The Simple Dollar: “Vacation with Others (355/365)” plus 1 more

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Vacation with Others (355/365) Posted: 21 Dec 2012 12:00 PM PST My final tip on inexpensive travel is not just useful from a financial perspective. It also makes for a much more enjoyable travel experience, too. Simply put, travel with others. Make your trip into a group excursion and you’ll save money (and increase your enjoyment) in many different ways. Thanks to Ralph Daily for the photo. For starters, traveling together allows you to share things. You can sometimes split a car rental if you travel together, for example, reducing the cost for each of you. My favorite money saver when traveling as a group, though, is to rent a cabin or a house instead of a hotel room. You can easily fit two or three families into a house or a cabin for the length of a vacation, reducing the cost per night for each of the families to a very low rate. For example, when I traveled to Seattle last summer with my family, we rented a house in the outskirts with another family, sharing the cost of the home for the eight days we were out there. The cost per family sunk below a reasonable hotel room. Even more important, it was very easy to prepare food instead of eating out. We prepared meals there, ate together there, and even prepared picnics for days out and about. Having this kitchen area saved us a tremendous amount of money. If you’re traveling with others, you can often maximize group discounts. If you bump into “buy three, get one free” deal by yourself, it doesn’t mean much, but if you do it with a large enough group, it can mean savings for everyone involved. Another big advantage of traveling in groups is that there are many eyes to help search for bargains. Everyone can do their own travel research in advance of the trip and share their ideas. Often, another person will find a discount that you may have never discovered, or they may find a free activity that you never considered. The trip planning itself can turn into a social opportunity as you pass information and ideas back and forth and come together on the basics of the trip. In the end, though, a trip with others is an amazing social opportunity above all else. It gives you a great chance to cement your friendship, both during the planning stages and during the travel itself. Group travel is just a winner all around. This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere.

Selective Memory and Your Wallet Posted: 21 Dec 2012 06:00 AM PST I love my children. I’m proud of them. When I think about their behavior, my thoughts are almost entirely filled with positive things. I think of my oldest child’s studiousness, my daughter’s creative energy, and our youngest child’s humor. What I often don’t recall is when they do things that they shouldn’t. If you ask me at the end of the day what bad decisions they had made, I would have a hard time recalling more than one or two of them. I know on some level that there are things that they do wrong. They make messes. They leave their coats out. They’re incredibly noisy at times. The sibling competitiveness between our two older children sometimes reaches dangerous heights. They don’t listen at times. They make horrific messes at the dinner table. The thing is, my ongoing memory of these events is pretty selective. We’ll handle a situation, we’ll move on from it, and I’ll forget about it. I remember them later in an aggregate sense, knowing, for example, that they’ve made big messes on spaghetti night at the dinner table. At the end of a given day, though, I don’t specifically recall many of the little things they’ve done wrong. This is selective memory at work. My mind, on some level, works through the events of the day, chooses to remember some, and tosses aside other things. One of my biggest financial challenges was recognizing – and overcoming – the fact that my mind does the same thing with spending decisions. I’ll buy a pack of gum at the gas station and forget about it. I’ll buy something online and forget about it. I’ll buy a few goodies at the store and forget about them. These are minor events, of course, but waht’s worrisome is how easily the brain discards them, even though they each do have financial impact on my life. I’ll forget about $5 purchase after $5 purchase, and it doesn’t take too many of those to start adding up to a real chunk of one’s budget. Over a long period, I’ve essentially trained myself to stop those little incidental purchases, but that wasn’t a good solution when I was first trying to get my spending and finances under control. I had to use other tactics. First, I kept a very careful money diary. Whenever I spent any money, even if I just tossed a quarter into a Salvation Army kettle, I would pull out a pocket notebook and write it down. I did this by keeping the notebook and pen literally inside my wallet, with the cover of the notebook jammed down over the wallet pockets. Whenever I reached into my pocket, I felt it. The act of writing in that money diary was a constant reminder of how many trickles of money were exiting my life, but the shocking part came when I totaled up the numbers in that diary. I had come to realize that I was spending money needlessly on a pretty regular basis, but seeing that first monthly total was one of the biggest shockers I got during my financial recovery. I simply couldn’t believe how much I was spending on foolish and unnecessary stuff. This shock pushed me into the next phase, which was where I started to very carefully consider each purchase. I began to spend a lot of time shopping at this point because I would think really carefully about everything I put into my cart or carried to the checkout. Did I need this item? Could I do without it? Is there a less expensive option to solve my problem? I pushed those thoughts to the forefront with every single financial transaction I made. The goal of all of this was to make myself deeply understand the impact of each little decision I made and how they added up to a painful financial result. Gradually, I began to view not buying those little things as the new normal and I was able to return to a faster approach to grocery shopping. I simply don’t put most of those things in my cart any more, and when I do buy something unnecessary, I fully understand why I’m buying it and what the consequences are of that purchase. The savings from this shift is tremendous, and it was all about overcoming my selective memory, proving to myself that my choices were actually pretty awful, and then working to improve those choices.

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