Travel On A Budget: A Separate Account

There are several things we do to enable ourselves to travel as much as we can, which means we have to pay attention and make sure we have the funds available at any time. I love that we have the flexibility to say “I want to visit Seattle” and our trip is booked minutes later. Saving for travel is important to making the travel experience for us, it’s nice to not worry about the money being there while we are away. A big part of this is making sure there is always an amount of money set aside for these spontaneous trips. Keep in mind, I mean spontaneous in the most planned way possible. As I have mentioned before, we want to make traveling a priority, and we want to feel good about the adventures we go on and the places we have seen.

At any point in our lives, travel could be taken away from us. At some point we might be limited to the places we can go or the things we can do, so for now we want to go everywhere and see everything that we can. Having one specific place for our travel funds is what allows us to know where we can go and what we can do. I started doing this before we got married and combined our accounts, but I’m happy to have continued it to our married life as well.

Most employers give you the option to have direct deposit, and then split your deposits into different accounts. I specified a percentage of my paycheck to go to a travel savings account and the other percentage to go into our personal savings. I only look at our travel savings account when it comes to making travel plans, I find that if the money doesn’t ever hit the bank account that I am constantly checking, it is kind of out of sight out of mind. At least until we are ready to go on vacation. Then, if it isn’t in the account, we have to wait to take the trip.

Most of the time I use travel points from my Southwest card to book flights, and then reward hotel nights for our hotel stay (more on this next week!), so we are only paying for taxes or pre-purchased activities before we leave. Then while we are traveling we, again, are only using our Southwest card or paying in cash. Then when we get home, I pay off our card with money directly from our savings. (If you want to learn more about this, check out this post about how we fly free almost all of the time)

While the amount that gets deposited into the account each month isn’t very much, it goes a long way when you are planning ahead. I really like to focus on what we do while we are vacationing, instead of where we stay or how we get there, but things like this make it easier to have an all around wonderful trip!

Are you focused on saving for travel? How do you do it?

ps. I realized I have 4 travel posts in a row planned for next week…I hope you’re ready!