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How can you afford all these trips?


robbalvey

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Since this gets asked a lot, I decided I'll sticky the response I gave a little while ago.....

 

Where do you get all that money for all these trips? :shock:

Well, for we both have full time jobs. Two, we really don't spend any money on ANYTHING else but doing our trips. Seriously, almost all of our 'disposable' income gets put into the savings account and put towards our trips.

 

People think we bathe in money, but really we are your typical average family living off 'middle management' salaries. It's how we spend, or rather don't spend our money that allows us to do these trips. Think about it, we live in a conservative family home and we don't:

 

- drink

- smoke

- buy many DVDs

- buy many video games

- have a home theater system

- go to the movies

- go to concerts

- go to sporting events

- have monthly subscriptions to anything

- have credit card debt

- eat out (in restaurants) much

- go over our cell phone minutes

- have premium cable/satellite TV channels

- don't celebrate holiday's in the traditional fashion (instead of buying b-day, anniversary and xmas gifts for each other, we agree to put that money towards trips)

- don't have a car payment (If we can't pay cash for a car, we don't buy it)

 

Elissa doesn't:

- get her nails done

- get hair done

- buy jewelry

- buy purses

 

- what else am I leaving out that "normal" people do?

 

As much as we would like to do some of those things, we pick and choose things we want to do and trips almost always win out. Our spending budget is very tight and very limited which allows us to do these crazy trips more often.

 

For example, we haven't seen a movie in the movie theater in years. We assume the average couple sees one movie per month, which for us would be conservatively around $30 for two tickets, drinks, snacks, gas, parking. Cutting out going to the movies saves us about $400 per year which is about equal to a week's worth of hotel stay on a Florida trip. So we have to figure "would we rather sit in a dark room and watch a movie for a couple hours once a month, or spend a week in Florida?" If you see TWO movies a month, then that's airfare to Japan!

 

The only thing we spend any kind of money on, which ties into our trips, is video equipment and the website which the DVD sales help cover the costs, but they don't ever cover all of it.

 

So really, the answer to "where do you get all that money" is simple - we don't spend it on other things. The trips we do are not THAT expensive, especially when you consider that we usually share hotel & car rental costs with other people, look for the cheapest airfare as possible, and we hardly ever buy any souvenirs. (I think I bought ONE T-shirt on the entire Europe trip!)

 

Our goal with the group trips is to make trips that would normally seem "far fetched" to some people as affordable as possible.

 

It may take some savings to do one our group trips, yes, but not as much as I think some people would expect and we hope people get as much value out of them as we do!

 

--Robb "Wishes he had as much money as people seem to think we do!" Alvey

Edited by robbalvey
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I would like an address to send Elissa a dollar to buy a new purse.

 

Just kidding- but I'll be honest- all of us WERE wondering about the trips you take and how you are able to do it- that clears up a lot of questions that were rolling around in the back of my mind. It boils down to what's important to you and how you want to spend your money. It makes sense.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I do pretty much the same thing...funnel all my extra money into trips. I had a friend my age tell me "Wow, how can you afford to take a trip to Spain?!" And when I started saying "Well, I don't eat in restaurants very much, I shop in thrift stores, I don't shop recreationally..." it completely blew her mind that someone would be like that! She said that she buys a whole new wardrobe every year because she just can't stand to wear the same stuff she wore last year...that she buys new cars every few years because she gets tired of the current one...and then she went and spent $1200 on a new coffee table! Yet she still wonders why she has no money to spend on trips!

 

-Julie

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We've pretty much been like this since we met. I've always been pretty frugal thanks to my upbringing, and I helped Robb realize he didn't need to buy the latest DVD releases every week!

 

As for the travelling, it just depends what's going on. Keep in mind I was in College until Spring 2003, some years our jobs let us travel more or less, and sometimes we have personal stuff going on. Once we realized we had done so much of the US we knew we had to start branching out more!

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- what else am I leaving out that "normal" people do?

 

 

 

Go 300 to 500k into the hole on a house the day after their marriage. It blows my mind that people think that they need a palace the day they are married. I can only imagine what it must be like in CA.

 

Robb - You need to charge admission to this thread. This is valuable information.

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Since this gets asked a lot, I decided I'll sticky the response I gave a little while ago.....

 

Where do you get all that money for all these trips? :shock:

Well, for we both have full time jobs. Two, we really don't spend any money on ANYTHING else but doing our trips. Seriously, almost all of our 'disposable' income gets put into the savings account and put towards our trips.

 

People think we bathe in money, but really we are your typical average family living off 'middle management' salaries. It's how we spend, or rather don't spend our money that allows us to do these trips. Think about it, we live in a small one bedroom apartment and we don't:

 

- drink

- smoke

- buy many DVDs

- buy many video games

- have a home theater system

- go to the movies

- go to concerts

- go to sporting events

- have monthly subscriptions to anything

- have credit card debt

- eat out (in restaurants) much

- go over our cell phone minutes

- have premium cable/satellite TV channels

- don't celebrate holiday's in the traditional fashion (instead of buying b-day, anniversary and xmas gifts for each other, we agree to put that money towards trips)

- buy new computers (all our computers were bought used or refurb)

- don't have a car payment (If we can't pay cash for a car, we don't buy it)

 

Elissa doesn't:

- get her nails done

- get hair done

- buy jewelry

- buy purses

 

- what else am I leaving out that "normal" people do?

 

As much as we would like to do some of those things, we pick and choose things we want to do and trips almost always win out. Our spending budget is very tight and very limited which allows us to do these crazy trips more often.

 

For example, we haven't seen a movie in the movie theater since Shrek 2 and before that is was the original Spider-Man. We assume the average couple sees one movie per month, which for us would be conservatively around $30 for two tickets, drinks, snacks, gas, parking. Cutting out going to the movies saves us about $400 per year which is about equal to a week's worth of hotel stay on a Florida trip. So we have to figure "would we rather sit in a dark room and watch a movie for a couple hours once a month, or spend a week in Florida?" If you see TWO movies a month, then that's airfare to Japan!

 

The only thing we spend any kind of money on, which ties into our trips, is video equipment and the website which the DVD sales help cover the costs, but they don't ever cover all of it.

 

So really, the answer to "where do you get all that money" is simple - we don't spend it on other things. The trips we do are not THAT expensive, especially when you consider that we usually share hotel & car rental costs with other people, look for the cheapest airfare as possible, and we hardly ever buy any souvenirs. (I think I bought ONE T-shirt on the entire Europe trip!)

 

Our goal with the group trips is to make trips that would normally seem "far fetched" to some people as affordable as possible.

 

It may take some savings to do one our group trips, yes, but not as much as I think some people would expect and we hope people get as much value out of them as we do!

 

--Robb "Wishes he had as much money as people seem to think we do!" Alvey

 

 

 

 

 

HOW

THE

HELL

DO

YOU

SURVIVE!?!?!?!?

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LOL...

 

Rent here sucks, but it has nothing to do with living near a Theme Park.

 

Down in Los Angeles it would be worse, but Valencia is a nice rapidly growing community so it's getting more and more expensive here as well.

 

In our Complex, 1 Bedrooms start at $1250, 2 Bedrooms start around $1700. It's pretty much the same all over Valencia if you want one of the newer, nicer complexes.

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We got in just in time, I guess. Back in 1998 when we bought our three bedroom/two bath house in Camarillo, it was $195K. Today, we could sell it for $550-600K. Our monthly mortgage is about $1650.

 

However, the market seems to be cooling, so who knows what'll happen?

 

Eric

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  • 1 month later...

Hey Robb,

How do you go about getting the best discounts and special prices at some of the smaller parks you vist? I mean, with Six Flags and Cedar Fair, it is easy with an annual pass, but what about individual parks? Just wondering because I was hoping to do a cross-country trip soon, possibly in 2007.

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