Adventures in Debt

Welcome back to me! Yes dear readers, I’ve returned from my week-long vacation in Vancouver, and I’m feeling refreshed and ready to tackle my financial situation again. Aside from this nasty cold that I seem to have developed while there (I blame the air conditioning and jet lag for that, not the wonderful city of Vancouver), I had a wonderful time.  How is it that I was able to travel 4500 km and back while being frugal? Here’s how:

1. Wait for a great deal on plane tickets.
2. Save up money for that rainy day trip.

I had already spoken to my friends who live there about the possibility of coming for a visit, so that if I was able to find a deal on a plane ticket, I could simply buy it without waiting to hear from them. And in mid-March, there it was: a 50% off deal for a plane ticket to Vancouver. That works out to $179 each way, and with taxes and fees, that came out to $470. That is an incredible deal! Most of the time it costs much more than that to fly within Canada. As usual, domestic flights cost more than international ones, although in this case I was able to find that deal. How did I do that? Well, I subscribe to the e-newsletter for two airlines, Air Canada and WestJet, and every Wednesday they send it out. There are always deals to be had, I’m just not usually looking for them. So I dipped into my Travel savings account and pulled out the $470 that was required.

Next up was spending money for the trip. I had actually already saved about $700 in my travel fund, as that was for my trip to Italy next year. However since I have a whole 12+ months to save up for that, I decided to use the money now for the trip to Vancouver. After taking the money out for the plane ticket, I had two more months to save up some extra cash. By the time my departure time arrived, I had almost $400 saved up for the trip!

So off I went to Vancouver.

Here I am at the Cleveland Dam, on a very spooky, foggy night.

By keeping my eyes open for deals, and saving some money, I was able to go to the other side of the country on vacation, and not have to go further in debt. Now that’s the way to do it.