How We Save Money on Travel with Kids: Guest Post on M$M

Travel with kids can be a scary concept for some people. Just thinking about flying with your baby can inspire terror in the most stoic of travelers.

How We Save Money on Travel with Kids: Guest Post on M$M www.thethreeyearexperiment.com

And while I admit that flying with our youngest was the reason that we have two, rather than three, kids today, traveling with kids can be done in a way that creates good memories for the whole family. Yesterday our story was featured on Millennial Money Man‘s blog and in it, I shared some tips we’ve gathered during the past few years for traveling with kids and sticking to your budget.

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Bobby is the millennial behind Millennial Money Man and his story is pretty cool. He used to be a high school band director, but after paying off $40,000 in debt on his teacher’s salary, he started a blog, and then decided he was going to turn the blog into a business. He shares his monthly blog income reports and he’s been pretty successful so far. While our family is obviously far from the millennial category (although my sister tells me I am now officially a millennial because they’ve decided to include ’79ers), I know there are a lot of people with kids, or thinking about having kids (like Bobby and his wife Coral) and they’re wondering how to fit kids into their travel plans.

While I didn’t include details about how to survive the plane rides (drug your kids), I did include other tips about making travel work with limited travel dollars. So read on! (And I’m kidding about the drugs–sort of).

Slow Travel

Slow travel is a lot cheaper than rapid travel. When you’re forced to cram a week in Florida into your kids’ Spring Break schedule, you’re going to pay through the nose for airfare, battle higher prices at hotels, have more crowds, and feel compelled to spend more since you only have a few short days of vacation.

We try to take trips that last at least three weeks. Often, we plan the trips over Christmas and New Year’s. Many times, we go during summers, and once in a while, we pull the kids out of school for two or three weeks in the fall or spring.

That way, we can plan our trip based on when airfare costs less. This year, we went to Chile and the Atacama Desert during December and January. It was the middle of the winter in New Hampshire, while Chile was in the middle of summer.

We had a home base in Santiago and then went up to the driest desert in the world for a few days. We saw breathtaking scenery in the desert, and we alsorelaxed and took it easy in Santiago. We swam in our apartment’s pool, went to the farmer’s market twice a week, and went to a park or museum every other day.

We’ve prioritized jobs that have lots of vacation time. My husband gets four weeks a year and I am a part-time teacher, so I get summers and vacation weeks off.

When we become location independent, we’ll have even more flexibility, as we’ll be able to extend those travel sessions by working remotely for weeks at a time.

The Good Stuff

It’s easy to fall into the trap, when you’re traveling, that you need to hit all the pricey tourist destinations. We’ve done it plenty of times.

But often, the sweetest memories we have of travel involve walking around a city, playing in a park, or discovering a hidden gem of a museum. Plus, when you travel with kids, they need a certain amount of time outside to run around and play.

We love to go to a local supermarket, stock up on unusual-looking foods, and make a picnic in the park. And taking pictures of iconic landmarks is free – you don’t have to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Likewise, when we’re in a new city, we find a cool ethnic restaurant and try it out or grab takeout. We don’t have a lot of variety in our small town, so grabbing some food to go is still an exotic treat for us.

To read the rest of the post, please visit Millennial Money Man.

See you Monday with our scary spending report from May. Ugh, moving!

 

Author: Laurie

Hi. I'm Laurie, and my family and I have set out to double our net worth and move abroad in the next three years. Join us on our journey!

One thought on “How We Save Money on Travel with Kids: Guest Post on M$M”

  1. i always get exotic pork products in the carolina’s. head cheese, puddings, organ meat based stuff. and pimento cheese and cracklins. i went to rio many years ago with very little portugese but ate every street food at the beach.

    Reply

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