The best summer vacation is one you can actually afford to enjoy.
Summer travel is something most of us look forward to all year. But without a plan, it can leave you with a maxed-out credit card and a lot of financial stress to come home to. In this episode of Financial Feminist, I’m breaking down exactly how to budget for summer travel so you can enjoy your trip without the money anxiety hanging over you the whole time. I’ll walk you through how to set a realistic trip cap before you ever open a flight search tab, why travel is a known predictable expense and not just a fun splurge, and how to build a sinking fund so the money is already there when it’s time to book. If you’re craving a getaway this summer, I’m giving you a step-by-step framework, plus my favorite money-saving tools and practical tips, so you can travel well and come home financially intact.
Key Takeaways:
Travel is a known, predictable expense, not a spontaneous splurge
One of the biggest mindset shifts when it comes to budgeting for summer travel is recognizing that a trip isn’t a surprise cost that falls out of the sky. It’s something you can see coming and plan for. Summer travel only feels stressful when it’s treated like an emergency. When you start thinking about your vacation the same way you think about rent or a car payment — as a fixed, foreseeable expense — you stop white-knuckling your credit card and start building toward it with intention.
Set your total trip cap before you pick a destination
Before you fall in love with a flight deal, you need to know the maximum amount you can spend without going into debt. Pull up your checking account, your savings, and your upcoming fixed expenses. If you can’t quickly tell me what’s in those three places, that’s your starting point. Your trip cap is your boundary and your permission slip. It’s not there to kill your fun; it’s there to tell you exactly how much fun you can actually afford.
Budget for every category of travel, not just flights and hotels
Most people blow their travel budgets because they only account for the big-ticket items and ignore everything else. A complete travel budget includes transportation (flights, Ubers, trains, gas), lodging (including cleaning fees and resort fees), food (restaurants, groceries, coffee, snacks), activities and excursions (plus tips for tour guides and housekeepers), shopping and souvenirs with a set amount per person, and a 10–15% buffer for the unexpected. If a category doesn’t have a number attached to it before you leave, it will become credit card debt.
Plan backwards from your travel date to build your monthly savings target
Once you know your total trip cost, divide it by the number of months until you travel. That’s your monthly travel sinking fund contribution. A $2,400 trip four months away means saving $600 a month. A $1,200 trip six months out means $200 a month. Seeing that monthly number makes the goal real and forces an honest conversation about whether the trip you want matches the budget you have.
If your dream trip doesn’t fit your budget, you have options — and delayed doesn’t mean denied
Cutting costs without ruining the trip is absolutely possible: negotiate your bills, travel a day earlier or later, pre-book your experiences, limit yourself to one or two splurges, and use credit card points strategically. And if the math still doesn’t work? Take a shorter trip, choose a closer destination, explore the U.S., go in the off-season, or sit tight this year and save so you can take the trip of your dreams next year fully funded. Delayed does not mean denied — it means planned.
Notable quotes
“A budget is not a killjoy. It is a boundary and it is a permission slip.”
“You can afford almost anything, but you can’t afford everything.”
“Hot Girl Summer does not include a maxed out credit card in September.”
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro
00:16 Why Summer Travel Feels So Expensive
02:50 Step 1: Set Your Total Trip Cap
03:49 A Budget Is Not a Killjoy
05:46 Let Flight Deals Decide Where You Go
07:55 Step 2: Break the Trip Into Real Categories
12:22 Step 3: Plan Backwards
15:13 Step 4: Cut Costs Without Ruining the Trip
17:48 Book Experiences in Advance & Pick Your Splurges
19:21 Use Credit Card Points
19:58 What to Do If You Can’t Afford the Trip You Want
22:05 Travel Is Part of a Rich Life
Visit https://herfirst100k.com/ffpod to get my free Travel Budgeting Spreadsheet!
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Planning the summer vacation is stressful enough. Let’s make sure you can actually afford it.
Hi, I’m Tori. Welcome to Financial Feminist. I’m a multimillionaire, a money expert, and I’ve helped over five million women be better with money. And we’re talking about summer travel today because everybody wants to travel in the summer, but nobody wants to pay the high costs. The real reason summer travel feels so expensive is one, of course it is, things are more expensive now. But two, we want to reframe the problem of the expense of travel. Travel is not a fun splurge. It is a known predictable expense. And summer travel is only stressful when it’s treated like a surprise. So this is for my type B folks who are not as good at A, planning trips, but B, paying for them. We want to make sure that we’re going into our summer trip, knowing we can afford it, but also being able to enjoy it, not worried about swiping our credit card one too many times in the heat of the moment on our trip and realizing we’re going into debt to pay for it.
But first, a word from our sponsors. You are not irresponsible at the end of the day for wanting to travel. Every single person on the planet, I think, wants to travel. I hope. Maybe there’s some people who don’t. Those people are the concerning ones, but they’re not who I’m talking about today. Wanting travel is totally normal. And in fact, it’s encouraged. I love that you want to travel, but wanting something doesn’t mean you just get to ignore the money. And especially at this moment where everything feels so expensive, it’s very easy to just be like, “Fuck it. I’m going to spend whatever I’m going to spend and it’s going to cost whatever it’s going to cost and I’ll go into debt and that’s fine.” But the end of the day, that is not sustainable and that’s not fun. As I’ve said many times on this show and in my work, nothing tastes worse than a pina colada on the beach with a side of guilt.
So this episode is exactly how to plan a trip you can afford and also enjoy step by step. And I also built a free travel budgeting spreadsheet for you that walks you through this exact process. So if you go to herfirst100k.com/ffpod, you can download it for free. I just want to do a quick aside. Only 1% of people who actually listen to the show go get the free resources we create. Our team puts so much effort into making these incredibly valuable and you can’t just come and listen to the show and be like, “Cool, I did it.” You have not done it. You have to go actually apply everything I’m teaching you. So we’re making it really easy for you to do that. There’s no excuse. It’s free. herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Okay. First, before we decide where we’re going this year, we first need to decide what we can actually spend. So before you look at flights, before you already have a dream destination in mind, you cannot start with Instagram. You cannot start by saying, “Yes, this is the exact place I want to go at this time.” Okay? What we first have to start with is what can I realistically afford without debt? So how do we determine what we can realistically afford? You’re going to pull up your checking account balance, you’re going to pull up your savings, and you’re also going to pull up your fixed expenses. And the first thing is if I just said these three terms to you, your checking account, your savings account, and your upcoming fixed expenses, and you’re like, “I couldn’t tell you what’s in my checking account,” or, “I couldn’t tell you what’s in my savings account,” or, “I don’t know what my upcoming fixed expenses are.” Start there.
If you don’t know how much money you do or don’t have, you cannot set any financial goal or any goal for yourself, travel or otherwise. So, we need to decide one number, your total trip cap. This is the highest number that you can pay. If you don’t set a cap, your bank account will do it for you because you’ll overdraft or you’ll get that little credit card decline notice while you’re trying to check out at a store. A budget is not a killjoy. It is a boundary and it is a permission slip. Okay?
I’m going to sound like a broken record. But if you’re new to the show, this is really important. A budget is not about restriction. It’s not about deprivation. It’s not about a diet. A budget is like a gas gauge in your car. If you start a road trip, and this is a perfect metaphor for this episode, but if you are driving your car without a gas gauge, that is a stressful experience from the moment you get in the car to the moment your car inevitably breaks down at 2:00 AM on the side of the road without cell reception in a place you’ve never been before.
Your entire trip is stressful because you don’t know if you can get 20 minutes in your car, you don’t know if you can get to the next state over. You have no idea. But if I get in my car and I see that I’m low on gas, maybe even my light’s on, I at least have information. It might not be the most fun trip to the grocery store, but I know at least, okay, I can go and I can get my gas at my Costco that is 10 minutes away, right? This is what a budget is. A budget is your gas gauge in your car that tells you how far you can go. And people think, “Oh, budgets are the reason I can’t have fun or budgets are the thing that are stressful.”
No. You know what’s actually stressful? Getting in a fucking car and driving. You’re just like raw dog in life and wondering, “When am I going to break down? Am I going to break down at any moment? Is my car going to get declined? Am I going to run out of money in my checking account?” That’s the stressful thing. It’s not, “Oh, I don’t have a ton of money, so I know I need to get gas soon.” That’s not as stressful, nearly as stressful as you just driving. Budgets at the end of the day are not restrictive. They’re not diets. They’re not meant to tell you you can’t have something. They’re there to tell you what you can do. If you take nothing else away from this episode, this is it. My number one tip for this concept of trying to figure out how much money you have before deciding where to go.
I have managed to travel to Italy for 10 days on less than $2,000. I have managed to go to New Zealand and Australia where the flight was so cheap. I’m trying to remember, it was a couple years ago, but it was so cheap. Oh, I flew to Iceland for like $400 from Seattle. That is so cheap. Do you know why I was able to do those things? It’s because I didn’t care where I went. I’m going to explain. So when I’m getting ready to plan for a trip, and this especially works if you’re flexible on schedule, but if you know you want to travel in the summer, okay, this is applicable here too. If you can just look at the flight deals during that time, if you can plan ahead and see where the flight deals are out of your airport, I love Going for this. We’ll put a link to Going. It’s in the description.
But what Going does is it sends me deals out of Seattle. It says, “Okay, your home airport is Seattle. Here are the deals out of your home airport for certain times.” You can also do this, theflightdeal.com is another free service that I love and I allow the flight deals to decide where I want to go. I’ve seen some incredibly cool places that were on my bucket list, just maybe not at the exact time I was thinking about going, but that makes it so easy.
If you’re like, “Okay, I want somewhere warm and maybe somewhere out of the country,” that can be so helpful in terms of making flights more accessibly priced, making the whole trip more accessibly priced, as opposed to saying, “I have to go to Florida and I have to go with these days or this time and I have to fly into this airport.” That is where you’re just not going to have as much flexibility budget wise. So if you can, allow the flight deals to pick where you go. This is my biggest tip that will absolutely transform the way you travel because you can go by the deals rather than just your own whimsy.
All right, step two. So after we’ve set our trip cap, after we start to understand what we can actually afford, you then need to break the trip into real categories. People blow their travel budgets because they only plan for flights and accommodations, right? Or if they’re on a road trip, they plan for hotels and maybe gas. They don’t think about everything else. And I get this impulse because it’s like, oh yeah, food’s not going to cost a lot or excursions are not going to cost a lot compared, of course, to flights and hotels, but those costs add up really, really quickly, especially when you consider that all of us have vacation brain.
You know what vacation brain is. Vacation brain is you get to the place you’re going, especially if it’s tropical and you’re like, “You know what? YOLO, I’m here. I’m going to have more drinks. I’m going to do this crazy thing that I didn’t plan for.” Vacation me is a different Tori. Vacation Tori, money’s the last thing she’s thinking about. She’s just like, “Yeah, that sounds fun. That sounds great. We’ll buy this and we’ll do this and we’ll spend this thing and, oh yeah, we’ll upgrade the hotel and we’ll…” It’s so easy to allow vacation you to actually decide what you’re going to spend. When suddenly, all of the other things you didn’t actually plan for might be more expensive than the flight of the hotel.
So the categories to include when you’re planning. One, transportation. Yes, flights, but it might be gas, trains, Ubers, right? That Uber or taxi tour from the hotel gets me every time. I forget. I forget it’s happening. It’s usually super expensive and you got to plan for it. Two is lodging. Is that hotels? Is that Airbnbs? Is that the ability to crash on somebody’s couch? Incredible. Cool. That’s going to save you some money. But also, the sneaky things, okay? The Airbnb cleaning fee that you maybe didn’t account for or maybe the resort fees, that’s the one that always gets me because I’m staying in nicer hotels now and especially in tropical locations, they tack on that $40 resort fee every day. I’ve been there for five days, suddenly, 40 times five, that’s 200 bucks. It’s just gone now. I completely forgot.
Food. Ugh, food, right? We all want to eat well while we’re on vacation, but eating well is really expensive, especially in this moment. So maybe it’s groceries versus restaurants, but it also might be a coffee you’re getting every single day. Maybe it’s the snacks that you forgot to bring that you now have to go buy.
So this adds up very quickly, especially if you’re a cocktail or two deep and you start getting into vacation Tori. Vacation mode starts kicking in and you start spending money. I think food is like the big place that your budget can just be blown very quickly. When you’re like, “Ugh, I can have that nicer glass of champagne.” And again, we can, but if we budget for it. Activities are the fourth one that we tend to forget. Tours, tickets, excursions, but also tips, right? You want to tip your tour guide because we believe in tipping people properly. You want to tip your housekeeper. You also have to think about not just the activities, but the tip for the people who are doing those activities with you.
The fifth one is shopping and souvenirs. Give it a line item, you have to be specific about how much you’re willing to spend or it’s just going to get blown out of the water. And if you are the person who buys things for other people, you’re like, “Oh, I’m buying my mom something and my partner something and my sister’s something and my best friend something.” Great. Have a budget for each person. I’m spending no more than $30 on a souvenir for my mom. I’m spending no more than $50 on a souvenir for my best friend. Whatever you decide that budget is, make it before you leave and make it per person. And that includes you. If you know you want to bring home souvenirs for yourself, set a budget.
And finally, it’s probably just a good idea to, in addition to all of these things, put a buffer in. Maybe it’s 10 to 15% for surprises. If it does not have a category, it will become credit card debt. If it does not have a category that you have planned for, it will become credit card debt.
Step number three, if you’re trying to plan for any financial goal that has a strict timeline, like, “I want to renovate my kitchen next year,” or, “I want to buy a house in the next four years,” or, “I want to take a trip by this summer,” then you need to plan backwards. Here’s what I mean. You’re going to take the total trip costs that you calculated on step one, and you’re going to divide it by the months until travel. That is your monthly travel sinking fund, right? So if you’re trying to take a $2,400 trip and it’s four months away, you need to be saving $600 a month. If you’re trying to take a $1,200 trip and it’s six months away, you need to be saving $200 a month. This, I think, is especially where we have to get honest with ourselves.
I was talking with a friend the other day, and this is not related to travel, but it’s the same concept. She was like, “I want to make $500,000 next year in my business.” And I was like, “Cool, that sounds amazing.” And then I literally did the simplest math ever. I didn’t even do it in my head. I pulled out my phone and I went 500,000 divided by 12. And I showed her the amount of money she was going to have to make every month in her business and she went, “Shit.” And I said, “I love that goal and I love that you’re thinking big.” And also, it has to be realistic. A goal without a plan is just a wish. A goal without a plan is just a wish. So we adjusted that goal accordingly because I think once you see it every month, it’s just more real, right? As opposed to saying, “Oh yeah, this trip costs $4,000. I’ll save a little bit and I’ll figure it out.”
It’s like, no, if you want to take that trip in six months, then this is the amount you need to be saving every single month in order to not go into credit card debt to afford this trip. You don’t need a trust fund, but you do need a timeline. You do need a timeline and you need to know the amount of money that you need to be saving in order to have the trip you want. And if you’re not able to save the amount of money to get the trip you want, then you need to change the trip. And I hate to be the kill joy, but again, nothing tastes worse than a pina colada on the beach with a sigh of guilt. Nothing tastes worse than you taking this long awaited, well-deserved vacation and the back of your mind the whole time you’re going, “You can’t afford that. You’re going to have to deal with credit card debt when you get home.” That’s home me’s problem, not vacation me’s problem.
That’s not the narrative that I want you to be having on this really nice trip that you’ve planned. I want you to be fully present. I want you to be able to afford nice things. I want you to be able to have everything you want while also being able to afford it.
Step four, if you’ve realized, oh, shit, the trip of my dreams is not the trip of my budget, then here’s how to cut costs without ruining the trip. These are my non-annoying frugal tips. The first one, cut your bills. Now, I don’t mean this as like, stop buying lattes even though you love them. Negotiate your bills. We’ve talked about this before. We also have a resource that we can link in the show notes about how to do this. It has scripts, it has how-tos, but what you can literally do is negotiate things like your auto insurance, your cable bill, your phone bill, also cable. I don’t know if you’re still paying for cable, you get my drift. Your home insurance or rental insurance, your medical debt. There are so many things you can negotiate that can immediately save you more money.
We have a resource we’ll put in the description with scripts. Scripts to negotiate your car insurance, your home insurance or rental insurance, your cable bill if you’re still paying for that, your phone bill. We’ve seen people literally, in just a few phone calls that take like an hour, get thousands of dollars back in their pocket. So this might be a way that you can help pay for the trip by cutting your costs. So we will have those two resources down below, a way to help save money on your car insurance by checking, I almost said by switching to Geico, but by checking to see if you’re getting good coverage and also what we call our bill breakthrough scripts.
And the last thing I’ll say about that bill breakthrough scripts as well is that there’s a ton of scripts in there to negotiate upgrades. This is a way that you can take a more luxurious trip for the same price. So we have a script in there about how to ask for an upgrade on a flight. And that might just be, “Hey, I’m in the middle seat and I want to get to an aisle seat.” Or, “I’m trying to get into the exit row,” or even, “I’m trying to sit in premium economy or first class without paying for it. ” But also, we have a script in there about how to get a room upgrade if you’re staying at a hotel. So definitely check out those bill breakthrough scripts.
The second thing you can do to cut costs without ruining the trip. You might want to travel one day earlier or one day later. If you have a little flexibility on how you’re traveling, when you’re traveling, this could potentially save you hundreds. There’s just some days that are more expensive to travel. This is how airlines work. If you have a little bit of flexibility, you could save some money. The third, pick your experiences and book them before the trip. The reason we want to do this is you sometimes save money by pre-booking it, but also, we inevitably, a lot of us go on a shopping day when we’re on vacation and then we don’t know how much money to spend on that shopping day. If we book our experiences before, those are the things that most people tell us really matter to them. Those are the things that they want to do. The snorkel excursion or the art museum. Those are the things we tend to remember, not the things we bought. So if we can plan those ahead of time, that’s going to be super helpful.
The fourth thing, you’re going to pick one, maybe two, splurges, you’re not going to pick five. As my lovely friend Paula Pant says, “You can afford almost anything, but you can’t afford everything.”
Six, you maybe want to stay slightly outside the city center or one of my favorite tips is split up your trip. I love doing this. I’ll stay in the city for like a couple days so I can go to the museums and eat at the good restaurants and do everything I need to do. And then I will purposely take myself to like a sleepy town somewhere outside. I did this in New Zealand. We stayed in Wellington for a couple days and then we went to a random surf town called Raglan that I had never heard of, but ended up being the highlight of the trip. It was beautiful. We found a great Airbnb. It was amazing.
And finally, use your credit card points. You knew that you weren’t going to get through this episode without me talking about credit card points. You knew that. We have our credit cards we recommend linked in the description as well. We have so many resources and yes, I’m going to keep plugging them in the description, but you can start using points strategically to pay for your hotel, pay for your flights, pay for your rental car, or at least, put a dent in it so the cost doesn’t feel as high. My final tip, I said it before, but allow the flight deals to pick where you go as opposed to feeling super restrictive. It’ll help save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
Okay. Finally, what to do if you can’t afford the trip you actually want? First of all, it is okay to want more than you can afford right now. That is normal. We all, I think, want nicer things than we might be able to afford. It’s very easy for us to dream about, again, the vacation we want or the vacation we deserve and then realize, shit, I can’t have all of this.
So it is okay to want more than you can afford right now, but it’s not okay to financially screw over future you just to get it now. Okay? So it might be taking a shorter trip. It might be picking a closer destination. It might be deciding, “Hey, we’re not going out of the country in the summer, but we’re going to go some really cool place in the U.S. we’ve never been.” My parents are great at this. They actually have not… I don’t think they’ve been out of the country in like 10 years, but they have seen so much of the U.S. and like, yeah, the U.S. is right now. Of course it is. And also there are beautiful national parks. There are beautiful cities and people and places to go. The U.S. is like so big. We have what feels like 50 countries inside the U.S. and so, this might be a way that you can better afford a trip while still seeing a new place.
You might want to do off-peak timing. It might be, “You know what? We’re not going to take a trip in the summer, but we are going to go in September or October.” It might be saying, “You know what? The trip that I really want, I cannot afford this year.” So we’re going to sit tight this year. We’re not going to go anywhere. We’re going to keep saving so that we can take the trip of our dreams next year. So rather than trying to half ass a trip that I’m not really excited about this year, I would rather sit tight, maybe go away for the weekend somewhere, an hour or two away and keep saving so I can take that killer trip next year. Delayed does not mean denied. It means planned. It means that you planned it. Okay?
Ultimately, travel is part of a rich life. We have talked about the importance of traveling, the importance of doing really, really incredible things with our money, okay? And you don’t have to choose between joy and responsibility. Financial feminism means that you get to enjoy your life without financial hangovers. It means that you get to use money as a tool to build a life that you want, but it also means we have to be responsible with that money and not go into debt just so we can get immediate gratification. So we have this free summer travel spreadsheet that you can use to plan your trip, stay on costs. It is linked in the show notes. It is free. You can go to herfirst100k.com/ffpod and please use this before actually booking your trip. This is a great place to start as you’re planning for summer travel.
Ultimately, Hot Girl Summer does not include a maxed out credit card in September. So we can have our cake and eat it too. We can travel and do all of the things we want to do while also taking care of ourselves financially. We’ll see you back here soon, Financial Feminist. Thanks for being here.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First 100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
