A Travel Budget Is Really Just a Priority Budget

If you never seem to have enough money for travel but a billion other people on the planet do, what’s wrong with this picture? Why don’t you have a travel budget that can pay for your vacations?

It probably means that something else is a bigger priority. After all, a travel budget is simply a priority budget, substituting for something else you could have spent money on instead. 

When I got back from my first trip around the world, after spending 12 months circling the globe, the questions from friends and family were amazingly predictable.

1) “What was your favorite place?”

2) “How could you afford to travel for so long?”

After two more times around the globe and many more shorter jaunts, I gave up on trying to explain why the first one is hard to answer and came up with a pat answer. But the second is still annoying more than 30 years after that first trip around the world.

I know people of average means or less that always seem to be off to this place or that, their social media feeds full of exotic experiences and interesting places. Then there are other people I know who earn a sick amount of money and they hardly go anywhere. Their answer to, “What have you been doing lately besides working?” is “Not much.” 

Your Monthly Budget Is a Priority List

Getting through life involves a series of decisions: what to study, what to do for a living, who to spend your life with, where to make your home, what to strive for.

If you want to cut the conversation short at a party where we’ve met, just sigh and say “I wish I could travel more” as you look down at your $200 shoes or twirl the keys to your BMW. I’m going to drift across the room and find someone else to talk to. 

How you spend the money you make and how you live your life are also decisions that are in your hands. You can spend $699 a month on a car payment — not including insurance — and not have anything left to travel with, or you can spend less than half that on a car payment and have over $4,000 a year to travel with. Or you can pay off your old car and keep driving it (or live in a city with good public transportation) and have even more to spend on real living.

If you spend $800 a month eating out in restaurants, or $600 a month on shoes, or $400 a month bar-hopping each weekend, that’s your business. If it gives you true pleasure and one of those is your top priority, great.

But if you spend a grand or two each month on something fleeting, or more junk to show into a closet, then that’s a priority problem. You can’t then whine about not being able to go on vacation and say that you wish you could travel more. This outcome is not because of a lack of funds. You just spent the money elsewhere. 

After you get past mandatory things like health care and the water bill, spending is a matter of priorities. Those who travel make travel a priority. Those who are more concerned about filling up their house with more stuff or spending their earnings on status items don’t get around so much.

In the “first world,” we’ve got more stuff than we know what to do with. My grandparents had one radio and one TV in their house for most of their life. They shared one car and ran it until it really wore out.

My grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side raised five kids in a house that was smaller than what the average middle class family of three lives in now. Somehow my mom and her four sisters turned out just fine and didn’t feel deprived. 

Most American families of three now have 3 $1,000+ phones, 3 laptops, a tablet or two, several TVs, and 6 devices that can play music. Judging by what’s in the parking lots I see at restaurants and stores, multiple expensive cars as well. And they’re all still complaining about inflation. 

What Will You Remember When You Are Older

I’m not a young man anymore and it’s even more apparent to me now that people remember experiences more than what they bought and possessed. Back in the 2010s, when my daughter was around 12, we had a big trip planned to Southeast Asia that we had talked about for at least two years. My wife was ready to cancel though because we’d had some expenses come up that we weren’t expecting and the bank balance was not as healthy as it should be. 

There was a little agonizing, but we went anyway and had an amazing time. I love this photo below because it’s just a candid moment of cooling off in a hot place and oh, by the way, we were at Angkor Wat! We rode an overnight train in Vietnam, went to a crazy shopping mall in Bangkok, and took interesting boat rides in multiple countries. It was an amazing three weeks that all of us will remember forever. 

At the time, we were renting a house in the USA that was apparently below average –“only” three bedrooms. In 1950 only 1 percent of homes had four or more bedrooms. Now the majority of new homes built in America have that and the number is rising. We could have spent more on the house each month and kept up with the Joneses, but then that grand adventure never would have happened. 

The median size of a home is more than 2,000 square feet (roughly 200 meters) now and that is held down by populated places like New York City where living space is small. In Utah the median is is close around 2,800 square feet and Colorado is not far behind. Yet every week on HGTV you see people on camera walking through a four-bedroom house with a great room and a yard going, “Well it’s kinda small…”

Then people fill up those bigger houses with more stuff. And then more stuff they bought going to the strip mall this weekend, and then all the stuff they gave each other for Christmas and soon forgot about. Soon their garage is half filled with things they’ll never use again and they can’t even fit a car into the space meant for two cars.

Did all those purchases give them pleasure? Maybe for a little while after they bought them. Maybe every five years when they pull out some specialized tool or piece of outdoor equipment. Otherwise the equivalent in dollars of a two-week vacation just sits there, taking up space, collectively tens of thousands of dollars. Then they lament that they could never afford to go to Central America and do this: 

I’ve had conversations with these people when they’re approaching retirement and are looking to downsize. They’re stressed about that change in their life, which should be freeing, because they’re asking, “What are we going to do with all our stuff?”

Travel Budget 101: Buying Experiences Instead of Things

One of the great things about getting out into the world and seeing how everyone else lives is that it gives you perspective. Unless you’re completely clueless, you see that most of the world gets by on far less than most Americans consider a bare minimum. Many of them are far happier too.

In this 2024 report, the USA dropped to 23rd in happiness, barely above Mexico and lower than every country with high taxes and smaller living quarters. Also lower than countries with a much smaller income such as Costa Rica, Czechia, Lithuania, and Slovenia. Other wider surveys that include the very poorest countries rank the United States even lower. 

Many of those happier people are also healthier, sleeping better with less stress because they haven’t purchased so much pampering, comfort, and junk food with their disposable income. They don’t take nearly as many pills for their first-world ailments but they do take more of something else: vacations.

Think back on the last 10 shopping trips, not counting groceries, where you spent $100 or more. How many of those items are you still using? How many are giving you real pleasure? How many would you spend money on if you had it to do all over again? 

Apply this kind of thinking to your mortgage, your car payment, your furniture, and your renovation projects. They might have all been home runs and you’re thankful for them every day. If not, could you have used some of that for a travel budget instead by rejiggering your spending?

Is It Really True That You Can’t Afford a Proper Vacation?

Many of the people who tell me they can’t afford to go on vacation more are the ones who are making far more money than I ever did. They just have very different priorities than I ever did. 

If you think you can’t afford to travel, take stock of what you have, what you earn, and where your money is going. I do consulting for people moving abroad and one of my clients was a teacher who had just retired. He was even thinking about becoming a travel blogger because he had already been to 27 countries on four continents at age 60.”I got every summer off and a long Christmas break,” he said, “so I took advantage of it.”

There was no mention of being short on funds because he was a teacher. Only the upside of having so much time. He could have spent what was left after paying the bills on something else, but he wanted to travel and made it happen. I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing he doesn’t have a house of 2,500 square feet that’s crammed with stuff he never used and clothes he seldom wears.

Instead of shopping sprees, he shopped for travel. 

The people who travel the most are seldom of above-average means. I’ve met construction workers, waitresses, bartenders, janitors, burger flippers, and freelance writers making their way across the globe. Unless you are poverty stricken or homeless, a few budget tweaks could get you there.

Heck, you can take a bus or a one-way budget flight to Mexico if you can’t decide where to start. Then head to Guatemala and keep going. You’ll spend half what you did just existing at home if you stretch it into months or years. 

Want to travel on a budget? The first step is to make travel a priority, then start creating the budget. Once you free up some funds that would have gone somewhere else, most of the world is open to you. 

If you want to travel more, you almost certainly can. It’s just a matter of deciding what’s really important and then finding a way to make it happen. Here are some concrete ideas to get you started:

“I wish I could travel more” is a lame thing to say.

How to travel more on what you’re earning now

Follow these steps to get a cheaper vacation this year