How to budget for your vacation

Here are a few tips to make sure you have enough money to enjoy everything you want to during your vacation.

1) Set up your budget before planning where to go. Vacation hot spots can vary drastically in pricing. Certain areas are simply more expensive than others, be it living expenses or daily spending. Do some research about costs in the area and plan how much you’d be willing to spend each day.

2) Start saving early. Putting away a few Rand every few weeks will build up over time, and will make it much easier to scrape together enough money to do everything you want on your vacation.

3) Keep transportation in mind. Will you be travelling by car, airplane, train, bus or boat to your vacation destination? You’ll obviously have to budget for a travel ticket or petrol, but also keep in mind that you’ll need transportation at your destination too. Budget for petrol cost, leasing a car or taking a train, bus or something akin to Uber.

4) Budget for both home-cooked and eat out meals. Eating out every day will become very unhealthy, very quickly. It’s important to have regular home-cooked meals to balance things out. But, you’re on vacation and it will be important just to relax, enjoy yourself and eat out every now and again. Make sure to budget for take-out and the usual grocery shopping.

5) Keep your coins. Silver and bronze money in today’s life is often just a nuisance, and something that’s bound to fill up your wallet or end up inside a couch. Instead of discarding your coins, get a piggy-bank or a tin holder and throw your coins in there once or twice a week. After enough months you’ll be surprised to find you have a few hundred Rand extra to do something fun with on vacation.

6) Keep emergency funds separate. Remember to budget for the unexpected, like losing personal items, breaking something on your car or going to hospital for an injury. Make sure you have an amount set aside for something like this, and don’t mix it up with your spending money lest you use it mistakenly.

7) Remember to budget for souvenirs. You might want to take something home with you to remind you of your trip. Maybe you’ll need to take back a few knick-knacks for family and friends. Don’t forget to budget beforehand for these as well.

8) Track your actual spending. Don’t just swipe your card or take money from your wallet at random without keeping track of how much you’ve already used, and how much you can still spend. Keep a journal, and diarise all your expenditures. You might even want to download an app on your smartphone which is designed to do just that.

9) Use a savings account with good interest rates. Most banks offer savings accounts where you can safely save your money before the trip. Most usually also provide a good interest rate, meaning that your saving will grow the longer they stay in the account.

10) Stay away from debt. Try your best not to take out a loan or use your credit card to pay for your vacation. This can easily lead to overspending and will hurt you in the long run. Relaxing on your vacation won’t mean much if you have to go home to a mound of debt.