Monday, November 17, 2008

I Would Spend an Extra $100 Bucks

I was reading Clever Dude's blog today and saw a guest post by Donnie Gamble entitled What Would You Do with an Extra $100 Bucks? He is suggesting that you should invest it wisely - save it. What would you do with it?

I know what I'd do with "found money" - put it in our Travel Fund. I guess that is saving for the short term, albeit "very" short term. (We are usually going on a trip at least every 6 months if not sooner.) In fact, we're putting our "extra" income (i.e. Craig's List and yard sale profits, credit card cash-back rewards, etc.) in the travel budget now.

So, why do we do spend it on travel rather than save it for the long term or put it towards paying down debt? Well, our budget is set up so that we are plowing quite a bit towards long term savings goals as well as retirement of debt. But we still want to do fun stuff -- but that means we have to come up with extra cash.

We do have a small amount ($100 per month) in the budget for travel expenses, but the two of us won't get too far on $1200 for the year. Mind you, that money is supposed to cover everything from transportation (gas for the car, airline tickets, etc.) and food to attractions and lodging. Even using a travel budget and a lot of cost saving measures, one of our long weekends for a marathon can run (no pun intended!) several hundred dollars to more than $1000, if we are flying.

So, we use extra money to fund traveling, which we love to do. It makes us work harder to find those bonus dollars. It also helps us keep our main savings goals as the priorities with much larger amounts budgeted for them than for travel. So, I don't find putting found money towards fun stuff to be frivolous at all.

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1 comment:

Kate said...

Absolutely--life is meant to be lived. You're saving for the things that you think are important and travel and experiences like that are important. We just went to my husband's hometown for a marathon/half-marathon. We saved by staying with his parents, I bought snacks at Target and borrowed books and audio books from the library.

I'm writing a grant proposal for some teachers to go to the UK this summer (we teach Brit Lit). If we save, hubby could come with and then we'd only have his expenses. We go to maybe two movies in the theater per year--I think travel is an okay expenditure.