Everyone deserves a vacation or at least the opportunity to travel. Traveling allows us to learn about cultures, show an appreciation, experience new things, and it can completely change one’s perspective. If you have wanderlust, then you know it’s hard to ignore that feeling. During the last couple of years of the COVID-19 pandemic, it may have been very difficult for you to suppress the wanderlust feeling.
As many areas are opening back up, people are going in mass waves to new locations to make up for the time where they had to be stuck at home. Of course, this is justifiable! However, saving for retirement should still be a priority. Thankfully with some planning, you’ll be able to balance out traveling the world and saving for retirement.
Take a look at your retirement goals
The easiest step is evaluating what your retirement goals are. So this includes what age you’re wanting to retire, how you believe you’re going to retire, and what you’ll do during retirement. You want to make sure you can obtain your travel goals and what better way than to begin planning immediately. You just need to keep in mind that you have to be realistic with yourself. You need to look in your company’s retirement plan to see what they offer.
You’ll also need to look further into ways to contribute to your retirement such as tax-advantaged retirement accounts, increase your savings, look into your investment portfolio and even Learn more about investing in gold with your IRA. It may be a lot to put into consideration, but nowadays just putting money back from your job isn’t going to entirely cut it, especially if you’re wanting to indulge in the finer things in life like traveling.
Create a budget for traveling
Once you have created a plan with how much you’re going to save each month for your retirement (and emergency fund), you can then begin creating monthly savings that will go towards traveling. Sure, you can put your trips on credit cards, but those travel hacks only work if you plan to immediately pay off your card within a couple of days after your purchase. It’s best to create a monthly budget that you plan to put back for traveling. This should include how you want to travel, such as luxury travel, how much you plan to spend, and how much you think you’ll need in case of an emergency.
Look into other ways to make money
If you’d like to travel extensively, such as go on a long vacation, try out the digital nomad lifestyle, or even just go out every weekend then you may need more income. Sometimes the income from your work may not cut it. Especially if you’re trying to balance your retirement, emergency fund, living expenses, and your travel. In these times, it’s best to look into getting a side hustle. This side hustle can be the money that you put directly into your travel fund.
Research
There are plenty of creative ways to fund travel without breaking the bank. This includes signing up for flight newsletters such as DollarFlightClub, trying out travel agencies, and even travel hacking with credit card miles. There is no doubt about it that there are plenty of ways to save serious money on travel. But this can even include just sticking to cheaper ways to travel in general such as road tripping this winter and taking an AirBnB rather than a hotel.
