Car rental in Mexico

I realised your draft post on car rental in Mexico was for your trip last year which was cancelled. Here is the research I compiled.

Personal liability insurance. Many rental car agencies (including the one we have booked with, Sixt), include the required by law liability insurance. Sixt includes coverage for $350,000 MXN, which is about $25,000 Canadian. You can buy additional coverage from Sixt for $11 per day USD. I think we will pay this additional insurance, but I may do a little research about whether it is required.
http://www.sfgate.com/mexico/mexicomix/article/Renting-a-car-in-Mexico-What-you-need-to-know-3787891.php
http://www.mexperience.com/lifestyle/transport/car-rental-in-mexico/

Loss damage waiver (LDW). This is the one covered by credit cards. I looked at the terms of the credit card we will be using. The only issue is that the principal driver has to be the one renting, and I currently have rented a manual car that only Murray knows how to drive. I was planning to get him that card anyway through the referral program, so we just have to do that by January.  OR we would have to see how much to pay for another driver, who would be covered as long as the cardmember is the principal driver.
For Amex: All claims must be reported within 48 hours of the theft, loss and damage occurring by calling 1-800-243-0198 (in Canada or the United States) or by calling collect (905) 475-4822 (elsewhere in the world).
If refusing the car company's insurance, they will usually put a large deductible on the credit card for the duration of the rental.

Personal Accident Insurance. This would be covered through our health insurance.

To do when rent car:

• decide if going to decline or take liability insurance.
• call credit card company before travel, tell them there will be large charge for deductible.
• take pictures of car, including close-ups of any dents, scratches, etc. Also look at underside (somehow?)
• decline LDW

anne's life plan ideas

I know you enjoy hearing about our crazy life plan ideas, and it will be fun in the future to look back and see what I was thinking about, so I thought I would compile our options. I have done spreadsheets for most of the options to see which are best financially (although finances are not the only consideration). They pretty much all involve Murr working until June 2018 and then taking 5 years leave (and then quitting for good if we're doing okay financially), and us making about $20,000 per year doing freelance stuff, or making money online somehow, or taking short term contracts, etc. until 2029. If we're not enjoying "retirement", or are not on track financially, then there is always the option for one or both of us to return to work when our leave is over.  So here are the grand ideas:

(1) Build a backyard carriage house and rent out the main house. This is the option we are most dreamy about at the moment.  These are not allowed yet in Ottawa but are in the process of being passed, so we have seen the proposed bylaws and such. The proposed laws would allow us to build a one story house in the backyard with a 50 square meter footprint (540 square feet), which could have a basement. This idea is similar to our previous side house idea, but the backyard house would be slightly bigger. I really enjoy imagining the floor plans for this house. This option varies financially based on how much it would cost, but if we could build if for less than $150K, it would be feasible. We imagine we would do most of the labour on it after Murray "retires."

(2) Sell our house in spring 2018 or spring 2019 and go travel, possibly indefinitely. I assume our costs during travel would be about the same as they would be if we stayed in Ottawa, which definitely means travelling slow and on a budget and mostly in cheap countries. Rent an apartment or house when we return. This option varies financially based on whether we can stick to our budget and what and where we rent when we return. We love the idea of travel, but also love our community and being near family, so I don't think we'll actually do this. Rather, we'll probably up our travel time to one month in the winter and 4-6 weeks in the summer and be home and stable the rest of the year.

(3) sell our house and rent. we also talk about this one a lot. I regularly look at available rentals and we could get a two or three bedroom apartment near us for less than $2000 per month. It would be attached though (i.e. in a building or row house). We like the idea of not spending time on house maintenance and having a smaller space, but worry about the lack of permanence and possible noisy neighbours.

(4) Buy a smallish condo, near Murray's parents' new condo and possibly in their building. We are uncertain about condo living though, because we don't think many other families do it, and we might feel weird being the only family in the building. We are also concerned about lack of outdoor space with this option. We like the idea of a ground level unit where we would have direct access to outside.

Everything is the same until Spring 2018, so we have lots of time to ponder!

love,
anne

Hawaii

Hi Anneabelle,

We just booked a trip to Hawaii :)  Andrew is SO excited.  It is so nice to see him so excited about something and I am excited too.  Alexandria has a two week break at the beginning of April so that is when we are going.  In the end we ended up booking the tickets with cash, but not before I did a ton of points research.  I want to summarize that research here for my own benefit.  There was no amazing answer with points given the current amount of points we own.  And we ended up finding flights from Denver to Kona (Big Island) for $465 each on Alaska, which was about half the other cheapest tickets.  I think they might have been having a sale.  It means leaving and returning mid-week instead of the weekend but we can make that work.  It also means we will have a 12 hour layover in Seattle on the way back, after a short redeye (urg!), but we plan to make the most of it and tour Seattle for the day.

I used the Travel is Free chart of Cheapest Ways to Get to Hawaii Using Miles as a guide.

• The first one on the list is Virgin Elevate at 20K, which would be amazing since it is cheaper than going to Ottawa.  This one had me so confused since I hadn't looked in to Virgin before.  The key is that this value is only when going through a partner airline (like Hawaiian). Million Mile Secrets explained it very well: "While Virgin America’s frequent flyer program uses a revenue-based system on their own flights, they have mileage-based charts for their partner
  airlines." And then in terms of booking on Hawaiian as a partner airline: "When booking award tickets, you can only book flights on Hawaiian Airlines (the price for a ticket does not include any connecting flights on Virgin America). So if you aren’t located in a city served by Hawaiian Airlines, you’ll have to use more points to book a separate Virgin America flight to 1st get to a Hawaiian Airlines city."  This meant that I would search on Virgin and could see DEN because it is served by Virgin but then the point values were way more than 20K.  Then I would search for the 20K return trips and DEN wouldn't be on the list, because Hawaiian doesn't fly to DEN.  Based on the other points below it meant we would have had to buy a separate ticket RT to one of the cities Hawaiian flies to (e.g. PHX, or SJC and join it with a work trip) and then also pay in cash/points for the trip within the islands.
• Virgin Elevate is 2:1 with AMEX points so it makes it worth more like 40K return if you are comparing to other AMEX transfers.  But is is 1:1 with the 20K becomes 25K bonus for SPG.  
• Supposedly Hawaiian has seasonal service direct to KOA from LAX but I couldn't find it.
• It should be an additional 6K RT with Virgin Elevate to fly inter-island with Hawaiian.
• 20K that do exist:
• Only to HNL: PHX, SAN, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Oakland
• SJC can go to HNL or OGG
• SFO can go to HNL or OGG
• Singapore got me so excited because as a transfer partner with AMEX, SPG, and Chase we would have had the 35K*4 that we needed.  But what I read (I don't know where the link is now) is that you have to find availability on United metal and on the United search engine you have to see both the first column with a 22.5K fare (their lowest) as well as a value in the second column.  This corresponds to having a line and the dots in the calendar view.  And we couldn't be signed in, because then we see the XN fares that are only available because of the credit card we have.  I could find this for the Tuesday before (we ideally wanted Sat-Sat) but I couldn't find anything on the way back.  Also, with the transfers from SPG that may take a few days and then needing to phone Singapore it felt a bit daunting to hope that this one available flight would still be there.  And I didn't know if you could do one-way awards with Singapore.
• Some of them like Alaska and AA are only transfers from SPG.  We would have about 87K with the transfer bonus but this wasn't enough to look in to these programs.  We also didn't have enough AMEX and SPG to make Hawaiian work, although it was much closer.  That said I am not sure the Hawaiian points needed were as cheap as he has in the table.  
• It was the same booking with United Miles, we just didn't have enough (not even close) with our Chase and United points.  Which was too bad because United has a direct from DEN to KOA.  That said we started to wonder if it was actually the best use of the points.  At 45K is it better to go to Hawaii or is it better value to buy the 25K Ottawa tickets that can actually be quite expensive.  At $465 a ticket the answer was simple but it wasn't so clear at some of the other ticket costs.  
• I looked at Delta but it was super pricey point requirements.
• From DEN, British Airways would have been 40K, assuming with could find a flight from here to the West Coast and then direct to KOA (7500+12500 each).  As a transfer partner of everything we could have made this work, and pretty much used up all our points.  I used this post to guide me in looking up the flights on American's website since as others have mentioned the BA website tried to route me through Heathrow!  Sadly the available flights were horrible, especially on the return.  They were midweek, which in the end we ended up booking anyways, but they had really bad routings on the way home.  Kona to Portland, to Dalla, to Denver - yuck and more expensive with a distance based program.  
• Aeroplan was the most interesting.  I hadn't been looking at it because it was 45K but then I got the idea of whether I could combine it with Ottawa trips.  It turns out it is possible.  YOW to KOA then KOA to DEN (with a 3 month stopover) and then DEN to YOW was also 45K.  This means that if I had booked a RT from DEN to YOW for 25K that got us there a week or so before going to Hawaii and then came back after the later summer trip I could have two Ottawa trips plus the Hawaii trip for 75K.  I think we only had enough points (and vacation time) that it would have just been the girls and me doing that, and a 11 hour flight from Newark to HNL with the girls by myself did not really excite me.  I also didn't know enough about when I want to come back in the summer.  But neat to think of for the future.  I had read about the whole nested trip thing but never really fully grasped its use before.

So there we go.  So far we seem to be going every 3 years so maybe this will be useful in another 3 years time :)

Hugs, 

Jen