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There are a million options from state parks to church camps to family members. I mean, when my wife and I were stone cold broke with small children, we drove five hours to the mountains and camped by a lake. We borrowed my brother's tent and camp stove, threw food in the cooler, and enjoyed 4-5 days in the woods. It was basically three tanks of gas, some groceries, and the park admission. I think, all told, we spend $200.
Location: We_tside PNW (Columbia Gorge) / CO / SA TX / Thailand
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sundaydrive00
Where are you getting the $35 car and the free fuel?
I buy my cars from towing auctions (often they are selling cars from 'donated agencies' so often nothing wrong with them ... Pet Shelter / Salvation Army, churches, Public Broadcasting...) Our local towing companies sell 100+ cars / week. Cheap, very cheap. (i have accumulated a LOT of spares, and like SWA (southwest airlines) I run ONE variety of vehicle where the engine and drivetrain are 100% portable across all models for 24 yrs! Only 4 hrs and you can swap engine and tranny into a 'new' chassis / vehicle.
Diesels are not picky what they burn... they were invented to run on Peanut oil, not diesel fuel (was not available at the time).
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Originally Posted by submart
You are right! Dogs are amazing, but they are expensive if you plan to travel without them. Lots of places (i.e. national parks) don't allow dogs. Leaving a dog at home like you said costs $40-50 a night. For some that might not be a lot of money, but for others it is.
My farm dogs are quite happy (prefer) to stay home alone. Neighbor stops by 2-3x a week or so to make sure everything is ok.
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Originally Posted by kapikap
Vacations can be had for very cheap.
I've done it ,with a family of 4 ,for $600 per week. One needs to plan according to a strict budget.
... Finding a average hotel,with a good pool and maybe a kitchen ,in orlando,is not that expensive. $80 per night is doable. Doing groceries ...
Or even a week at the beach. Stay at a hotel 10 minutes ...Fill the cooler for the day. Sand and water is all you need.
We have used Guest homes for 30+ yrs. $ free (Servas.org, since 1947) to $20 / night WW. 10 days lodging < $200 (for entire family, usually includes 1 - 2 meals / day) https://wikitravel.org/en/Hospitality_exchange
Food... groceries... Buy 'culls / bruised' produce at grocery store about 6AM, often it is free. No need for bread (often is free if outdated), we use lettuce for sandwich wraps. (free if bruised or wilted)
Quote:
Originally Posted by MinivanDriver
There are a million options from state parks to church camps to family members. I mean, when my wife and I were stone cold broke with small children, ...I think, all told, we spend $200.
Good report...
As a family we often did 'volunteer gigs' (work weekend at a church camp, or on a farm...) A Little work and a LOT of fun. We stayed at a sailing camp on an island for 6 months doing odd jobs (as a family). That was EZ and fun and CHEAP!
I'm very well aware that going on a vacation doesn't necessarily have to cost a lot of money, but if you travel and stay at hotels and eat out, it's still going to cost a good chunk of money.
This summer I won't be taking a vacation because I can't afford it these days. I used to every summer for many years, travel internationally. But not this time.
Which is fine, I'm a homebody anyways and I'll use that free time to play videogames and study courses online.
I’m a firm believer that if something is important enough to us, we will find the time and the money to make it happen. It’s called sacrifice. Sometimes we have to give up one thing to get another. I’ve had to do it my entire life.
When our kids were growing up, we did the same, went camping, rented a vacation place for a week or visited relatives. We would, maybe spend a night of two in a inexpensive motel and would eat a few meals out. There were a few trips to amusement parks but not many. Now days families think of vacations as a week in a resort area, a cruise, an airline place ride, etc. No wonder they can not afford to vacation. Not everything in life is fair or equal.
This resonates to an extent. My ex and I were avid campers and hikers in the mountainous destinations that surround the Inland Empire of Eastern Washington state. The only difference was that we quickly gave up on tenting and purchased a used pop-top camper, which turned out to be a life-saver and in the long-run, it cut our costs enormously. From the Tri-Cities (Richland, Kennewick and Pasco, WA) we visited the Olympic Peninsula, the Cascades in WA and OR, Northern Idaho, the Rockies in Wyoming, Montana and Canada and Coastal OR and WA. We even spent time in the Colorado Rockies.
As others have said, it's partly a matter of financial priorities and partly knowing how to economize. I had 4 siblings and never took a plane flight till I was 16 (and then I paid for it myself, from Columbus, Ohio to Canton-Akron). We rented a very large cabin at Cook Forest, PA every summer with Mom's extended family. In retrospect it was a lot more work for the women- little, tiny kitchen, laundry facilities were in the next town for many years till they installed a laundromat by the cabins (and this was before disposable diapers)... but we have so many pictures and memories from those trips. Later my family would drive overnight from Ohio to the Outer Banks and rent a house on the beach- it wasn't too expensive back then. No hotels. No planes. No theme parks.
I YEARNED to go to Europe but it wasn't in the budget. Two years into my first job out of college, I made my first trip, to London and Paris. My coworkers joked that it must be nice- but I was single, lived in a 1-BR apartment, drove a POS car (1973 AMC Hornet) I'd bought used....I'd wanted to go to Europe and was willing to cut back in other areas to do it. My second DH and I also made it a priority and all the loyalty points I was racking up from business travel helped. No fancy cars (for 10 years we had ONE car in the household), bought less house than we could afford, DH was retired and bought most of his clothes at off-price places. We also kept costs down by picking up stuff for meals at local grocery stores in our travels- didn't have a lot of restaurant meals either traveling or at home and almost never the "fine dining" type.
While I believe there's a segment of the population that truly can't afford to go someplace for vacation, I think that for others it just isn't a financial priority (i.e. they're spending the money on other "wants") or they have an overblown idea of what a vacation should include and for them, that level of vacation truly is unaffordable.
As others have said, it's partly a matter of financial priorities and partly knowing how to economize. I had 4 siblings and never took a plane flight till I was 16 (and then I paid for it myself, from Columbus, Ohio to Canton-Akron). We rented a very large cabin at Cook Forest, PA every summer with Mom's extended family. In retrospect it was a lot more work for the women- little, tiny kitchen, laundry facilities were in the next town for many years till they installed a laundromat by the cabins (and this was before disposable diapers)... but we have so many pictures and memories from those trips. Later my family would drive overnight from Ohio to the Outer Banks and rent a house on the beach- it wasn't too expensive back then. No hotels. No planes. No theme parks.
I YEARNED to go to Europe but it wasn't in the budget. Two years into my first job out of college, I made my first trip, to London and Paris. My coworkers joked that it must be nice- but I was single, lived in a 1-BR apartment, drove a POS car (1973 AMC Hornet) I'd bought used....I'd wanted to go to Europe and was willing to cut back in other areas to do it. My second DH and I also made it a priority and all the loyalty points I was racking up from business travel helped. No fancy cars (for 10 years we had ONE car in the household), bought less house than we could afford, DH was retired and bought most of his clothes at off-price places. We also kept costs down by picking up stuff for meals at local grocery stores in our travels- didn't have a lot of restaurant meals either traveling or at home and almost never the "fine dining" type.
While I believe there's a segment of the population that truly can't afford to go someplace for vacation, I think that for others it just isn't a financial priority (i.e. they're spending the money on other "wants") or they have an overblown idea of what a vacation should include and for them, that level of vacation truly is unaffordable.
Is going to the Outer Banks for vacation an Ohio thing? My family camped there for years until my parents purchased a double lot and a very 1960s mobile home (no air conditioning!) on an island near Morehead City, N.C. We used to see so many other Ohio license plates there. In the days when the county was still listed on the bottom of Ohio tags, we kids used to play a modified version of the "license plate game" by listing the plate counties. Think that our record was sixty-three out of eighty-eight.
Mom always said that she enjoyed camping more than staying at the trailer as the trailer just meant a vacation away from Ohio--not from housework! For me, though, staying at the trailer was a lot of fun as I basically had the run of a island that was connected to the mainland by a drawbridge. We towed a boat down with us from up north, so we used to go clamming and trawling; take the boat out to Cape Lookout and fish from a nearby dock. We ate most of our meals at the trailer, but we would also sometimes go out to local seafood restaurants that catered to families. This was the eighties, so by then there were a few nearby attractions to visit like an aquarium, Fort Macon, the U.S.S. North Carolina, and a water slide park. Mostly, though, vacation for us was about being away from home--not about constant and costly entertainment.
On the way back home, we'd often stop along the way to visit other places such as D.C., the RJ Reynolds cigarette factory outside of Winston-Salem (don't think that *that* would fly nowadays, lol), Mt. Pilot, etc. We'd always stop to spend the night in Wytheville, VA as it was the half-way point between the island and home.
Going to Disney World was a rarity in the time and place in which I was raised--not the rite/right of childhood that it's become. My parents could have financially swung a trip, but none of us were really interested in going. Disney hadn't yet become the multilevel marketing behemoth that it now is (and the Disney channel was not a part of basic cable), so it wasn't on our radar to begin with. No one we knew took cruises like people do now with their families except for one senior neighbor who went to the Bahamas as part of a church tour group. There is no way that my parents would have dropped five hundred dollars on an added "swimming with the dolphins" experience even if we had gone on a cruise as a family, either.
I didn't step onto a airplane until I was sixteen and went to France for the first time. My parents were well off by the standards of where I was raised, but they were largely frugal--traits that were passed along to their three children, which is a large part of the reason why I was able to travel quite a bit when I was young and not making a lot of bank.
Outside of the trips to France that my mother took with her students, my parents didn't travel internationally until after my father had retired and had discovered the wonders of the internet and Priceline.com. The money that he made from his post-retirement substitute teaching gigs paid for their traveling adventures.
These days, given the demands of house and work, I limit my travel to where I can go in my car for a long weekend on the cheap, but there are many fun and relatively inexpensive options that fit that bill from my location here in Pittsburgh. For me, it's all about priorities. Being frugal in most areas of my life means that I can afford other luxuries that are important to me, i.e., I can have it all--just not all at once.
I guess that my point is, is that many Americans can afford to take vacations--they just cannot afford to take the vacations that they feel that they are entitled to take.
Last edited by Formerly Known As Twenty; 04-29-2019 at 08:01 AM..
Only 39 million can't afford it? With over 200 million Americans? I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of Americans can afford summer vacations, actually.
Exactly what I was thinking. That's a much better number then I would guess. And it's right around 330 million right now... not 200.
And no, bringing them on vacation was not an option, since the point was to do things that we normally could not do because of pet duties. A weekend away with them was nice sometimes, but not a real or prolonged vacation from the routine.
I've brought my little dogs on vacation four times. In a new place, they panicked every time I left the hotel. Who wants to hear my dogs barking? My oldest has diabetes and needs an insulin injection every 12 hours. The insulin needs to be refrigerated at the right temperature.
Really, vacations seem like more work than relaxation for me.
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The money that he made from his post-retirement substitute teaching gigs paid for their traveling adventures. 
