This last Wednesday morning, the registration for this year’s Financial Blogger Conference (FinCon12) opened. Along with that, the hotel could be reserved through the handy link that gives us the promotional conference pricing. Seeing as how attending FinCon12 this year was on my 2012 goals list as well as my ‘gotta do it’ list; I was very excited.

I’m already positive that my enthusiasm cost us more money, at least on the tickets for the conference. Like 5 minutes after I registered, I found out there was a coupon code you could use if you took the survey earlier on. Had I known that before I purchased our tickets ($149 each), I could have saved a total of $76.00. So there’s the first bit of money I totally wasted for the conference.

In addition to the conference registration, there was also the matter of booking the hotel and airfare. My honey is going to attend the conference with me; so we’re adding a couple days to our stay so that we can have a little vacation. FinCon12 is going to be in Denver Colorado this year, and neither my honey nor I have ever been to Denver. It’ll be fun.

When making the hotel reservation, through the special link, you can get your room for $99 per night…of course that doesn’t include all the hidden fees they sneak in. The Financial Blogger Conference is going to be at the Grand Hyatt Denver, which is really nice.

It’s located in downtown Denver, so there’s got to be a ton of great stuff nearby. Since I had to purchase through the special link, I’m not going to be earning cash-back or points on the purchase. Still, it seems like a decent price for a nice hotel. We’re going to be staying at the Grand Hyatt Denver for 7 nights for a total of $795.22.

I didn’t want to have a hard time later on getting plane tickets, so I just got them right after booking the hotel. We could have saved about $50 on our airfare if we would have gone for the non-direct flights. Instead, we paid about $50 more so that we could have the direct flights without having to get off at strange airports and find the next terminal. In my opinion, that’s worth $50 round-trip.

This time, I was able to earn some points from our airfare purchase—only 1,000 points, but it’s better than nothing. I went through MyPoints and bought our tickets from Expedia. It’s really easy to do and only took me like a minute.

We got 2 round-trip tickets from Portland, Oregon to Denver, Colorado at the times we wanted for a total of $471.20. I could have been smarter about this and compared more prices, set-up alerts and all that other great stuff…but I didn’t.

It feels good to know that everything is taken care of and I don’t need to stress out about anything. We lined up our house/dog/baby-sitter and the husband requested the time off work. Attending the 2nd annual Financial Blogger Conference is no longer a maybe, it’s a sure thing. Doing things this way ensures that nothing will get in the way, as well as nobody backing out—I’m horribly shy.

Still, I spent a TON of money on Wednesday. I’m sure if I would have chilled out and taken my time I would have gotten way better deals and saved a lot of money. But that’s okay, because blogging is important to me and travel is important to both my honey and myself. We’re spending our money on the things that are important to us, because sometimes that’s what really matters.

Spending Total 4 Round 1 of FinCon12

Conference Registration $149 x 2 = $298.00

Hotel = $795.22

Airfare = $235.60 x 2= $471.20

Total = $1,564.42

To me, that’s a crapload of money. It stressed me out to spend all that money and I ended up getting a really bad headache (spendover), but I feel better about it all now. Not only will I get to meet tons of other personal finance bloggers and learn how to be a better blogger, but I’ll have to get over my fear of flying. It’s going to be much better to get over going to Denver than to Europe.

Are you attending FinCon12?