Using Goals to Help You Save
- March 28th 2008
- Saving for your trip
It’s easy to be told to save your money instead of use your credit card for things and vacations you want, but when it comes down to actual practice it usually easier for most people to put it on a credit card and pay it off. Why is it so hard to save money for things, like vacations, that we know we want? Why can’t we just say no to the cup of $4.50 coffee and put that five bucks into a savings account each and every time? Is it because we’re not good at delayed gratification or are we just horrible at self control?
I sometimes think to myself, as I stand in line at the coffee shop, “I have an espresso machine, I can make this at home for next to free” but I never turn around and leave. The desire to save that money just isn’t large enough. It was during my interview with Theresa a couple of weeks ago that I realized that I’m not applying the same goal-setting practices to saving for a trip that I apply to the rest of my life. In my other life I write the blog ReallyBigGoals.com about how to achieve truly huge goals in your every-day life. I felt so silly for not even thinking about applying the very same practice that I promote there to my travel savings goals.
Here is the way my thinking about saving for and planning a trip goes:
“Self, hello?, I want to get out of the country/town/hemisphere”
“That’s nice self, but we don’t have any money”
“But I’m sick of being here.”
“Well, let’s save some money up and then we’ll think about planning a trip.”
“Ok, I’ll save some money for a vacation and when I have $2,000 I’ll plan a trip.”
I asked Theresa if it was easy for her and her hubby to save the massive amount of money that they are going to need to travel the world for a year or so and also to re-integrate and find jobs when they get back. She said that it got easier to save the more planning they did because they quickly realized that the $25 that they would normally spend on take-out when they were to lazy to cook suddenly equated to two nights in a South East Asia hotel.
To set any goal, whether it is a Really Big Goal or a simple New Year’s Resolution, you need to define your goal in a quantifiable way and then break it down into bite-sized pieces. Even if you’re not planning on taking a year long wander around the world, denying yourself cable becomes much easier when you realize that a year of cable will buy your family a week in a nice San Francisco Family Hotel. Without a clear goal, you can know that you should save the approximately $1,200 that cable will cost you a year, but it just won’t seem worth it unless you know what you’ll get in exchange.
What is the most helpful goal-setting tool you use in saving for your vacations?
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