Money Musings 💭 Are you dreaming of more ✈️ ⛱ 🏔
Do you have travel on your mind?
A recent survey shows that Americans’ top goal for 2022 is to take a vacation. And it makes sense. So many of us are overdue - way overdue - myself included.
If you are making up for lost time, I’ve got you covered. If you’ve already been traveling and haven’t put together a budget, that’s okay too. It’s always better to start.
Over the next three weeks, I’m going to walk you through how to budget for travel, step by step.
When I mapped out all the trips - big and small - I plan to take this year, the list was longer than usual. Honestly, after not traveling much for two years, having any trip on the list felt like a big deal!
Plus, travel costs are up! When I started to look at prices for flights and hotels, I definitely had sticker shock and had to adjust some plans.
But despite the higher prices, there is good news.
If you are looking to reduce the amount you are spending on travel, I have an exercise that will help you do that without giving up the parts of the trip that bring you joy.
More good news?
The further in advance we start setting aside money for something, the easier it is on us (yes, please! 🙋♀️). If you haven’t ever made a travel budget, you’re going to wonder why you weren’t doing this all along.
Head to the money move this week for step #1!
MONEY MOVE OF THE WEEK
MAKE A TRAVEL BUDGET - PART #1 - MAP OUT YOUR TRIPS.
This first step is really fun. Studies show that planning (and dreaming up) our vacation actually provides the biggest boost to our happiness (even more so than the vacation itself!).
Map out your travel. What travel do you have planned (or want to have planned) over the next twelve months? If you have a more expensive (bucket-list type trip) in the next couple of years, you might want to add that to the list to start saving sooner rather than later. Don’t forget to include weddings or bachelor parties where you will be traveling and even weekend getaways. I like to include the month the trip is happening as well.
Then estimate the cost. I use the word estimate very purposefully. It’s better to estimate and be off (which we will be!) versus not plan at all.
Go through and add up the cost of each trip you have planned. The flights (don’t forget to include transportation to and from the airport or parking at the airport), rental cars, hotels, meals, activities, shopping, and anything else you can think of. Add it all in there.Then, add it all up (per trip and a grand total).
Great work! If this total isn’t workable, I’ll help you decrease the cost (without reducing your fun) next week.
YOU GOTTA SEE THIS
NON-PROMOTABLE LABOR HOLDS WOMEN BACK.
You’ve heard me talk about the unpaid labor women do at home.Quick reminder - In the U.S. women perform 4 hours of unpaid labor per day compared with men’s 2.5 hours. That’s almost 11 extra hours per week, 45 hours per month, and 550 hours per year.
What would you give for an extra 11 hours per week? 😡
Well, guess what? That’s not the only place women are doing extra work.
Women are doing more “non-promotable work” in the workplace. Non-promotable work is a term coined by Laurie Weingart and Lise Vesterlund for work that does not advance their careers.
From Emma Hinchcliffe - “They found that women are 44% more likely to be asked by male managers to perform non-promotable tasks, and 50% more likely to say yes. Women and men have internalized a “shared expectation” that women will be the ones to take on these jobs.”
What is non-promotable work? It includes office housework like taking notes in a meeting or planning a coworkers goodbye party but can also mean handling a low revenue client, mentoring a junior employee or creating slides for someone else to present.
What do we do about it? It has to be a multiple pronged approach. For the time being, women can become aware and work to spend more time doing promotable work (they wrote a book to help us do that).
The more long-term solution is for employers and managers to change how they distribute non-promotable work to be more equitable (because it’s not going away).
They also need to understand the value in it. A lot of the non-promotable work women are doing is REALLY valuable to companies and should be treated that way.