I love my sinking funds. The concept works for my mentality as I enjoy filling them up monthly and look forward to spending them. Spending my sinking funds makes me feel like I won a jackpot. It’s money available for me to spend without worrying about where it comes from or how to pay it back at the end of the month. My favourite sinking fund is the vacation fund as I enjoy vacationing and look forward to when vacationing is incorporated into my lifestyle as a staple and not just for a few weeks. I start filling up my vacation fund from January and as it builds up every month so does my excitement to vacation build up.
I have struggled with my budgeting in the last months so I’m applying new tools to help me stay on track. I typically do not budget track during vacation, I just spend then check at the end of the vacation and get surprised that I’m overspent. For this vacation, I’m using a new approach with a daily spend budget and I’m updating at end of day. It’s not a lot of work and does not reduce my vacation bliss but helps me have no anxiety on what I’m spending and how I’m tracking vs. the budget.
I know I’m a sucker for good food so the daily budget was mainly food based. I had the maximum spend for breakfast, lunch and dinner inclusive of tips and some extra for activities. I have updated the tracker for four days now and I’m like woahhhh!! Day 1 was the only day I was underspent as this was arrival day. I have consistently overspent the budget for the last 3 days and the overspending is escalating as I get more into vacation mood. The not surprising shocker is I’m eating my Money as the amounts spent on food in restaurants are staggering. The last time we vacationed here was in Summer 2019 and I worked with those prices at 1.5x but the reality is everything is now priced at 2.5x and above. This location is far from us and we don’t visit here regularly so I want to maximise the experience and enjoy our standing favourite restaurants which translates to increased cost for me vs. planned.
I don’t want to overspend my budget for this vacation and the daily tracking has indicated that I need to dial it back a bit for the remaining days we have here. I’m going to do this by ensuring we skip bottles of wine at lunchtime and only do that at dinner time if needed, switch up some of the booked 4 course dinners to light dinners and go with carafe water instead of nodding to Evian every time it’s offered. I do have time to turn around my spending and still have a great vacation. I’m not sad I ate my money so far but will be doing a choiceful eating for the remaining vacation days.