A Simple Financial Formula For a Stress-Free Family Vacation

This year I brought my family from Vermont to Seattle to explore the city while I participated in Tiller’s remote team gathering.

It was a few days of vacation for them, and a few days of rewarding and intense teamwork for me.

However, our trip was nearly derailed with expensive, extensive overnight travel delays. We spent an unplanned night and day in Phoenix, plus an extra night and day in Washington.

Vacations are notorious for blowing budgets up.  

Vacations are a potential financial minefield:

1. Everything is more expensive than anticipated.
2. Unexpected travel delays = expensive extra food, transportation, and lodging.
3. Travel exhaustion makes convenience more appealing than frugality.
4. After months of disciplined saving for vacation, the rebellious freedom of spending is often too fun to resist.

Plus, like diets, financial routines are often ignored on vacation. And when you ignore your financial routines, you end up feeling guilty, stressed, or both. That’s a terrible way to experience vacation.

Fortunately, I had (sort of) planned ahead for this trip.

I created a loose daily budget of about $200 per day. That’s way more than we spend at home, but actually a bit lower than average for a family of four on vacation.

I also earmarked $500 for “emergency funds.”

To be fair, in my mind some of those “emergency funds” might have gone to an epic last night out, or a particularly enticing gift.

In the end, we had to use most of our emergency funds for the extra nights of travel delays. But I’m very grateful we had that money set aside.

5 minutes of tracking spending each morning = a much more fun vacation.

This was the first vacation when I actually tracked and categorized our family spending each day, just as I do at home.

And just like home, it took less than five minutes per day.

Knowing what we were spending and what we had left made our trip vastly more pleasant. I’ll never ignore this routine again while traveling.

Here’s how it worked in five steps:

1. I open my Tiller-powered Google Sheet (I use the Monthly Budget).
2. Categorize all of the previous day’s spending.
3. Quickly sum yesterday’s total.
4. See if I spent more or less what I planned in my loose budget.
5. Decide to skip fancy coffee and drink the free stuff in the hotel (kidding – I never skip fancy coffee).

If we spent a little more than planned one day, we simply spent a little less the next day.

Tracking our family budget and making deliberate choices about where to spend became part of the adventure of the trip.

And rather than feeling like we were missing out, we felt empowered about where to spend.

This was great for the kids. They saw how we were engaged with our spending. They joined in with strategizing where to save – even forgoing a $16 Lyft ride and walking back to the hotel, so we could go to the ice cream arcade the next day.

Crucially, we grownups felt at peace with our vacation spending.

A few minutes of categorizing and tracking spending each day on vacation might sound tedious.

However, you’ll feel more confident and relaxed and better able to enjoy your vacation when you know what’s happening with your money.

You might also quickly catch overcharges that often happen while traveling. I did – the hotel mistakenly charged us for two nights on our last night in Seattle.

Finally, one of the best things about tracking spending on this vacation is that we’ll create a more accurate budget for the next one.

I can’t say this trip was a money win. But at least it wasn’t a money fail.

I was hoping not to spend all of the emergency money I’d budgeted for our trip.

But since it was there, it meant we could explore the Phoenix desert and then the mountains outside of Seattle without feeling desperate, annoyed, or pinched.

Those extra days became the favorites of our trip.

The more engaged you are with your money, the more relaxed you’ll feel, and the more you can enjoy the journey.