Summer Travel Tips from a Financial Planner
Thanks to a few big puzzle pieces finally falling into place, my husband and I recently got to go on the trip of a lifetime.
When we got married more than a decade ago, we said we would take a trip to Scotland before we had kids. (My husband has family history there and it’s been somewhere he’s wanted to go since he was a child).
We never got around to it before we had kids.
Once we had kids, we said we’d go for our 10th wedding anniversary. But we didn’t dare take three young kids with us to Scotland and they were too young to leave behind with relatives.
Finally though, everything lined up for us to be able to go this year. The kids were old enough to leave with family (yay for grandparents!), my husband had a month-long sabbatical from work, and I had the support of our IWC team to take the time off and go.
While we had been saving for this trip for a long time, and started actually planning it six months before we went, there are still a few lessons I learned through this process that are worth sharing.
1) Having a budget can be very freeing.
Since this was a significant trip (we were gone for two weeks), and we’ve been waiting to be able to make this trip for years, we knew we would have to have a realistic budget. We knew we would want to bring back souvenirs for friends and family, transportation costs while there would be significant,
and we would be spending a lot on eating out since we didn’t want to have to cook.
Having this trip budgeted in our eMoney financial plan allowed us to enjoy the experience without feelings of guilt over spending on ourselves.
We kept an eye out on what the total spending and this enabled us to actually enjoy doing some impulse spending.
Suddenly, spending $60 to see castle ruins, or $25 to buy our son a stuffed “Loch Ness Nessie” toy, or $45 to buy a sweatshirt when the weather turned unseasonably cold, was OK because it was within the overall budget.
2) Having a travel-friendly debit/credit card is an absolute must.
We did some research on what payment type would be travel friendly, and after hearing from other friends and clients, we decided to give the Schwab Investor Checking and debit card a try (no, they are not paying me to say this 😊).
We are so glad we did.
On our travels, almost everything had a “tap to pay” option and having a trusted card was essential.
It used to be that taking out cash at the airport was easy and convenient and you would usually get decent exchange rates. But the Schwab debit card attached to our Investor Checking account proved to be way “gooder”, equipped with excellent features, such as:
– A very fair exchange rate that happened instantly
– Reimbursement for ATM fees if we needed to take out cash
– An easy way to access the account and track spending (linked to our Schwab
Alliance log-in)
– Accepted everywhere we went (it’s a Visa debit card)
3) Tipping culture seems to be very different where we went.
So much has been said about the tipping culture in the US, and how it’s gotten out of hand. We were pleasantly surprised to find this was not an issue where we traveled.
The tax and tip for our food and services were all built in, so there was no need to guess what might be a good tip or when to tip. This really allowed us to not stress out when we went out to eat, knowing that the price we were charged took care of paying the taxes and employee wages.
4) Don’t mess around with arriving early at the airport.
The pent-up demand for travel due to the Pandemic is still very strong. It seemed like everywhere we went we were joined by dozens of other travelers finally getting to check things off their bucket list like we were.
When we left Scotland for our first leg of the journey home, we were tempted to ignore the “arrive three hours early” instructions from the airlines.
But boy, are we glad we didn’t!
The airports were extremely crowded, and it seemed to us like there were just not enough workers.
Even with arriving really early at the airport, there were still significant hold-ups and we ended up missing the second leg of our flight due to the first leg landing close to an hour late.
5) Don’t wait, take the trip now.
I can’t tell you how many times we doubted our decision to take the trip. Was it too expensive? Were we leaving the kids for too long? Would it really be OK to be gone from the office for that long? What if
something happened to us while we were away? Should we wait until the kids were older still?
While all those questions were valid concerns, we thought through them like we would ask our clients to think through them.
We planned for the worst. I wrote a long letter to our Successor Trustee and Estate Executor to let them know where all our important information was. I made sure he had the number to our office, since our office is the main gatekeeper to our financial information, just like it is for many of our clients. I made sure he had the main password to my password manager, and the combination to the safe. I made sure to tell him what life insurance policies existed and where to find those. And I made sure to let him know our wishes for the kids if we didn’t come back.
While this was sobering to do, it is what we would have recommended to a client in my situation and why wouldn’t I eat our own cooking?
I am so grateful all the puzzle pieces fell into place. That we had the support from family and office to take this amazing trip. And that we came back with some fantastic lessons learned.
Daniela Jones, CFA®, CFP®
Partner, Financial Life Planner
