes down to $149.58 per convention if I just count the cost of gas for transportation expense. That would have been even lower if I’d car-pooled with anyone and they chipped in for gas! (I offered, but I’m not conveniently located, unfortunately).

Of course, I have to keep costs that low, because I don’t have money to burn, and going to these conventions is important for me professionally. I need to promote myself, I need to promote my company, I need to connect with readers, I need to network with writers and industry pros. I’m fit, healthy, and flexible–I can sleep on a cot or on the floor and be perfectly happy, I can eat cheese sandwiches and fruit for a weekend and get along fine. Some people have very good and serious health reasons that they can’t “rough it,” but I don’t. As for the effect of a cheerfully crowded hotel room on sleep…well, I’m sleep dysfunctional at the best of times, and when I attend conventions, I just do without much sleep. I understand that lots of people can’t do that, either.

But this frugality has nothing to do with the economy or my current finances–I’ve always lived my whole life this way. Sometimes it gets tiresome, but it is handy to have the “infrastructure” in place to do lots of things I want to do for very low cost. There are a lot of ways to save a lot of money, and I don’t cut my budget as tightly as I could. I’ll be happy to exchange cost-cutting tips with any con-goers on my f-list.

By the way, I’m a very responsible hotel roommate. You won’t even know I’m there. 😉