How To Budget For A Trip

Setting a budget for your trip is deserving of its own section if not entire chapter.
Apart from time, money is the main restriction keeping people from traveling. Travel is a luxury, first and foremost. There are ways to make travel less costly but doing some comes at the expense of certain comforts on your trip. In addition to that, although we can try- life happens when you’re traveling and there are always unexpected expenses that will pop up. The best way for you to prevent feelings of money anxiety during your trip, or worse preventing you from booking the trip in the first place, is to start a budget. Before you even decide where you want to go you should already be putting money aside for your trip. Very rarely will a flight across the Pacific Ocean cost you nothing, so it’s better to start saving something now. Even if all you can save is an extra 100 dollars a month for leisure, start putting that aside in the travel fund. I am a firm supporter of financial well-being and as much as I love travel, I do not support putting trips you cannot afford on credit cards.

Travel is much more fun when you can afford it. By setting aside money each month automatically into a separate account, not only do I begin to live my everyday life without being tempted to spend my travel fund, but when I do decide it is the right time to start traveling, I have money that I can spend guilt free on my purchase. By doing so it makes it more likely that you will go forward with booking the trip because you have the money already set aside for it. You’ll also then be able to spend guilt free when you’re in country, which is the best part! When I took my first solo trip to Japan, I felt like I was a kid in a candy store! All the time I spent saving up and being frugal in the states paid off, because I could eat and do nearly anything I wanted once I got there. The amount you will need to save for the trip is going to vary wildly on what you want to do, see, eat etc. during your time. For each person this is going to look different, but to give you a rough estimate my travel fund for the year tends to be 6,000 USD. With this number on average, I can fit in roughly 3 roundtrip cross-ocean flights per year and stay about 1-3 months abroad. Too often I hear people say they wish they had visited friends and family more, traveled more, gone on more adventures etc. When I ask what holds them back a lot of the time it is money, and it breaks my heart. It really is possible for you to take those trips and have those memories, and I encourage you to both prioritize them and believe that it is possible for you. My grandparents live in Malaysia and growing up I only got to see them once every 7-8 years because it was too expensive to travel there from Ohio. When my grandfather passed away, my mom took it very hard because she had not gone back to see her parents more often. Flights often cost around 1,000 dollars round trip, and although that is in no means a small amount, if we had just saved an extra 50-100 dollars a month that would have cut the time span between trips down from once every 8 years to potentially every 1-2 years. That could have been 4x the memories, 4x the opportunities to bond together, 4x the laughs and meals shared together. Once a loved one is gone, no amount of money can bring them back and all you’ll have is the memories with them.

                                                                                                                                                                                                Jacqueline Roman