I was stressed about paying, plan!

[3girlsfun]

I get really stressed out about paying bills and such, as I always want to make sure that everything is paid, and on time. I use to not be this way, but, after reading Dave Ramsey, I am very happy when my bills are paid. (Although, we don't follow him, we have debt, and still plan vacations, etc.)

Anyway, so, in the last two months I haven't been able to pay as much on our trip as I would have like too. I have been freaking out about how I was going to get our trip paid off by the deadline. This is all after I bought the plane tickets yesterday.

I just sat down and figured out how much I need to pay out of my DH's weekly paychecks, and my monthly paychecks until our trip. I feel so much better, bc it is very doable.

Does anyone else have this sort of stress that goes into planning/paying for their trip?

It makes me think I should pay for the trip in full when I book it, instead of paying on it like it is a bill.

How do you budget for your trips? Starting July 1st, I have allocated a certain amount of each of my paychecks to automatically go to our Disney Visa account. Our account is a debit, not a Credit Card. As we have no CC's.

Ok, I'm rambling, just wondering.....

 

[momejay]

I stress about paying the bills but around here we consider WDW a necessity. (You know what I mean.) We put aside a few bucks each week in a vacation/family entertainment fund. It isn't the same amount every week. Last week, I added $100 my MIL gave me for birthday money. This week I only put $15 into it because I spent so much on Toy Story 3.
My children are all teens so instead of birthday presents they ask for Disney gift cards to be used on the next trip. The older 2, both 16 years old, work & have their own gift cards that they add to weekly. Even if they only put in $2 a week at the end of a year it's nice amount to have for an evening at Disney Quest or whatever they want to spend it on.
We squeak by & we were on food stamps all winter. We had one disaster after another last Fall & got too far behind. I hope we can get back to WDW before the year's end. We are almost all caught up from all the miscellaneous home & car repairs. (only about $2,000 in debt at the moment) Now if I could just get the insurance company to pay for my son's medication as they should & if I could just get more hours at work...

 

[marie1203]

I use to stress out but for no reason. I found the best way for me to be ok was to divide our savings account. So now there is a savings account for vacations, one for emergencies and one in case of emergency for our dogs. This way things are much easier I know how much I can spend on vacations and budget around that without stressing how am I going to pay for it before since all the money was together it was harder to budget and not just keep spending it. But in our house we always have things that throw us of budget so I have learn to plan for those monthly. Like this month I have spend $600 in unexpected vet bills and today I have another vet trip.

 

[ksumn1]

Our trips are paid for with extra money. Usually from a big overtime storm check, or a tax refund. Yes, we know it's an interest free loan to the gavernment but it works for us.

Last trip we were using overtime checks but then we had a house fire. we had to use that money for the new house so now we"re planning a trip hoping for an overtime check (in 11 years, we've only had 1 year with no storm check). We also have our 1st time homebuyers credit coming sometime. Depending on overtime, we'll either do a value or mod package with dining onsite (maaaayybe) or an offiste Bonnet Creek with PH no DDP and some meals at the resort (much more realistic).

 

[3girlsfun]

We have been scraping by the last few years, and we have the end in sight! Hopefully September we will have an increase in money, and all will be good again. It is insane how quickly things can change, so I understand the food stamps thing.

I am super excited about starting our vacation fund! I think the stress will go away with that. It will be wonderful to have money automatically set aside. We also have been trying to live through our budget from one account, and that is just not working, the money just disappears.

Anyway, it just gets stressful thinking about making sure the trip is paid for! I am hoping our next trip will be paid for way in advance!

 

[bumbershoot]

I am hoping our next trip will be paid for way in advance!

Yes, if you can get yourself "ahead", so that you're saving in advance of a trip, it makes things much much better.

And if you get a budget going for your household, depending on the length of your trips, remember that you can put budget money into your trip. For example, we have budgeted grocery and gas money each month. Because our trip to WDW is a long one, I figured out the percentage of the grocery and gas money we can put towards our trip, since we won't be buying groceries for home while we're at WDW. That might take a little bit more of the pressure off.

 

[3girlsfun]

Thank you for the tip! I hadn't even thought about taking the gas/blow/grocery money out for that week! That is about $400!!! Yeah for spending money! LOL!

I think part of it is that I haven't been on a vacation, or a "big" vacation in so long, that I forgot how much it costs! We can totally afford the vacation, or we wouldn't be going, it just stinks when the A/C breaks, and there went $145 off our trip budget, and things like that. Future trips should be easier, as I will have some money saved ahead of time.

I will say though, there are things in our trip that I can cut, that add up to about $500, and without these, we would still have an awesome time! Once we get to Disney we wont be spending hardly anything! Thank you Free dining!