Some people make New Year’s Resolutions. I am not one of those people. I do occasionally make goals, however. This year my goal was to travel more. I looked around and saw too many people talking about traveling, but never taking the opportunity to do it. I figure if you can’t spend all your disposable income on travel when you’re young and single, when can you?
The first half of the year was a bit slow travel wise, which is common unless I fit in a ski trip somewhere. Since I had to take the ski season off to rehab a running injury, travel was at a dead stop until May. In the spring, I had a friend ask if I wanted to go to Hawaii. They answer to this question is always yes. Then I had another friend ask if I wanted to go to Lake Shasta and rent a houseboat with a bunch of friends. Not only was this travel, this was something I’d never done before. Obviously I said yes.
So throughout the year, I’ve gone to Hawaii and Lake Shasta, made a couple trips up to Seattle and to the Oregon Coast, spent a week at Priest Lake, ID with the family and followed the Oregon State Beavers to Las Vegas to see them play UNLV. With one more trip scheduled to Alaska in October, I feel like I’ve done a pretty solid job meeting my travel goal for this year. Not only have I been all over the place, I went to places I’ve never been to before.
In general, I have an odd view of how to budget my income, but I believe in saving for a trip before doing it. So I have a savings account strictly dedicated to travel. There are times when my travel account has more money in it than my emergency savings account. If you’re going to make travel a priority, make it a priority. Since I have the money for a trip all saved up, I rarely take the time to figure out how much money I’m spending on my travel addiction. Enter Mint.com.
Mint.com is this amazing website I’ve discovered that aggregates all of your financial information from savings accounts to loans to 401(k)s to credit cards, etc. You name it, Mint will track it. Once everything is aggregated, you can assign labels to your spending so you can easily track what you’re spending money on. A very cool way to discover that my student loans are expensive and that I shop too much.
I decided to check out how much I had spent on each category over the past three months. Coming in right behind rent and home expenses, there it was . . . travel. While it’s slightly frightening to realize that 20% of my spending has been spent on traveling, I don’t regret it a bit. I made travel a priority this year and it cost some money, but I wouldn’t trade the experiences I’ve had or the things I’ve seen to get even a smidge of the money back.
To some, the money I spend on traveling and the amount of travel that I do would seem extravagant. To me, the life experiences gained along the way are well worth the cost. And if that book title is true, and there really are a thousand places to see before you die, well then I better get cracking.
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