First a note – this isn’t a paid advertisement or anything of the sort. Every so often, I just like to tell you about things I like.
As of late, I find myself traveling more and more. It used to be one or two trips a year, now it’s more like five to ten. I like to go places, but I hate the logistics of traveling – keeping all of the schedules straight and remembering all the paperwork. It’s even more ridiculous when you’re traveling with a group of people who are coming from different locations. Figuring who will be where and when they will be there gets to be complicated.
Then I found TripIt. TripIt is a great site that organizes all of your itineraries into one. “Great, Megan,” you’re thinking. “But I can do that myself.” Sure you can. But TripIt makes it easy. When I make a flight reservation, I just forward the info to TripIt and bam! It’s all imported in and ready to go. Hotel reservations? Bam! Done. It works for dinner reservations too. Of course, not every reservation has an e-mail confirmation, and not all e-mail confirmations work with TripIt, so you can just go to the site and enter in the information.
Then you can print off all of the paperwork and carry it with you or my favorite method, use the TripIt app.
I use TripIt Pro. For just $49 a year, I also get notifications when I’m eligible for a flight refund, and most importantly, mobile alerts when my flight status changes. This has saved me more than once. I was sitting at a gate one snowy day and got an alert that my flight had been canceled. The airline hadn’t yet announced this in the airport, so I was one of the first people on the phone to rebook. Definitely a great perk. Also, I can create an inner circle and automatically share all my trips with those people. For safety reasons, I always like someone to know when I’m leaving the state, and this is an easy way to do that.
So there’s my two cents about TripIt. The regular version is free and I highly recommend checking it out!
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
I’ve been using Kayak’s free option for over a year now and have been thinking about switching to Kayak for the flight refund notification and the weather alerts that come with it. Otherwise, Kayak does the same thing for free.