How To Save For Your Summer Getaway

By Jenny Ferguson
[Travel]
What small purchase can you give up to start saving for your vacation?  Jenny Ferguson shares some tricks to fill your vacation fund.
Sure, money’s tight after the holidays are over.  You’ve splurged on gifts and take-out meals as a special holiday treat and on entertaining family and friends during the holiday season.  Your credit cards are maxed out and you dipped into your vacation nest egg to go snowboarding on your days off after New Year’s.  Oh and the holiday bonuses this year were decidedly slim.

You have 30 weeks until July when you have two weeks of hard earned vacation time that you have been looking forward to since last July when you got back from your annual summer getaway.  But with your finances in this shape, you’re fairly sure you won’t be able to take the vacation you had planned.  Here are a few simple tips to saving money so you can still take that vacation you’ve been dreaming about.  Use them all or use a few to help augment your vacation fund.

Cut Out The Caffeine

Every morning you stop off at the local coffee shop for your morning dose of caffeine.  Depending on where you get your fix, you might be spending up to $5 for a fancy coffee drink.  Let’s say that on average you spend $2 per cup of coffee and maybe you don’t have one every morning, just every other morning and only during the week when you have to get up ridiculously early in order to commute to work.  You’re spending on average $6 a week on coffee (and those are just the good days when you only indulge in one cup)!  In 30 weeks, that’s $180.  Even if you’re not a coffee drinker, the same goes for the sugary sodas and vending machine juices you buy every day at lunch.

Bring your coffee from home and you can stick most of that money into your travel fund and start daydreaming about the fancy coffees you can drink in Italy or about the number of days in the Caribbean sunshine that you can buy with your coffee fund!  The same thing applies to the lunch you buy at the cafeteria at work.  Brown bag it for big savings.

Set Savings Up At The Bank

If you look at your bank account at the end of every month and wonder, “where the heck did all my money go?” it’s time to go into the bank and ask the friendly people at your branch how they can help you save.

You can have a set number of dollars taken directly from your paycheque every month and set aside in a bank account that you can’t access at ATMs or bank machines.  This means that you’re saving automatically (i.e. you don’t see the money in your normal spending account because it never actually makes it there for you to spend) and that you have to go to the bank during business hours and line up to see a teller if you want to make a withdrawal.  Hopefully these efforts can help you save!

You could also set up several other savings-friendly functions at the bank like having all of your debit purchases rounded up to the nearest dollar and having that money put away into a special savings account.  That way, you’re saving even when you have to spend!
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