Saving for a Vacation

I like to travel, you like to travel, let's go places together.

There are a ton of great resources for traveling on a budget. Even on a tight budget, you still need a decent chunk of change to travel.

Our travel savings account has helped fund trips to National Parks, road trips, Burning Man, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Belize, and New Zealand (in 2017)!

This instructable should encourage and inspire you to save more so that you can travel!

Have an account you no longer use? Perfect!

Only have one account? No big deal!

Against banks? OK, lets see: Whenever I say account, read it as "a special hiding place that doesn't earn interest"

When opening up a new account, look for the following:

• ZERO fees
• No minimum
• Interest earning

The goal here is to tag account as your "Travel Savings Account". Most online banks allow you to give your accounts a name. Come up with something exciting to inspire yourself.

Here's where you'll want to set up automatic withdrawals.

Set up bi-weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly transfers. Depending on your salary and goals, figure out what you're comfortable setting aside.

I set my automatic transfers to occur every 2 weeks when I get paid. When I started out, I was putting aside about $50 a month. This didn't seem like much to me but resulted in an extra $600 a year. When you're living on a budget, an extra $600 sure helps out when you need to buy a plane ticket.

If you can set aside more, you're only benefiting yourself. Fold in some extra holiday/tax return/birthday gift money if you're really feeling inspired. If two people can each contribute $100 biweekly, you're looking at travel budget of $5200 a year!

Now that you're set up, you're ready to plan your next trip.

You don't have to spend all of the money in your account & your travel budget doesn't have to be limited to your travel savings account.

Budget wisely. Travel smart. Have fun.