Are big trips messing up your finances
- Jun 1
- 4 min read
Do you like traveling?
Chances are, you do. For many of us, exploration, culture, and rest are core values.
And if I looked at your bank statements, I’d likely see a good chunk of your money going toward flights, places to stay, and experiences in new countries.
I get it. It’s one of the things I value a lot too.
But let’s be honest: Does traveling also end up messing up your finances?
Perhaps your bank account takes a larger hit than you expected, so you feel guilty and deflated after the trip, worried about how long it would take to financially recover.
That used to happen to me, and I see it happening to others around me.
I believe it doesn't have to be that way.
Last month, Carlos and I took a two-and-a-half-week trip to Florida, USA. Because we applied an intentional and pro-active approach to this trip, we managed to eliminate at least 80% of the money stress.
In this article I will show how you can use a similar approach to plan your next great adventure without the financial hangover.
Step 1: Recognize when a trip is BIG for YOU specifically
Why?
Because then it automatically requires upfront financial planning and so we want to give ourselves enough time to do that, calmly and methodically.
How do you know when a trip is BIG for you or your household specifically?
In my experience, it’s when you cannot comfortably cover the trip using just one month of free cash flow, meaning the monthly net income remaining after bills, groceries, and other monthly expenses.
For example, if your net monthly income is €3,500, and after bills, groceries, and other monthly expenses you have €700 left over, any trip that costs more than €700 is a BIG trip for you. It requires upfront design.
Step 2: Define the trip ‘theme’, WAY in advance
When you're not clear on what you want your vacation to be about, overspending can creep it. This happens because your priorities are not clear.
To prevent this, ask yourself: what do I want the single core theme of my next big trip to be?
When Carlos and I first started planning our trip to Florida 9 months before it happened, we agreed that our theme would be Connection & Generosity.
Meaning we wanted to spend quality time with long-distance family and close friends, sharing experiences together and creating new memories.
Because we identified that theme early, we made a conscious trade-off: we chose to stay entirely with friends and family, foregoing the option to stay at potentially unique accommodations (e.g. Disney hotel😉).
That choice saved us thousands on accomodation, allowing us to confidently reallocate the money saved toward what we actually valued: treating our friends to lunches and dinners, buying groceries for the households hosting us, paying for people to join us on cool experiences like kayaking with alligators and awesome theme parks. We even gifted them a professional house cleaning service when we left.
The ability to be generous in this way made every euro spent completely worth it to us.
Think about your next big trip: what is the core theme? And if you aligned your budget with it, what would you cut back on, and where would you splurge?
Step 3: Start funding a separate ‘piggy bank’ for the trip
Once you have your trip theme selected, you need to build the fund for it, steadily and calmly.
Carlos and I estimated our trip would cost roughly €4,000 each, based on past experience and estimating conservatively to give ourselves room.
We started planning 9 months in advance, and the math was straight forward:
Total estimated trip cost / Number of months till trip = Monthly saving target
€4,000 / 9 months = €450 / month to save
In September of 2025 I opened a “US Trip May 2026” piggy bank in my personal ING bank account and automated €450 to be deposited there every 1st of the month.
We bought flights in January and paid for the rental car and some activities in April. I paid for my share of these costs from the dedicated trip fund that was steadily being built up, never disturbing my regular monthly cash flow.
Right before the trip started, we each transferred € 1,000 into the common expense account to cover the anticipated trip expenses based on our core theme: the group dinners, groceries, activities and gifts.
On the personal front, because I had systematically saved during the last 9 months, I had a cash cushion left over in my “US Trip May 2026” piggy bank that allowed me to say yes to spontaneous experiences while on the trip, without dipping into my regular monthly income or guilt-tripping myself later.
How long in advance can you start to plan for your next big trip? What would the monthly saving target be?
Step 4: During the trip, enjoy the freedom and peace of mind
When you enter a vacation completely pre-funded, your relationship with daily spending changes entirely.
Because the money was already there, we experienced freedom and peace of mind:
We rarely looked at restaurant menu prices or agonized over the cost of gas,
We had zero arguments about money because our shared expense account was pre-loaded, and
When I chose not to buy a gadget I’d been eyeing for a while, I easily redirected that money into a luxurious massage experience for myself and a friend. It wasn't "impulse spending”, but a conscious re-alignment of my spending with what I valued most. No regrets.
What does freedom and financial peace of mind look like for you while on a trip?
Be intentional from the very beginning, and decisive about your trade-offs
We returned to Amsterdam last week, checked our personal and common expense accounts, and found we were still within our budget boundaries.
Which tells us that our financial life in the coming weeks and months doesn't have to suffer to compensate.
We didn't achieve this by accident, and we certainly didn't achieve it by restricting our joy while on vacation.
We achieved it by being intentional from the very beginning, and making conscious trade-offs regularly and often on where we want to generously spend money, and where we’re happy to cut.
Which is why this approach, tried and chiselled over several trips, is now working for us and for the clients we coach.
As for the leftover buffer in my personal US trip fund? It was just officially renamed the Japan 2027 Fund! 😊
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