3 Tips For Budgeting For A Yearly Vacation

For your own mental health, it’s important that you’re able to take some time off to rest and relax each year. We all dream about traveling somewhere hot and sunny, perhaps staying in a 5 star hotel and flying in on a private jet from a company similar to Jettly.com. However, spending a lot of money on a big vacation isn’t easy for everyone to accomplish. But if you’re wanting to make vacationing a priority in your life, you’ve got to learn how to make it easier to do through your monthly budgeting.

To help you see how this can be done, here are three tips for budgeting for a yearly vacation. 

Get Your Plan In Place Early

If you know that you’re wanting to take a vacation every year, the sooner you’re able to plan at least some of the details of your trip, the easier it will be for you to start budgeting and saving for your travels. 

According to Brian Martucci, a contributor to Money Crashers, you should try to get all of your plans in place for things like travel dates, lodging, airfare, transportation, and other fixed costs. Once you have these details nailed down as well as you can, then you will know how much money you need to save in order to afford your trip. Otherwise, you could be saving either too much or too little for the vacation that you’re wanting to take that year. 

Create A Monthly Budget

As soon as you know how much your total trip is going to be costing you, you can then start breaking down how much you’ll need to save for each month.

The easiest way to do this, according to Sarah Kuta, a contributor to The Penny Hoarder, is to take the total amount that you need for your trip and divide that by how many months you have before you’ll be leaving. Whatever that number is will be how much you’ll need to save each month for your vacation. Keep in mind, however, that if you can’t afford the monthly savings that you have laid out, you may need to push your travel plans back until you can save the money you need. 

Save By Different Categories

While there are some parts of your vacation that are going to be relatively fixed costs, like the vacation lodging you’ll rent from someone like Heidi Huston or the cost of your flights, there are other parts of your vacation budget that will vary. 

To budget for these items, Holly Parker, a contributor to Mint.com, recommends that you budget additional money into categories based on how much you’ll be spending each day of your trip. These budgets should include things like food, entertainment, souvenirs, and other variable costs. 

If you’re ready to start committing to taking a vacation each year, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you learn how to budget for yearly travel and trips.