At the time of vacation you must think how to save your money in a limit of time?Just follow me.
Following are nine easy ways to save up money for your own vacation.
1.Open a dedicated savings account:
If you are serious about your effort to fund your travels directly and methodically, rather than out of whatever is in your bank account when your travel date comes around, this is a critical step. In most cases the cost to set up an account is zero, save for a bit of your time.
If you go this route, make sure you do not face any minimum balance penalties when you actually start to use and spend down the money you've saved. It may also be useful to have ATM and online access to the account, which will let you draw money directly from the account when booking and while you travel; this keeps you from mingling your regular accounts with your "trip money," guaranteeing that the money you set aside for the trip is the money you actually spend.
Using a single, dedicated account will also help you keep on budget during your trip, as the easiest way to know how much you are spending is to track the balance of your specific travel account. You can keep an eye on your balance as your trip progresses, and track the true cost of your trip without too much effort.
2.Set up automatic transfers:
Once you have a dedicated account set up, you have to fill it up. If you don't trust yourself or family members to do so, set up an automatic transfer at a regular interval to do it for you. This is easy to set up and can really add up over time. A transfer of $14/week ($2/day) adds up to just short of $730 by the end of a year; that would have funded flights for my entire family to aforementioned wedding, and we could have skipped the 13 hours of grueling summer weekend driving we did instead. Look into package deals, and you can sometimes take your whole family on vacation for not much more than that.
If you've set up a recurring direct deposit for your paycheck, often you can work with your employer to have your deposits split among multiple accounts. So you could have 1 or 5 or 10 percent of your paycheck go straight into your dedicated travel account — without having to move it yourself or being tempted to spend it.
3.Let someone else do it for you:
If the preceding approach sounds like too many trips to the bank branch, you can do the whole thing online — and even have someone twist your arm. To that end, check out SmartyPig.com ( read a review of the service here and see a video of a family saving for a trip around the world here), where you choose a savings goal when you set up your account, and let SmartyPig keep the transfers going until you reach your goal. Subsequently you have several options on how to collect the money, including transfers back to your banking account, a debit card or even gift cards. On top of that, it seems that SmartyPig offers one of the highest interest rates in the country, so your money works for you as well.
4.The trusty change jar:
We finally filled up a large pretzel jar of spare change recently and took it to a local bank with a change machine (avoid the supermarket machines, which take 8 percent of your savings). We discovered that we had accumulated over $500 of spare change — yeah! Seem impossible? Not at all — it only takes $1.36/day to get to $500 in a year. If most families have two adults emptying their pockets into a bucket every day, the silver adds up fast. Our 3-year-old has his own change jar as well and is contributing to the cause with any loose change that ends up on the kitchen counter, on the floor in the car, etc.
5.Do a true budget:
It sounds like a government budget office tactic, but I encourage you to do a budget that accounts for money you don't spend while on your trip. This includes food, lower energy bills, weeknight movies, Netflix or on-demand rentals, suspended paper delivery, etc. This will give you a much more honest cash-flow analysis of how much your trip is going to cost you. Don't forget to factor in non-travel costs like boarding for pets and hiring the neighbor kid to mow the lawn; in the end, for plus and minus, you will have a better sense of what the trip actually costs.
Our Travel Budget Calculator can get you started with your trip budget.
6.Liquidate directly into a travel fund:
Almost everyone I know has a plan to get rid of a ton of stuff on eBay or craigslist, and almost all of them have yet to get to it. They need motivation; the decision to put all monies collected directly toward a travel fund can provide just that. Once you set up an account of some type per the above, start emptying out your closets of all your extra stuff, and fill up your dedicated travel accounts with the income. I recently sold a filing cabinet for $50, a dishwasher for $150, an old "Sports Illustrated" magazine for $37 — there's a night's stay at a very decent hotel right there.
Good old-fashioned yard sales seem to be doing better than ever. Our annual neighborhood effort generated about three times as much income this year compared to years past.
7.Travel grants:
If you are traveling for professional, educational or research purposes, you may qualify for any number of travel grants available to qualified individuals. In most cases travel grants do not fund entire trips, but will rather offset some of your expenses — so while you won't get a free trip, it can be considerable money in your pocket nonetheless. Check out this primer for finding and applying for travel grants.
Also, if you're planning a volunteer vacation, you can often drum up support from churches or temples, community organizations, and other local charity-minded institutions.
8.Get everyone saving:
Any parent knows that travel costs multiply dramatically when kids are added to the mix — you need more plane tickets, bigger rental cars, more beds, more tickets to attractions, more food, more more more.
If your kids get allowances, or if you give them a weekly spending budget, they should help save for the trip as well, whether in cash from their allowance or chits from their spending limits. Explain that vacations cost extra, and that while you are still paying the bills at home during the trip and will cover most of the travel expenses, they will need to save up for any little extra stuff they want to buy. Let them know specifically what they need to save for — you'll pay for airplanes, hotel rooms, meals, park admission and the like, and perhaps they'll pay for souvenirs and non-mealtime desserts.
9.Grandparent (or parent) travel grant:
You know you sweat the high cost of taking a family on vacation, but getting your kids to look at travel as something that costs a lot more money than staying home can be a challenge. Grandparents.com has a great solution that can be used by grandparents or parents alike: Have the kids apply for a travel grant from you to fund the trip.
The site suggests establishing a foundation, giving it a name, having the kids create a budget and outline their responsibilities, getting letters of support — in short, going through the full grant process.
9 easy creative ways to save money for vacation
