Nine Creative Ways to Save for a Vacation

Wanting a yearly escape with your partner, your spouse, or the whole family usually means setting money aside across the months before you go. The question is how. Below are nine approaches that have worked for people trying to fund a trip without feeling the pinch all at once.

Start with a savings account dedicated to the trip. If you're serious about building the fund in a steady, deliberate way, this is the groundwork. Most accounts cost nothing to open. Check the fine print so you don't get hit with fees for dropping below a minimum balance. Add online access so you can watch the balance climb and move money straight toward your bookings when the time comes. Tracking what you spend on the vacation becomes almost automatic.

A new account does nothing until you feed it, so arrange automatic transfers from your regular checking. Even a modest weekly amount piles up over twelve months. Your employer can often help here too: ask whether your direct deposit can be split, with a small slice of each paycheck routed to the travel account before you ever see it.

Saving on your own is hard for some people. If that's you, a service like Smartypig.com can handle the transfers automatically and keep going until you hit your target. Once the money is there, you can send it to a gift card, a debit card, or a bank account.

Then there's the change jar. Drop every stray coin into it. Come year's end, the total tends to surprise people. Consider this: setting aside $1.37 a day gets you to $500 across a year.

Build what amounts to a vacation budget, and do it by counting the money you won't spend while you're away. Think lower utility bills, no Netflix or movie rentals for that stretch, groceries you skip. On first glance it sounds backwards, but the exercise gives you an honest picture of your real cash flow around the trip. Then add the costs that only exist because you're gone, like boarding the dog or paying someone to mow the lawn, and the true price comes into focus.

With an account in place, go clear out the stuff you no longer use. Empty the closets. Whatever those sales bring in can pad your travel fund with hardly any effort. eBay, Craigslist, and local classifieds all give you a place to list items, and a plain old yard sale works fine too.

Travel grants are worth checking if your trip ties to research, your profession, or education. They rarely cover everything, but they can knock down several expenses and leave you with spending money. Running a volunteer trip changes the picture: temples, churches, charities, and community groups sometimes pitch in.

Kids multiply the cost of a vacation fast. Extra plane seats, more beds, a bigger rental car, more admission tickets, more food, more of everything. If your children already get a weekly allowance, bring them into the saving. Tell them plainly that a trip is an added expense sitting on top of the regular bills, and that any extras they want to buy are theirs to save for. Spell out what you'll be covering: the hotel, the flights, the meals, the souvenirs.

Getting children to grasp how much pricier a trip is than staying home is its own challenge. Grandparents.com offers a playful way around it. Kids can apply through the site for a travel grant from grandparents, or from you. Set up a named foundation, have the children draft a budget and list the responsibilities they're taking on, and walk them through the application as if the grant were real.

Sometimes a trip comes together at the last minute and there's barely any runway to prepare. When that happens, you have to find savings fast. Stop eating out and cook instead, because restaurant meals cost far more than groceries, and cutting them alone frees up more than you'd expect. Write out a spending plan that names everything: flights or gas, the hotel, admissions, souvenirs, food. If the total is too steep, trim it. A full week you can't swing becomes a long weekend.

One more trick for a lean month: pick a week and eat only what's already in the house. Call it pantry week. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich will get you through a meal just fine. Treat it like being stranded on an island where you make do with whatever's on hand. Wipe out a week of grocery spending, more than once if you can manage it, and the savings show up in a hurry.