How to Budget for a Big Vacation

Hi all! Back to the grind of another week, but hopefully you all had a great weekend. We didn't really do much because the weather here was brutal this weekend! We tried to run some errands on Saturday but the wind and rain made it so hard. We ended up just staying home the whole weekend having a Star Wars marathon! Kai is starting to fit in to all his 3 month clothes and one of the things I bought for him for this age was a pair of R2D2 pajamas! I have some R2D2 PJs myself (mine are from last year but here are some similar ones), so we did some major twinning and snuggling in them this weekend and watched most of the saga.

So one thing I get asked all the time is how we can afford to travel as often as we do, and the answer always is because we budget for all of our travels! Seeing the world is our biggest hobby and in order to make that hobby happen we save our money to do it! Today I want to share with you how we budget for our big annual vacations that we take every year. We have a few simple tips that really make all the difference in allowing us to take trips of a lifetime all the time!

Pick One Big Destination a Year

We always settle on one big trip per year and then fit in smaller trips like road trips or trips to go see family and friends in to our travel schedule. Figuring out where you want to go is the first step though because that's how you're going to figure out how much it is going to cost you to go on said trip. I suggest doing this as far in advance as possible. Honestly, we pick where we want to go on our big vacations each year almost a whole year in advance.

Make a Rough Price Outline

After you pick where you want to go, it's time to start figuring out how much it'll cost you. I look up flight prices and hotel prices to the destination we have picked out. I always try to look for the average price as well as good deals and land somewhere in the middle for both flights and hotels. I add those two things up and then I add in around $1,000 in spending money if we are taking a domestic trip or $2,000 for international trips. Those amounts include everything that we would be doing except for renting a car if it's necessary. So I'm talking all food, shopping, and entertainment. If we have to pre-pay for any entertainment, then it comes out of that lump sum. Examples of these kinds of things would be sporting event tickets, theater tickets, and tours.

Input Trip Total in to Budget

Once we've figured out roughly how much it will cost us to go on our chosen vacation, we figure out when we want to go and add that rough price in to our budget. We have a nice spreadsheet budget that we use to track all of our bills that need to be paid each month. We have it extended out by a couple years for any annual bills, big expenses like Christmas or buying a new car, or for vacations, so we can see that any expenses we have this year won't severely effect us in the future. So if we want to take a trip this upcoming December, we would put the trip total in to one our December lines on our spreadsheet under additional expenses. This way we can look and see that we won't be too low in our savings or that it won't cause any issues with having enough money to pay bills around that time. It's a nice visual representation to make sure that we aren't stretching ourselves too thin by going on vacation. If it causes any issues then we go back to the drawing board of either changing the time of year we take the trip or pick a new destination that might not cost as much money. As we get closer to needing to book our vacation, we spread out the total to where we need to pay for our flight and our hotel. So with still using December as an example, we would take out the price of the flight and hotel and move it to October since that is when we would be spending that money to book the flight and hotel. Then all that is left for the vacation in December is the spending money we would need for the trip.
*If you're interested in how we set up our budget please let me know and I can do a post on it or just answer via e-mail on an individual basis. I know budgets can be intimidating!

Look for my next travel tips post about the best way to save money on travel, so you can travel for less more often! Where is your next big vacation to? We're hoping to make it down to Savannah, GA/Charleston, SC this fall! Hope you all have a great week ahead!