How Do You Afford That?

I’ve had a few people over the years ask how our family can afford to do a few of the things we do. Typically it’s someone who has some idea of how much I make, and typically what they’re wondering about is our being able to go on a decent vacation. Thought it might be helpful for some of you to hear my answer.

I’ll tell you it in a minute, but let’s start with the idea of strategic spending. You can call it budgeting, but I’d call it spending money on what you want to spend money on, and not spending money on things you don’t really want to spend money on. Sounds obvious, but very few people do it. Before you spend your money you need to decide what’s important to you. Like we’ve decided that vacations are important to us. We believe they bond a family together, and want our kids to have those memories to look back on. So if that’s something we want to spend money on there has to be something else (something less important) that we can’t spend money on. And, for us, it’s convenience spending.

That’s my answer: Avoid convenience spending. And I bet if you avoid convenience spending, you can go on a killer vacation every year. I’ll explain better what I mean tomorrow.