How To Plan Your Next Vacation
Now that you’ve started getting your finances organized using Mint.com, it may be time to use some of your savings towards a vacation. If you live in the Boston area then you might be thinking it’s a good time to get out of town, preferably somewhere warm!
Let us help you plan your next vacation, wherever your destination may be. We suggest you start organizing your vacation plans by using a travel activities planning document where you can do a brain dump of all the places you want to go. Once you know where and when you want to travel, you can work on a travel budget based on the activities and destinations you listed. Finally, once everything is confirmed, you should get all of the important information in one place and create a travel itinerary to use and share.
Packing Tip: Did you know that rolling your clothing not only saves you space in your suitcase but rolled clothes tend to wrinkle less than folded clothes.
Travel Activities
Think of this as the brainstorming stage. Allow yourself to think freely and fantasize about your vacation. Where do you want to go? What do you want to see? What activities would you do? Are there any friends or family you want to visit while traveling? It doesn’t mean you’ll do everything on your list, it’s just a place to get all of your ideas in one place.
Our FREE Travel Activities Printable can help get your ideas organized on paper.
Travel Budgeting
One of the hardest decisions you have to make when planning a trip that involves airline travel is when to buy your plane tickets. Most people are always looking for the best deals, but it can seem daunting to try and find the lowest airfare, especially with time constraints. The Wall Street Journal published a great article explaining the best day to buy airline tickets.
“Looking for an airfare deal? Your odds improve if you buy on the weekend. When searching for the lowest fare, don’t give up on Tuesdays. It’s the day with the most frequent price drops, leaving the door open for good deals. One tip for uncertain fare-watchers: The Transportation Department requires that airlines give refunds for tickets canceled within 24 hours of a purchase, or offer a 24-hour hold, for tickets bought more than a week before departure.”
Try this app: Hopper, is a Cambridge, MA firm that analyzes prices and flight searches in giant reservation systems. You can download their app and search for the best times to purchase your tickets. The WSJ says the average consumer spends 12 days shopping for airline tickets. Hopper notifies you the instant that flight prices drop, and before they’re about to rise. Hopper can help save you up to 40% on flights!
Tip: When searching for airline tickets online, try using “incognito browsing.” Travel websites can track searches and if you keep searching the same flights, they can increase the price of tickets. Incognito mode allows you to privately search for flights and see the unmodified prices. For Windows, Linux and Chrome OS: Ctrl+Shift+N. For Mac: xt⌘-Shift-N.
Our FREE Travel Budget Printable to help you get financially organized for your next trip.
Travel Itinerary
Creating an itinerary for a vacation can seem overwhelming. By keeping it simple and well-designed, an itinerary can really help during the trip, both for you and anyone who needs to know where you’ll be. We are way past the days of moms carrying a three-ring binder through Disneyland with print-outs and brochures with every possible activity and attraction. We live in a mobile world and having everything at our fingertips on a small device can save time, energy, and paper!
Our FREE Travel Itinerary Printable can help get all of your travel information organized. This simple design can help you keep everything on one page. If you want your neighbor or a family member to have a copy of the itinerary in case of emergency it’s easy to make a copy for them to have.
Tip: Create a Dropbox folder for your upcoming trip and save PDF versions of your personalized itinerary so you can access them on the go and share them electronically.
Tip: Another option for creating a mobile itinerary is to use an app like TripIt. You can use their app to file all of your travel information in one place. You can share this itinerary with others through email as well.