How Do You Pay for Your Vacations?

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1. Hypothetically I set aside $100/mo for travel but since the pandemic more often than not I have a more pressing need and that money is redirected elsewhere, meaning that I don’t really travel much since the cost of living went up. The vast majority of the weddings I go to are local but on the occasion I do need to travel for one I will use CC points to cover some or all expenses.

   I also always travel on the cheap: go on the shoulder season, fly discount airlines, 4 people in each hotel room (so sharing a bed with a friend).

   Once I’m somewhere though i don’t let my budget impact my experience too much. I always eat out when traveling (experiencing different cuisines is my favorite part of traveling). I don’t go to fancy places or order the most expensive thing on the menu, but I also don’t make sandwiches in the hotel room or choose the cheapest option either.

2. The thing I miss most about pre-Covid life is the work travel, because I used to pay for all my vacation flights with skymiles accumulated from work travel, which helped tremendously on keeping vacation costs down. Actually having to pay for flights has definitely increased my vacation costs significantly. (We pay out of savings. DINK high income.)

3. We just cash flow it out of income after taxes, retirement savings, etc. are taken out. We put everything on credit cards for the points, but pay them off immediately.

   1. +1

   2. what does cash flow mean – like if you take a $10k vacation do you just have that sitting around in your accounts?

      1. when you’re booking flights one month, a hotel another month, excursions closer to the trip, and then food and miscellany while there, it’s NBD to just … pay the credit card each bill each month that includes those expenses.

         1. Yeah basically what Cat said. We book flights, hotels and excursions separately and travel often, so our travel costs tend to be reasonably steady each month. We put them on credit cards and pay off the credit card bill each month out of the previous month’s salary.

            If we have a month where we have a abnormally large expense (like we just splurged on transatlantic business class flights and it was $$$$) then we might pull some money out of a savings account and cut back on fun spending for a month or two until that account returns to its normal balance. We keep about $25k in a high interest rate savings account for situations like this and other short term needs that might pop up, like expensive home repairs.

         2. Same. Also has the benefit of racking up cc points, which we do use for flights once we have enough.

         3. This is what we do also. We spread the trip expenses across multiple months and just pay for it out of cash flow. But we haven’t done a trip where, say, the airfare alone cost $10k; our airfare and hotel max out at around $3k and that’s for a really big vacation for us, the kind we only take every other year or so.

   3. We also cash flow vacations, and we do the types of vacays where expenses hit at all different times. Flights one point, some hotels as booked, others after you stay, and then food and most activities is obviously during the vacay itself. That, combined with putting it on credit cards and having the bill cycle delay means we have loads and loads of paychecks to divide expenses between. However, we travel frugally compared to many here and often our travel expenses are not significantly higher than the social activities we would be doing locally (HCOL location.)

      1. We had a week in Spain where I swear we spent less on food than we do at home. We had breakfast included at our hotel, typically ate gelato for lunch for like 2 euros a person and usually spent less (sometimes much less) than 50 euros for our family of three on dinner. That’s hard to beat even in our LCOL college town.

   4. Same.

4. It seems everyone was in Europe this summer except for me. I just can’t afford it!!

   1. Europe flight prices this summer were nuuuuts. We ended up going to Iceland because Icelandair flights were really reasonable. It was like $600/person to go to Iceland and almost $2k per person to go anywhere on the continent.

   2. FWIW I just booked flights to Paris in November for $550 round trip on United. I don’t really get the appeal of Europe in the summer. It’s so, so hot and crowded and the air conditioning is limited. March-April and October-November are the best months to go IMO unless you’re going specifically for warm weather activities in a beachy location

      1. If you have school age kids, it’s complicated to go at non-summer times. Our school’s spring break is only one week and is in early March when most of Europe is still way too cold for me. We go in late May/early June so it’s not too hot or crowded normally. But it’s hard to find a good deal on flights in May. And fwiw this year even our spring break flights were >$1,500 per person. There are deals to be had for sure, but you generally need a lot of flexibility about when you travel, which can be tough with school and even with certain jobs.

5. Has anyone been on a beach vacation like the picture, with bungalows or whatever on the water? i want to go but always worried i’d be drunk and walk into the water.

   1. lol yes, but what you can’t see are the stairs on each bungalow that make for an easy return to dry land ;)

   2. Yes, in Bora Bora and it was FABULOUS. On my life list to do something similar again for sure. I don’t know how drunk you plan to get but I think you’d have to be pretty hammered to fall down the stairs into the water.

6. With the money in my bank account.

7. vacation? What is vacation?

   1. Get a new job! Life is too short to not take vacations. I’m a Big Law survivor and am guessing you have a similar job.

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