Vacation! - Counting My Pennies

I did something that I have never done before.

I booked a vacation well over a year in advance.

I have never booked the sort of vacation where I schedule in time to pay a downpayment with the balance due later. And yet now I have.

I am scheduled to go on a cruise next fall with a bunch of my friends. The balance for this isn’t due until next July (though I will likely pay it in June so that I can begin booking excursions). I am so incredibly excited.

I haven’t been on a cruise in over ten years – the last one was a family trip with my extended family, and I was at that weird age where I was too old for the teen stuff and not old enough for the bars. So this one should be fun. Also, it’s the first time I’ve taken a trip that wasn’t based around a race or visiting family in I don’t know when. Years, probably.

(Okay, so there is a distinct possibility that we will be running a 5K on one of the islands and running a ten mile race the day we return to shore. But that is not the point of the vacation.)

I’m really excited to have this out there, and it’s definitely motivation to put aside extra money for the trip, both to pay it off and to pay for fun on the cruise. It’s definitely something to look forward to. I already find myself wanting to plan, and it’s a year and a half away! I have a lot to do before then!

Megan Smith

Megan is a 30-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.

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