Hi 👋
I was doing some travel planning during a boring meeting I had this morning at work and started thinking about how others plan their travels, PTO, etc, and how you decide how much you’re going to invest in travel for the year. Would love to hear!
Planning: For me, I am very type A about travel and every Jan I sit down and plan my trips for the entire year, from Jan thru Christmas; accounting for every holiday, and I log each one and costs in Google Sheets. My boyfriend is way more spontaneous with his travel so thinks I’m absolutely insane 😂 So I figured I would get a range of perspectives!
Vision: I set an intention for each year’s travels and in the past few years I’ve gravitated towards very immersive, intense nature trips (this year I’m doing free diving expedition near Cabo to see orcas, a remote scuba liveaboard off the coast of Costa Rica, a multi day trek in the Dolomites, then doing the W Trek in Patagonia, etc) so I need to make sure I book far in advance and that I budget for these trips.
Budget: I set a hard budget for the entire year and fit in trips around that. For this year, I’m entirely focused on nature/wildlife trips so that means no city trips for me, unless it’s traveling for work.
Time off: I also game out my PTO “budget” for the year. I am RTO 3x a week but my big tech company is very flexible with which days I come in and we get 3 weeks of “remote work” days so I can be a bit sneaky with extending trips over weekends, etc.
Big picture finances: I lower my retirement contributions a bit for the first 6 months of the year (still hit match of course) and make all my big pre-payments for my trips, then I bump the contributions back up around June or so.
So would love to hear from you girls! I feel very lucky that SFO is so close to the city, it’s so easy to go through security, and that it’s a United hub 👏