Budgeting for Adventure Travel

How to make your dreams come true

While my husband and I are blessed to have jobs related to technology, we don't have the most lucrative pay on earth, and Jason is raising three kids on his own. So we do have to be strategic and intentional about making things happen. I will acknowledge we are privileged to be able to travel at all. I also get excited about "making things happen" as a project manager and a personal finance nut.

So I hope the methods I describe here reach someone who wants to make travel happen for them, and may not know where to start. These are ideas that could be applied to anything explained through the lens of adventure travel.

Prioritize and Pay yourself first

First things first, taking time and money for travel means getting your financial priorities in line. There is so much to say about this, but it goes without saying (even though I'm saying it), that you have to take care of the essentials before you save for the non-essentials.

If you are not familiar with Ramit Sethi's "Rich Life" philosophy, I recommend this and his podcast as a way to consider and plan your financial life. No kickbacks here, I just love Ramit's approach and recommend it. If you are in debt, or don't know where your money is going, these resources will help as well as the tools I list. This post is more focused on goal setting beyond the essentials. Ramit covers it all.

Blog: "How to Live a Rich Life"

Book: "I Will Teach you to Be Rich" 

One thing I love about Ramit's approach is it talks about defining what makes me happy and carving it out in my finances as a priority. Finances reflect our priorities and they can do more so when we are intentional, and our spending is aligned with higher goals, not low value purchases.

For me, this means several trips a year, and lots of cycling adventure trips. So you really have to know where your money is going and make it line up with what is important to you in life.

Use Tools to Create Visibility into your Finances

Given how complicated life is, it's very difficult to look at the number in a bank account and figure out how that number is going to turn into all these wonderful things. Don't try, use a computer!

I use apps such as YNAB, Google Sheets and Empower to keep track of my big picture goals, operational spending and saving goals as well as super long term trends. A solid budgeting app is so critical to this. I used to use Rocket Money to track my finances. I highly recommend YNAB instead as it gives you so much more fine grained control and visibility into your spending. I've also heard of others like Monarch Money and Actual Budget but can't speak to those. There's a huge community and tons of resources on YNAB and I've been blown away by my experience. I have over 50 separate categories to track from groceries to a car down payment in 5 years, and there is no way I could do this manually or even in a spreadsheet.

Where is this going?

List your travel goals. Classify goals by cost

We do this by roughly classifying trips into A, B and C class trips. Your mileage will vary depending on how much you can invest in travel.

• A trips are the ones you can afford to do once a year, or once every two years. This could be something like an international trip, or otherwise expensive destination to get to or stay in. For us, it's Paris for a week.

• B trips - Whatever medium is to you. Maybe you can do 1-2 per year. For us, this would involve flights and a car rental.

• C trips - More than twice a year. C trips are usually local and drivable such as a nearby area for a micro-adventure. For us in. Austin, San Antonio or Houston are examples as well as Bentonville and Big Bend.

• extra tip - leave breathing room in your plans for weddings or other new opportunities that come up during the year. Also, we are figuring out how to turn B trips into C trips by doing longer road trips, and camping 1-2 nights
  

Create a backlog and start saving

List all the trips you may want to take on a spreadsheet or list so you have the backlog. You can classify them as A, B or C or whatever classification works for you, just so it's a mix of easily attainable and big bucket list trips. A spreadsheet works great when a trip is in the concept stage.

Start saving: Travel costs can be big hits to your monthly budget when they're not evened out month to month. So we like to amortize the costs with this method. That way, we do not feel guilty about paying for it because it's already budgeted and set aside for us. We start with how much we can contribute per month per person to our travel budget. Then each month we contribute that amount into our shared account. That's it. Then the money "gets a job."

From Backlog To Plan

If you're familiar with Agile methodologies, you may see a parallel here. For a given amount of time, a handful of backlog items are chosen to work on, while the rest are left in the backlog. Our new process is similar. We move a handful of trips from the backlog into planning, which in this case is a YNAB plan / budget. In the meantime, take an amount you are comfortable contributing into savings account every month. We choose to keep it separate from other funds, but you could also use a budgeting tool to separate it from your other funds. In any case, protect it like a baby endangered animal. This will align to your plan.

Feed the plan with your travel funds over time

My advice for this type of planning before I started using YNAB was entirely different. Now we have fine grained control over our travel budget and I love it. https://www.ynab.com/ (not a sponsored post, I truly love this software).

In YNAB or a budgeting tool, create a category for each trip that you want to move from the backlog to the plan. This could be done in a spreadsheet too, just takes more work. You will want to create a target. That means, how much do you need for the trip and when is your deadline for that. If you're using YNAB, it's easy to create a target for how much that trip will cost and it will calculate your monthly allocation for you. You can tweak this amount until it aligns to the contributions you make. If that means one trip per year, awesome! Six trips, awesome! It's entirely up to your budget and how many trips you can save for at once, and how much they cost. If you want to be more flexible, you can also create generic categories on a spreadsheet or budgeting app (eg. Trip A / Summer 2027) and decide once you're closer to your goal where the destination will be. Since we blew through our budget last year, we are excited about saving up before we commit to a trips in the future, or at least having a solid plan for steady savings. Below is an example for monthly allocations in YNAB.

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   YNAB example

   
   

Once you have categories set up, and you have your savings aligned to those categories, you just sit back and watch them grow. Then, I think you can take it from there. But if not, I will create more content on this topic! So stay tuned.