How Life Travelers Budget Traveling Life

It is super tempting to want to travel; the wanderlust, the new places and spaces, and the different cultures you can experience WHO WOULDN’T! But there are a few steps you need to take if you want to travel without breaking the bank. Creating a good money saving plan for your travels is a great way to afford the trip you want with the budget you have. Now I know budgets aren’t sexy and especially when you are a traveling couple money can be a source of stress. BUT it is necessary and we promise to keep it as painless as possible!

Figure Out Where You are Going

This sounds easy but when you are planning a new trip this can (and probably will) change. We will jump between a few countries before we come to a final decision. The issue with that is that it is hard to start planning a trip until you have decided where and that includes basic financial information like flights. For example tickets to Australia from the United States are expensive, which is fine but if that already breaks your budget you are going to be in trouble.

Figure Out What You Want to Do

Once you found out where you want to go, create a master list of everything you want to do. For example when we traveled to Kauai, we wanted to go tubing in an old aqueduct. Take time to do the research and figure out what exactly your dream vacation is going to be.

Have a Special Place for Your Travel Finances

Especially when traveling in a couple it is easy to get possessive over money, the easier way to remedy that is to create a joint fund for your trip money. When we first started dating we had an LTTL jar that we always put money into. The best practice we found is once a week or month, add a specific amount of money to the fund and do NOT touch it unless it is for the trip.

Create a Budget

Include the predicted flights, cost you think for food (and drinks), activities, and housing. This is your master budget, include everything you want to do or even kind of want to do. I use excel usually when creating this because then you can track your actual spending versus that you planned.

Figure Out Your Bare Budget

Once you have create your dream vacation on the next column of excel create what I call your bare minimum budget. This should include food, transportation, and housing. It should also include the reason you are traveling. For example if you are traveling to London to go on the London Eye add that into your bare budget.

Create an Activity Wall

Since planning the budget isn’t sexy (I KNOW) you should add some activities that will make it fun. One thing we did was create an activity wall in our apartment. We put some colorful ribbon down the center and had one side dreams and the other side labels reality. We would write out the activities, food, transportation, and housing on different note cards with there cost and stick them on the wall. Then every once and awhile we would check how much money we had saved and if we had enough money, we would move an activity from dream to reality. It’s a wonderful way to watch the physical development of your trip. This is the method we used to be able to take our first trip together.

Review, Review, Review

Now you have gone on your wonderful travel and had a blast, now is also a very important part; the review. This is equally important to track how you did, were you over or under budget? Was there something that costs more? This is important because even though trips will change you can also grow and get better and planning and developing your budget.

Budgeting can be time-consuming but if you put in the work you get amazing results.This is the method we use to save and budget for our travels. But there is no “right” way to do it! Want to travel without spending a lot but hate budgeting? We got your back! Do you have any fun tips, tricks, or ways you like to budget for trips? We would love to hear from you!