I have posted in the past about some issues my wife and I dealing with, and most of the big ones are “over the hump”. At least, I think they are. Probably the last big one deals with vacations. The basic problem is she talks about where she wants to go and I worry about paying for it.
This is another example of the difference between our families and how we were raised. My parents weren’t that interested in tracel and also probably couldn’t pay for a lot of travelling either. My wife’s family (particularly my FIL) loves to travel and have many happy memories of trips. They were also lucky enough for a decade or so to have the use of a condo her grandfather owned. So they could afford to do more than their budgets would otherwise have allowed.
The way it works now is my lovely wife tells me about a great trip that would be just fabulous, I make a face (inadvertantly) and try not to ask immediately how much it costs. This does not make for domestic harmony. What’s the best solution to this situation?
We have been on a couple cruises and I had a good time. But, in the back of my mind, is a total of the $$ I see everywhere. This kind of thing happens a lot, in much smaller scale. She “makes” me go to a festival or concert or something, and I grumble a bit but I usually have a good time. But trying to find $5000 to go to a Sandals resort seems just irresponsible to me, aside from the fact that it’s impossible.
I highly recommend what my husband and I do: road trips. We went to New Orleans for our anniversary in November and the whole trip, including food, souvenirs, and hotel, was just over $1000. And we had a blast.
I would love to take a cruise, but quite frankly, they aren’t cost effective for us. We aren’t close to the ocean (we are in Oklahoma), so we would have to drive or fly to wherever the boat is leaving from.
If I were you, I would sit down with her, and figure out just what it is you both want from a vacation. Do you just want to get away from people and stress? Go camping or hiking, even for a day on the weekend. Do you want to go to a big city and see the sights? Go on the off season, and be prepared to haggle hotel prices.
Set your big vacations 1-2 years in advance, and then start setting aside the money for it. Six months or so from the date, start firming your reservations and try to pre-pay as much as possible before the trip. You’ll probably want to look into traveler’s insurance if it’s not too expensive. When the trip comes, you’re less likely to think about how much it costs when you’re not constantly filling up your credit card or passing out traveler’s checks.
We’re going to Costa Rica this November, and we’ll start paying for it in July. We have to have the trip completely paid for 10 weeks before the departure date (we’re going with an adventure travel company).
Good ideas all. But my response is, why don’t we put a little aside and in a couple years remodel the kitchen? New landscaping? Re pave the driveway? More replacement windows?
I don’t really care if we go on a vacation or not is the real problem. My problem. I need yto learn to not grimace when I hear the word “vacation”.
[QUOTE=DaddyTimesTwo]
Good ideas all. But my response is, why don’t we put a little aside and in a couple years remodel the kitchen? New landscaping? Re pave the driveway? More replacement windows?QUOTE]
Because vacations are important to her. She probably enjoys the fact that you two are creating shared memories, seeing new things for the first time together, and enjoying each other in a place where she can forget about the daily toil of life. I don’t know her, so I’m just guessing at her motives, but I think that it’s probably not about staying at a specific resort and doing a specific thing.
Would she be open to compromise - pick a less expensive vacation, but still have that time together? Maybe you can not grimace because she’s actually giving you a compliment - she really wants to spend time with you and have adventures with you.
The best solution is compromise. You work on not making that face (I know it’s hard; I do the same thing about some of the foods Dr.J likes, but it’s well worth at least making the effort), she comes up with smaller-scale suggestions, and you both look at the budget together to see how and when you can make it happen. Most importantly, neither of you grumble. She doesn’t grumble about not going to Sandals, and you don’t grumble about the money. Nothing kills the spirit of working together as a loving team like a bunch of pissing and moaning.
Figure out what it is that she likes most about the trips she proposes, and how you can get the same sort of thing cheaper. She wants some pampering? Go to a spa and B&B within a day’s drive of home. She wants sun and surf? Go to the beach during the off-season and stay somewhere cheap. She just wants to break out of the routine for a while? Follow Lirogue’s suggestion and road-trip with a big cooler of drinks, snacks, and sandwich stuff. Drive around seeing the sights of your own state or the ones nearby. Set your own pace and decide where to go and what to do on a day-to-day basis.
I don’t mean to stomp on any toes, but it seems to me like the vacations aren’t the big problem here at all. The big problem seems to be that you haven’t fully integrating compromise and effective conflict resolution into your repertoire yet, and until you do, fairly minor things like where to go on vacation are going to keep on blowing up into huge issues.
Here’s my suggestion. Set up a separate trip account and make regular deposits. Never ever look at this account. Don’t ever think about this money; think of it like the taxes and social security that gets taken out of your paycheck. Give her full control over this account, and give her the responsiblity of planning and paying for the vacations. She never needs to tell you how much it costs, and because you never really “had” this money to begin with, you don’t have to worry about what happens to it.
It’s hard, but remember that this is important to her. I am in your wife’s shoes. I value travel as part of experiencing life, but my husband isn’t quite so keen on it. Money is a means to an end, and once the basics of food, shelter, etc. are met, the end should be happiness and fulfillment, whether it’s a restaurant grade kitchen or memorable trip.
Good suggestions, all but this. There’s nothing quite as depressing as traveling to a beach location and having it be too cold/windy/raining to do what you wanted to do there in the first place. Then the wife hates the husband for being “too cheap” to go there when it’s warm.
My wife and I had some of the same issues in the past. Basically, I caved. Completely. The key here was that my wife takes care of all the finances, and we had just gotten out of our “get into a boatload of debt buying shit we can’t afford” stage, and we didn’t want to get back into trouble, so she was very good about planning trips that we could afford. A weekend here, a weekend there, and it ended up being a heck of a lot of fun, and eventually I learned to relax a bit and just enjoy myself.
A thing doesn’t have to be tangible to be worthwhile. The stories I have to tell from the unfortunately small amount of travel I’ve done are some of my most valued possessions.
I wouldn’t trade my memories of the view from the hilltops in the Cinque Terre, or of the feeling I got playing poker in the Mirage poker room, or of getting drunk with my wife in a New Orleans storefront on New Year’s Eve, for all the replacement windows in the world.
I’m not saying that travel is that worthwhile for everyone, but when you start looking at every dollar you spend as either an investment or a waste, you have to ask yourself if you’re missing out on a lot of what life has to offer. We make money to live, not to have valuable things.
Well, actually, lv, when the off-season is depends a lot on which beach you’re looking at. We went to Key West during early June, which was the cheaper part of the year (our trip overlapped the first few days of hurricane season). Here in North Carolina, we have reliably nice beach weather up until early October, but the prices drop sharply after Labor Day. I shudder to think of going to a New England beach between September and May, but to be perfectly honest New England isn’t exactly what I think when I hear the word “beach”.