Travel Budgets

[Surewhitey]

We look at the cost of lodging and if it's good, we go. Airfare is usually reasonable to most places. Food is what it is. If all the stars align, we're definitely there.

2023 was our biggest vaca year, so we probably can stay in the ballpark.

 

[jollystomper]

I have a "Travel" category in Quicken but don't recall ever looking at it. Plus, the Quicken file does not included DW's spending. We don't do crazy expensive trips and have been very lucky financially in life, so we don't worry about costs too much.

I choose use the Travel category in Quicken out of a personal preference to visually separate non-vacation travel and related expenses, since I do not consider them vacation. For example, we spent several days in New England helping out DW's elderly uncle - doing yardwork, installing security cameras for his home, buying him food, getting him set up with meals, etc. I do not consider that a vacation, it was work... so all costs associated with that trip end in the the "Travel" bucket. Whereas the travel expenses for our France vacation are in the "Vacation" bucket.

Just a personal preference of mine to separate pleasure from obligations .

 

[Teacher Terry]

I know how much I spend in travel for the year. When I was married it varied wildly depending if it was a motor home trip, cruise or European trip. Now single I use the same method of figuring out where I want to go and how much it will cost. The past 2 years I went to Europe for 11 days. This year will be much less as going to California for a week and then to Kansas for another week to visit family.

 

[USGrant1962]

When I retired from Megacorp in 2017 I planned to spend about $30K/year on travel. I just looked in my Empower/Personal Capital aggregation and it looks like we spent $180K over 6 years, or $30K/year - wow? Of course it was a weird time with Covid and all. And there is no inflation escalation on that 2017 $30K number. IMO, considering Covid and inflation, we are pretty much on target for my planned travel spend.

 

[Sunset]

I choose use the Travel category in Quicken out of a personal preference to visually separate non-vacation travel and related expenses, since I do not consider them vacation. For example, we spent several days in New England helping out DW's elderly uncle - doing yardwork, installing security cameras for his home, buying him food, getting him set up with meals, etc. I do not consider that a vacation, it was work... so all costs associated with that trip end in the the "Travel" bucket. Whereas the travel expenses for our France vacation are in the "Vacation" bucket.

Just a personal preference of mine to separate pleasure from obligations .

+1

I have some distant obligations, so when we go to do those, I don't put it in the Travel category as it's not a vacation time.

 

[DrRoy]

I track what I spend on stuff, but for travel I just call it "travel".

So my airline tickets, baggage fees, taxi , restaurant , hotel and cruise costs are just an entry for that month during the year.

I justify travel as something I want to do and pick things I can afford. No Space flights for me

We do not have a travel budget. What we spend is what we spend.

The only way I keep track of it is that it is part of our monthly/annual after tax spend.

The latter is the only number I care about.

+ this. Any flight where we are sleeping overnight (like Europe) we are going 1st class. I don't track any delta, except the airline!

 

[old medic]

The majority of our trips revolve around camping. But we have had other spur of the moment type trips where we play with numbers. Truck pulling the camper at 11 MPG Vs the car at 35 MPG. As Rodi noted, Camping the food is basically the same as home VS eating meals out. Depending on where you stay, a campsite can rival a hotel room in cost.

 

[1242Vintage]

We don’t budget for travel. But what I do have is a wife with ninja-like powers for trip planning. She always finds … or talks someone into … great deals on hotels to places we want to go and then finds airfare to match.

In the winter we go in search of warm beaches AND in the Summer I’m on the bicycle race circuit and she always extends race weekends to include a day or two of relaxation.

All-in we spend about $40k annually on travel.

 

[Gumby]

When we are traveling, I just count everything we spend during that period as "Travel" and add it to the cost of any tours, lodging or airlines paid in advance.

 

[NoiseBoy]

My main "spending spreadsheet" only has one row for all Travel related expenses. From year to year, I just track one line item. However, in my Google Docs Travel folder I have separate itineraries for all of my international trips and I add a breakdown of the main cost categories to them at the end of each trip. These docs also double as my travel journals. From there I pull the main travel categories into a spreadsheet so I can compare the costs for each trip and derive an average "per night" cost. London = expensive, Budpest = cheap!

As far as how much I can afford to spend, that comes from some planning that I did before retirement. I took a swag at home much more I would travel once I retired and then used my historical spend on travel to build a ladder of CDs to take me to age 62. This is the first year that I have the full amount of my travel CD allocated to travel. I'm actually having a little difficulty finding trips that I want to take.

 

[brett]

We don’t budget for travel. But what I do have is a wife with ninja-like powers for trip planning. She always finds … or talks someone into … great deals on hotels to places we want to go and then finds airfare to match.

In the winter we go in search of warm beaches AND in the Summer I’m on the bicycle race circuit and she always extends race weekends to include a day or two of relaxation.

All-in we spend about $40k annually on travel.

We do the same and it has enhanced our travel experience We seldom book months iin advance. We take advantage of last minute specials.

Alternative travel routes have resulted in some very worthwhile detours for us. A few years ago we found ourselves in Santiago, Chile needing to get to Buenos Aires for a cruise. Flights to BA were in the $300 plus range. We picked up low cost flight to Montevideo, Uruguay (a short ferry away from BA) for $75. Then decided to spend an unplanned 10 days in Uruguay. We found it to be a hidden gem and plan to return. We might not have gone had it not been for the air fare opportunity.

 

[Route246]

Same here. We always live below our means so things like travel vacations never have a budget, meaning we never have to make decisions during a trip to do or not to do ever about cost and budget. It is all ball parked before we embark. We do keep a Google sheet up to date of basic outflows during a trip but that is mainly just for record keeping and credit card bill reconciliation. It is always nice to know how much we spent when we return home, too. Our only real splurge is lodging and air tickets. We have taken trips where airfare was the majority of our expenses but time is very precious and arriving rested and refreshed is worth the expense for us.

Dining is always done as a matter of convenience and taste as we treat a highly rated local diner the same as a Michelin star place. It is just food and we expect to enjoy our meals without regard to what Michelin thinks. All of our international destinations have Yelp-equivalent sites to scope out prospective dining but we don't treat it like gospel, it is just a way to develop a prospect list. Certain countries have very good street food which is relatively safe, other countries have highly rated places which are food poisoning bouts waiting to happen. You need to do your research and take your chances. I always have a Cipro-equivalent antibiotic with us just in case something happens in a foreign country.

We don't budget or keep a tight grip on it. We decide where we want to go, and what kind of experience we want. We are cost conscientious and frugal by nature so we never really go overboard.

 

[Rustic23]

We look at what we think it will cost, if that is OK, we go. We don't track a thing until we get home, then we see how much fun we had.

 

[athena53]

We look at what we think it will cost, if that is OK, we go. We don't track a thing until we get home, then we see how much fun we had.

Most of my travel costs are paid or known in advance- airfare, hotel, any tour costs- so the "trailing expenses" when I get home aren't that astronomical. I do have to confess that I keep track of what I'm spending on the trip. I don't think it's ever kept me from doing something fun or buying a piece of jewelry that's calling my name- but I'm a bit of a financial control freak and want to know the bottom line.

Right now my next major trip is to Central America- tour and airfare are paid for.

 

[Lee94joyce]

I budget and track my expenses, including travel, in a spreadsheet. Maybe not 100% accurate for all travel, but accurate on big trips. We spend about 20% of our annual budget for travel. We could travel and spend more, but we have animals at home and it is difficult for us to impose on family and friends to care for them.

 

[mountainsoft]

I don't budget for travel but I do calculate what each trip cost us, and track our overall expenses at the end of the year. We are fairly cheap travelers, mostly road trips, no fancy hotels, no flights to Europe, no expensive cruises. I don't think we've ever spent more than $4000 on a single trip. We may do one or two "big" trips a year with a few overnighters in between. There is so much to see and do locally without flying half way around the world. I doubt we'll ever see it all.

I just group everything into a "Recreation and Restaurant" category. That may include a long road trip, or just going to see a movie. Most years we spent about 6K-8K for that category, though we did splurge in 2023 (our first year of retirement) and spent around 15K total for the year. I would still expect to be under 10K most years, but I'm not too worried if we go over.

 

[karen1972]

I have a budget item called going out, it has 4 subcategories (transportation, lodging, eating out, amusement).

That budget item covers both local entertainment and traveling. So if we see a concert locally we cut into the same budget we would have used to buy an excursion when traveling. Some years we are busy so spend more locally and some years we plan longer vacations so skimp on the local stuff.

For us having one budget item makes more sense to us logically as we do a lot of short term travel, rarely exceed 5 days due to pets. So then its a decision of do we go to a concert in town this weekend or find a cheap hotel and go to the beach for 2-3 days.
Eating out, concerts, museum, traveling, etc its all to me just fun stuff to keep us entertained so all goes together in a big pool of money.

As for delta, we typically go thru 2 tanks per month, so if we are doing road trips and its exceeds that, the "extra" tanks will be charged against the Going Out bucket. If we are gone for a week, I will also re-allocate 25% of the grocery budget to Going Out. Other than that my day to day expenses aren't going down with traveling.

 

[YVRRocketSurgery]

Kind of overkill but I keep 2 types of spreadsheets to track our travel spend.

One is an actual detailed trip spend worksheet within an overall (big) trip specific spreadsheet (that also has separate worksheets to store trip details like transportation info, accommodation info, a list of activities we can pull from, etc).
Categories I track are:

• Destination transporation which is typically our airfare costs
• Regional transportation which covers destination travel within an area. This might be like a train pass or the cost of a cruise.
• Local transportation like buses/metros, ubers/taxis, car rentals, etc.
• Accommodations
• Food
• Activities
• Souvenirs & Gifts separated out since these are optional
• Miscellaneous which overs communications like local sim cards, meds, laundry, etc.

I use info from this spreadsheet if I want to drill down on costs to get an idea what spends have been like in the past for similar trip situations.

The second spreadsheet is my monthly/annual spend spreadsheet. As the travel spend occurs each month (since we may prepay airfare, hotels, etc or have multiple trips on the go) it goes into this spreadsheet. But I only keep more generic categories like Flights, Accommodations, "Major Spends", Food, and Miscellaneous. Flights and accommodations are split out since they are pretty standard and distinct costs. Major spends because I wanted to separate out big costs like cruises. Food because I wanted to be able to combine our food/restaurant spend at home. And everything else gets dumped into Miscellaneous. This obviously gives a consolidated view of our travel spend per year.

In terms of aligning our travel spend estimates with cashflow estimates: We estimate our income needs for the year based on previous years' spends and build in a pretty reasonably sized buffer. Our spend, including travel spend, has been, if not consistent, fairly predictable. Our travel spend generally doesn't swing enough (pandemic years aside) to overwhelm our buffer.
We also generally don't really try to optimize travel spend based on our historical data because we're already pretty intentional with our spend.

 

[Rustic23]

When we retired, my spread tracked in detail all expenses and income. Now 20 years later, I track money going out and coming in, but I don't track to where. There are about 5 rows for unexpected expenses, but most money is tracked by three rows, three rows, two credit cards, and two bank accounts. We figure we have another 15 years at most, and with little or no chance of running out of fund.

 

[tulak]

I have a budget item called going out, it has 4 subcategories (transportation, lodging, eating out, amusement).

Same, except I call them transport, lodging, food, and entertainment.

It's helpful for me to see where I'm spending my money. I also tag transactions (using Moneydance) per vacation. So I can easily see how much that trip to Italy in 2022 cost.

 

[timeismine]

No Travel Budget Strategy

We do not have a fixed travel budget, and play the points game with multiple Airline and hotel credit cards. The savings and upgrades can be substantial. It helps that we are probably considered frugal travelers, prefer to stay and eat in local neighborhoods while traveling internationally. This is done more to experience the flavors of a particular region food-wise, and ends up being less expensive than traditional tourist venues.

Domestically in the US, I prefer camping or AirB&B's. After a career spent traveling and eating in US restaurants, I just cannot stomach much of the food anymore, and the universally generic hotel rooms give me flashbacks to work stress.

Another reason is I spent pretty much my whole working live watching expenses, saving, and being careful with money. Just dont want to do that anymore.

 

[brett]

^+1

We do the same though we very seldom travel in the US any more other than an airport stopover or a two day HNL stopover.

We do not budget. The only thing that I might do after an international trip is to add up our total spend on the trip. Not for budgeting purposes....just for my own interest.

 

[Gumby]

I don't budget anything, but I do keep track.