This is the fun part budgeting and saving for travel. People often want to ask others who travel a lot. How do you do it? How is it that you always travel? The three keys are planning and being flexible. We've talked about that but also budgeting and saving.

There are many reasons to put travel in your budget. The same way you have an item in your budget for your car payment, your rental or how mortgage, your other insurances, even people have budget items for entertainment and clothing. So just add one more line for travel. And the reason is it helps you to be more aware of where you're putting your money. For example, many of us love Starbucks or other coffee shops, and at $4 and 15 cents per cup. One grand a mocha latte, which I love at Starbucks per day for one month, could add up to enough to afford you a plane ticket to Europe.

Just think about that, right. So oftentimes, we think we don't have money for travel. But if we put it in our budget, and we understand how we're using the rest of our money, we can shift some of that money. And at the end of the month or a couple of months, we actually do have enough even to buy a plane ticket. One of my favorite money quotes, money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace You as the driver, so many of us have an attitude towards money where we aren't really Cognizant and aware of our attitudes about it.

But on a more basic level, we don't even know what we do with it, right. So we know that you do need money to travel, you can't travel without it. So it's important to start a travel savings account, I actually recommend that people have a savings account or some account that's dedicated just to funds that they put aside for travel. One way is to commit to a certain amount saved every month and use a separate savings or checking account. That's just for your travel funds. So you might want to start off small and save $5 a month, $10 a month, $20 a month.

Or you might want to look at a percentage of your expendable income, your leftover income every month and save that for travel. There are different ways to do it. Right. And there are all kinds of ways that you can set up those dedicated accounts. You can use online banks, there are many no Feed checking and savings accounts, credit unions are great. And you can go in and meet with the agents in person, but you want to have something dedicated just for your travel funds.

Another cool thing is that you can actually use technology. Now, two of my favorite tools are mint.com. And that's a money budgeting service or financial management service that actually looks at how you use your accounts. It looks at how many mochas you're buying a day or where your money is going and at what time of the month. And it really helps you to tighten up and make better budgets because sometimes we have aspirational budgets, but then they go all out the window because we spend our money in different ways than what we've written down. So mint.com actually looks at what you do every month that looks at how much money you're spending, how much you're bringing in, how much you're saving, and where it's going.

So I love that tool. And it helps me to see how much more I can actually start saving for travel. Another question This really great is digit is digit.co. And this automatically you link it to your bank account. And it automatically saves little amounts of money. Sometimes it might be a few cents $1 or a few dollars, depending on how aggressively you tell it to change and it takes it out in really small increments, so you hardly ever notice it.

But at the end of the month, sometimes you can have a couple of hundred dollars saved up through this app. Now, it used to be free and just about two months ago, they actually started charging a fee, which is $2 and 99 cents per month. I understand that for some people, you know, it might feel like a bait and switch it started off free and now there's a fee with it. I say that I still think that the amount of savings that I get with digit because it just takes it out automatically it again tracks or monitors my spending patterns and habits and C's were to take some money out to save it. So I really like those two tools. And you can use the money saved in the awareness raised about how you spend your money to put more money into travel.

So the other thing that's important for budgeting is actually coming up with a budget for your particular trip. Some people, what they do is they just book The airline tickets and booked the hotel or hostel or whatever, and then they just go, they don't necessarily think about how much they're going to spend on other expenses. And so it's really important to try to do a little bit of research so that again, back to those travel fears. One fear people have is that they might run out of money. Well, if you really try to come up with a budget, that's pretty accurate, you know, within the confines of what you might spend, then you actually will allay some of that fear because you know how much you will need. And so this is sort of an estimated budget, I put it a little higher than I think I would actually use on a two week trip to Costa Rica and so I'd put in there some airfare accommodation out I was thinking, staying at Airbnb and hostels and then food and drink thinking, you know, for that period of time I would be doing some cooking groceries, maybe some restaurants and then also water drinks and things like that.

And then depending on the activities, if I want to do some ecotourism stuff or natural spa yoga things or clean eating, whatever it is, you know, you want to think about how much those activities might cost and what you want to do. And then also in country transportation, you want to think about how much you're going to be walking versus public transportation or buses, private taxis, other private transportation services, and then miscellaneous items. Things like if you're going to stay for a while, do you need laundry or dry cleaning? Are you going to buy souvenirs? Sometimes we don't even budget for that. Any airport exit fees or anything like that?

So this is just a general idea of different things you want to think about the cost of for your travel. And then I always say it's a good idea to sort of pad the budget. So you you make the items more than you might actually spend, just so that you won't run out of money. So here's your budget 10 challenge, I want you to make a budget for one of the travel goals that you listed in the earlier challenge. So remember, you were to come up with some long term and short term travel goals. So I assume that one of the travel goals was to go to a specific destination.

So you should just make up a hypothetical budget including how much you know from your research you would pay for airfare, a kind of accommodations you want. Any type of eating entertainment activities, just make a rough budget so that you can start to think about how many lattes per day add up to the trip of your dreams. Good luck.