Seth and I just got back from our first major trip since our honeymoon, a ten day trip to Paris. We’ve been sharing vlogs and lots of instagram posts the entire time, and I’ve gotten a lot of people asking me how we managed to afford this trip.
I refrain from using the word “lucky”, because that implies that being able to afford this trip happened on accident, which isn’t the case.
Seth and I don’t make an exceptional amount of money. We both have good jobs with reliable paychecks, but definitely don’t make enough to take a trip without planning at all. So all of this was just through really good planning.
Seth and I started planning for this trip in about December/January. So, we’ll say 6 months. We spent under $3000 on our entire trip, and we really could’ve spent less, if we’d been more frugal with our trip.
1. Saving
Saving seems intimidating and honestly, until you start doing it, it seems impossible. Being a young married couple, we haven’t had a shortage of financial struggles. We’ve only been married a year, and the first 6 months or so of that was really hard. Mainly because we didn’t save at all. We spent our entire paycheck, every single month, and were left with nothing, desperately waiting for the next check to hit our account. But we got sick of that. We opened a Savings Account(weird that we didn’t have one, right?) and promised to put 10% of each paycheck into our Savings every single month.
It’s helpful to not put an absolute dollar amount down for how much you have to save. Because what if you promise to put in $200 but you were sick, and so your paycheck is smaller, and if you put in the full $200 then you can’t afford your phone bill? Saying 10% means that if it’s $50, that’s fine. If it’s less, it’s fine. The key thing is that you’re saving.
After doing this for about two months, we honestly hadn’t noticed a difference in our finances. We didn’t feel like we had less money, we still did all the same stuff we did before, but we had a slowly growing savings account. It was about this time that Seth got a promotion at work, and we started saving more. Because we had dates picked out for our trip, we decided to add more than our minimum of 10% for most of our paychecks, because we could now afford to. We ended up putting about $600 into our Savings Account every month, unless for some reason we had unexpected financial problems, in which case we would just put in the 10%.
2. Finding good deals
Okay, so if you don’t save, you won’t be able to afford it. But, why pay a lot when you can pay a little? I spent a lot of time searching for flight deals for our trip. I mainly used the app Kayak(I am in love with this app), because it will save all the flights you want, so you can keep an eye on them, to see if they change in price. Aside from that, I would go into the app most days and just re-search the dates for our trip, to see if any new deals came up. it’s also a lot cheaper(sometimes) to take two one-way flights, rather than buying a round trip ticket. We were able to get our tickets to Paris for $450 each, and our tickets back for about $625 each, which included our stop in Iceland.
3. Be Flexible
We ended up changing the dates for our trip a handful of times, because we wanted to fly when flights were the cheapest. This is honestly the best way to get cheap flights. Pro Tip: Flights are going to be cheapest on Tuesdays(idk why) and 6 weeks before your trip is the best time to buy them for Domestic flights, and about 2 months(maybe a little more) is the best time to buy for International flights.
4. Airbnb
We were able to rent out a studio apartment for about $60 a night. It ended up being about $550 for the 9 nights that we were there. It’s cheaper than a hotel would’ve been, and it gave us the flexibility of checkout times, location, and being able to cook. You also just feel very at home when you stay at an Airbnb. I found myself referring to our apartment as “home” many times last week.
5. Daily Budgets
It would suck to get to our destination, and feel like we couldn’t spend any money because you’d already spent your entire budget getting there. But it’s equally as painful to spend more money than you have/should because you justify it with the fact that you’re on vacation. We set our daily limit at $50(exceeded a few times, but other days we fell far under that, so it evened out). This included meals and tourist attractions. Honestly, most of the things we went to see were free, not because of budgetary reasons, but just because tourist attractions don’t have a lot of appeal to us. That’s another story though..
It’s not that hard to travel. I know that being young and in college makes you feel like it’s impossible. Believe me, been there. And whether you have to save for a year, or 6 months, it’s totally achievable.
I hope I was able to answer all of the questions that you may have had! If I missed anything, comment below. 🙂
