Set financial goals and ask yourself Why

With any area of my life, I have found it is very important to set goals. In the case of finances, you want to make sure you have purpose behind your penny pinching. If not, you will find that you fail so much more easily because there is no purpose or reasoning behind it! When we had debt, our reason for frugality was to be able to pay off the debt as quickly as possible. Since we’ve been debt-free, our reasons have become a little more fun, such as saving to buy a home, travel and vacations, and making memories.

Create a budget and check in with it!

Use the envelope system

We have also discussed just how helpful and effective the envelope system is before, but want to reemphasize just how much it will help you to be successful in your finances! It helps you take control of your spending and be more conscious of where your money is going. There was a study done that shows consumers who pay with credit cards focus more on the benefit of their purchase, while those who pay cash concentrate more on its cost. That is because there is an emotional pain associated with handing over physical currency, as opposed to swiping a credit card where that money is out of sight and out of mind. There are so many benefits to using the envelope system and I strongly encourage you to look more into it here!

Look at every purchase as an investment

Identify your spending weaknesses and address them!

By having a budget and tracking your spending you should be able to account for every dollar. Take a look at your expenses and see where you are unnecessarily spending. For some this is picking up unplanned and unnecessary items at the grocery store, online shopping, or buying a soda every day. Whatever your weakness may be, come up with a few ideas on how to combat them. If you find yourself always throwing extra things in the shopping cart at the grocery store, maybe try ordering your food online and picking it up! This way you track your spending while you shop and can resist impulse buys. If online shopping is your downfall, try unsubscribing from the shopping email lists, or following shops on social media that make you want to spend spend spend!

Read books or listen to podcasts that will help educate and motive you financially

Italy has always been towards the top of my bucket list. There is something about ancient cities and sites that really appeal to me, so being able to see structures that are upwards of 2000 years old is going to be pretty amazing.

When it comes to traveling, we are mostly exposed to the highlights of peoples’ vacations: the photos, the videos, the stories, etc. But we don’t always know what kind of work goes into planning it. We in the Fund Family, however, like to keep it real. Which is why we are not only going to share the highlights, but also the behind-the-scenes planning that is going into this trip. Hopefully this will be enlightening to aspiring travelers as to how you can save money and make those dream vacations a realistic option. That being said, we are still learning! So if you have any tips and tricks that we don’t share, let us know in the comments below!

Trip Overview:

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s talk about the background:

Date: Early May

Length: 10 days (including 2 travel days)

Cities to Visit: Rome, Florence, Cinque Terre

Flight Details:

Outbound: SLC > SFO > EWR (NYC) > FCO (Rome).

Inbound: FCO > EWR (NYC), JFK > LAX > SLC

Transportation in Italy: Public transit, trains, walking

Budget: ~$2,600

Planning the Trip

This trip has actually been in the works for over a year. We were originally planning on going to Italy last April-ish (2017), but then Carlee and I found out we were having a baby and we thought that it would be best if we didn’t spend all that money on a vacation and instead save it for the new baby. But the stars aligned, the idea never died, and here we are about a year later finally getting to go on that trip! We didn’t think we could make the trip this soon, but we’ve worked hard and have been very blessed to be in a situation to be able to go. It also helps to be finally graduating from my Masters Program, so now I have an excuse to go! We are also planning on bringing our babies with us, which is an exciting, but also a little nerve racking thought. A lot of our plans and ideas are being made with this in mind. Because we are traveling with kids, we may not be able to vacation quite as hard as we would otherwise. But that’s ok! Hopefully we will learn a lot from it and make some awesome family memories.

Budgeting for the Trip

To be honest, it bothers me when I see those YouTube videos or articles telling people they can travel the world for $500. Maybe some people are crazy good at planning and making things work, but for us normal people, that is more of a dream than a reality. Our original goal for this trip was to do it for less than $2,000, but as we started planning what we actually wanted to do and see, we realized that it was going to be tough to make that goal. We are pretty happy about being able to do a 10-day international trip for about $2,600. Like I mentioned earlier though, we are still learning, so we know we could do better than this! So if you know tips and tricks, please enlighten us all and let us know!

Here is our budget breakdown:

When it comes to budgeting, I usually try to overestimate slightly, because I’d rather be under the budget than over, and overestimating helps me to accomplish that. It’s hard to know, however, what all the costs will be exactly. Food and public transportation are hard to estimate, so we just tried to make our best guess. Most of the budget items for any vacation are very dependent upon what you actually want to do. If you are the type that loves to visit as many museums and sites as possible, your tourism costs may go up. If you are visiting as many cities as possible while in a foreign country (which we have done before), then your transportation costs will go up. So just make sure before you plan a trip that you know what you want to get out of it, and try to budget accordingly.

Ideas to Cut Costs of Your Trip

If you take a look at the summary, you will see that the two largest costs are transportation and AirBnBs. I would assume that for most travelers, this will be the case. Flights are by far the biggest part of our budget. This will bring us to our first travel tip: Find the right flights! You’ll either make or break your vacation budget on the flight. Our flights ended up costing slightly more than our budget, but only by about $20. But for us, being able to fly our wives, babies, and ourselves to Italy for under $830 was an accomplishment. Here are some ways we were able to do that:

Research, Research, Research

This part of traveling is probably a turn-off for most. Who likes to spend hours doing research? Well, in all honesty, I don’t mind research when it’s for vacationing! But I can understand why some may not enjoy this as much. It takes work to find the right flights and places to stay. As far as I know, there is no magic way of doing this quickly when you are seeking to cut costs. We used things like Google Flights or Momondo.com to help us find out what dates and airlines tend to be the cheapest. You can also try and google low-cost airlines to figure out which ones are not only the cheapest, but also offer the best routes to your desired destination. Spend some time researching. It may be long and difficult, but it can pay off big.

Pick The Right Airport

Flying out bigger hubs like LAX or JFK can save you a lot of money. It’s not always easy to get there though, and we understand that. But if you are able to drive to one of those airports or even find a cheap flight there, it can be easier to fly with low-cost airlines and save a lot of money. For our trip, we are flying out of Newark cause that is where we could find the cheapest flights to Rome with the airline we chose.

Time Your Vacation Right

We’ve learned that in general, it’s best to avoid June – August, as this tends to be high-travel season and flights and accommodations are generally more expensive. We are traveling in early May because that is when I’ll be out of school, and that is also when things were generally cheaper. Christmas time can also get more expensive, since a lot of people are traveling for the holidays. When you are doing research, it should become obvious pretty quickly which months are the cheapest, and which months you should avoid.

Take Advantage of Credit Card Rewards

A huge thanks here to our friends at wallstreetminimalist.com for helping us learn a little bit more about travel hacking. For those who aren’t familiar with travel hacking, it’s basically taking advantage of credit card reward systems to be able to travel really cheaply. Thanks to their tips, we were able to sign up for a credit card that was super easy to earn 60,000 miles with. We used those miles to get free round-trip tickets to NYC, where we were able to get pretty cheap flights to Rome. Had we just flown out of SLC, we probably would’ve spent much, much more on flights. If you don’t have much of a credit history, like my wife, then start working on that so you can qualify for things like this! If you and your spouse (for those who are married) are able to qualify for things like this, that can save you even more money than it saved us.

Pack Light

This can be tough, and we are interested to see how this goes with traveling with our baby, but if you can avoid checking bags, you can save hundreds of dollars. In fact, by choosing to do carryons only, I think we saved around $300. To make this work, it’s important to pick the right AirBnB or accommodations so that you can have some way of washing your clothes. This way, you can pack less. Packing less is nice for more than just the money though. The less you pack, the less you have to haul around going from city to city.

Looking Forward

Hopefully the nitty-gritty of the planning and budgeting didn’t bore you too much. If you are nerds like us, then you love this kind of stuff. I’m always trying to find ways to travel inexpensively and save money. I always wished that there were more comprehensive resources for finding the information on these kinds of things. It seems like I have to visit a 101 websites to find the right stuff. Hopefully we can help solve this problem as we continue to share our knowledge and experience with everybody!

So now we are about 7 weeks away from our trip. We have planned almost everything out, and most things are paid for. We are still finalizing a few trip details, but we will keep you posted on those for sure! Keep an eye out for our travel posts! We are excited to share more about the experiences when it actually happens, including tips for traveling with kids. Until then it’s the home stretch for me in school. I’ll be trying to focus on studying when all I can really think about is our trip to Italy!