How do you budge for vacations....

[Hazeleyes536]

now that my Dh has a job at home (was a contractor working in afghanistan) we dont make as much money as we are used to.
It hard trying to start a budget when we never ever needed one!
How do you budget for trips and everyday things you do with your kids etc....

 

[worm761]

Add them as a line on your budget. I put mine in an interest bearing savings account so it can grow extra money for me.

 

[Marionnette]

now that my Dh has a job at home (was a contractor working in afghanistan) we dont make as much money as we are used to.
It hard trying to start a budget when we never ever needed one!
How do you budget for trips and everyday things you do with your kids etc....

Every family has to figure out a budget that works for them. There's no magic formula that works for everyone. In theory, the categories could include (thanks to Dave Ramsey's TMMO):

• Charity – 10-15%
• Saving – 5 – 10%
• Housing – 25-35%
• Utilities – 5 – 10%
• Food – 5 – 15%
• Transportation – 10-15%
• Clothing – 2 – 7%
• Medical/Health – 5-10%
• Personal – 5 – 10%
• Recreation – 5 – 10%
• Debts – 5 – 10%

Obviously, the more that you can eliminate from some areas (lower your debt, for instance) the more that you can throw to another area, like your recreation.

We happen to break recreation down into vacation and other recreational activities, so they end up being two categories instead of one. We're also at a point in our lives where we have no mortgage and we carry no debts. The cars are paid for, so the transportation costs are low. That allows us to throw more towards recreation and savings. And to be honest, that's how we manage to budget for vacations. If we were younger -with a mortgage, student loans, childcare issues, and whatnot - it would be considerably harder to put 5% of our income towards annual vacations.

 

[mandy14]

We originally had a percentage taken out of husband's paycheck before we received the paycheck. It was clearly not enough but I ended up having a full time teaching job fall into my lap that we do not include in our budget so that goes completely towards vacations and wants. I think the above poster put a line item in for charity--we don't give money we give of our time and donate items that we don't need anymore so that is not part of our budget. We also use a credit card for all of our expenses that we pay off monthly that has frequent flier miles on it. We use those miles for our airline tickets.