Do you budget for vacation?
So I was just curious if any of you ever budget for vacation? FT'ers and retired need not apply. I have not been able to go on vacation in 3 years (due to financial and other constraints) and so...
Forum Discussion
pasusan wrote:
We don't budget, but I do run a report in Quicken after our trips.
We break the expenses down by:
Dining - the rare times we go to a restaurant
Fuel - always the very biggest expense
Fun - entrance fees, bus and boat tours - could be called entertainment
Lodging - campground costs
Purchases - something we wouldn't normally buy - like a souvenir
Transportation - tolls, subways, Uber - stuff like that
We don't include groceries, because we would be buying them whether we're at home or not.
Strangely our trips average out to about $1500 each. Some are longer time, but the gas prices are lower - like last year we went for over a month down south to Mississippi. Some are shorter, but gas prices are high - like in 2010 we went on a 2 week trip to NYC and the gas prices were terrible. Both were $1500.
I've done something very similar with similar spending categories not so much for budgeting, but just for information. Our main road trips are 2mo worth of Disney World at Fort Wildnerss two consecutive years out of every three. First is in the Dec-Feb time and the next in the Oct-Nov. That way we get use of an annual passport for two trips and hit four of the major holidays every 3 years. Because of the ultra high cost of FW (this next Dec-Feb trip has FW CG fees over $8K alone) those are unusual with total costs running $12K to almost $15K depending on what time of year due mainly to annual passport costs. About the only budgeting during these Disney Mega trips is eating out at Disney and we try and limit that to about once every 3 to 4 days with about 3/4 being lunches. This is not so much for cost savings, but just trying to not go too far overboard on nutrition/calories since both of us are Diabetics and it takes us 2 to 3 mo back home to recover and get back on an even keel so to speak. We also like you do some shorter road trips averaging around 2 to 4 weeks and those avg anywhere from $2K to $4k per trip. We also never boodndock nor do we try and stay at the cheapest CGs either.
Larry
