Writing – Maps and Meanderings

Planning to Travel Pt 2 – Being Intentional About Saving

Published on June 9, 2020November 16, 2020 by Meaghan Elizabeth

Last week I talked about how travel doesn’t just happen. It takes planning, and intentionality. I shared a bit about how I learned about the importance of being intentional in planning and saving for travel if it is something that you are interested in doing. If you missed that post, I would recommend checking it out here before you continue.

Today I want to look at 6 steps I’ve used to make regular travel saving a part of my budget. I’m not a financial expert in anyway, and these steps are in no way exhaustive, or the only way to go about creating a plan. But I hope that these steps might help you to find the time and money to include travel in your life.

Books on a Map — Books on a map. Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay

Step #1: Do you actually want to Travel?

I can already hear you saying “Of course I want to travel, I’m here aren’t I?” But before you skip past this step, I want you to take a few minutes to really think about it. Do you really want to make the time and save the funds required for travel? Or do you just think that you want to travel, or that you should want to travel?

These days it can seem like travel is something that everyone does, or wishes they were doing. But it is okay for travel to not be one of your priorities. It is okay to read travel blogs, and follow travel pages on instagram or Pinterest, and not want to travel yourself. Maybe there are other things you would prefer to spend your resources on, and that is okay.

We don’t have unlimited resources. And this means we need to prioritize and make decisions about where we want to spend the resources we have. And this applies just as much to non-monetary resources such as time and energy. If travel isn’t something you want to prioritize, then you won’t follow through on the changes you would need to make to save and plan for travel. So take the time to truly think about this step. And keep reading, because you can use the following tips to save for and explore your preferred activities.

Step #2 – Take a look at your Time

It’s important to recognize that time is as much, or more, of a limited resource as money. Think about how much time you could set aside for travel or exploration, as well has how much time you want to set aside for travel. You might be lucky enough to have 5 weeks of vacation time, but that doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily want to spend all that time on travel. Consider also how you may be able to make use of long weekends for travel and exploring.

While you’re looking at your potential vacation time and long weekends, you’ll also need to consider other activities or obligations already slotted into those times. Christmas, for instance, might be a time of year where you have time off, but it may not be time that is free to dedicate to travel.

Also keep in mind that you’re going to need to consider your time and money alongside each other to determine how much you can travel. Quitting your job might give you seemingly infinite time to travel, but it’s going to seriously reduce the budget you have for travel.

Step #3: Take a look at your Budget

I will admit, this is typically the least exciting part of the process, but it is also one of the most necessary steps. And it’s important that you take the time to do it with care. You need to have a complete understanding of your budget before you can decide whether some of it can be put aside for travel savings. I’m not going to go into detail here about setting up a general budget, but if you have not done this before, there are many good articles and tips only a Google search away.

For our purposes you will be looking at the money you have in miscellaneous, or more discretionary fund categories. Your landlord isn’t going to like it if you decide to slash your rent budget by $100 a month, for instance. I want you to figure out how much money you have in these categories and then write down exactly where that money goes every month. You need to be precise. This won’t work if you just write down $200 for miscellaneous spending.

Write down everything from clothes shopping, to Netflix, to your morning coffee purchases. If your miscellaneous category varies, then maybe track it for a couple months. Write down exactly how you spend the money that’s not going directly into non-negotiable bills or long-term savings and emergency funds. This step is tedious, but it’s what will allow you to figure out where you can save in the next step.

Step # 4: Find places where you can save

Okay, so you’ve analyzed your budget and figured out exactly where your money is going, now you can start to figure out where you can cut expenses to start to save for your future travels. How much you can save regularly will determine what types of trips you can take and how often, along with how long it will take you to save for each trip.

What if you made your coffee at home everyday? How much could you save? Write it down. How much would you save if you only buy one coffee out a week? You might be surprised at how much you can save just making this one change. Maybe you spend $50 on dining out each week. If you were to cut that back to every other week, you could save $100 a month. That’s $1200 a year! Think of the travel you could put that towards.

Continue going through your list until you’ve written down all the possible places you could save. Is this number higher or lower than you expected? If this number is more than you want to save for travel, then go ahead and add some of those things you cut back into your budget. If it’s lower than you would like, then you can try to go back in and cut more things, but make sure you’re realistic here. It’s better to save at a slower pace than to make cuts that aren’t going to work for you.

It’s one thing to say that you’re going to cut out all dining, but if that’s something you love, you aren’t going to be happy cutting it out completely. The goal here is not to make saving for travel painful. You have to figure out what saving plan is going to work for you. If you can’t imagine cutting out your daily coffee, then don’t cut out your coffee budget! I’m not kidding. Find the things to cut back that work for you.

Pennies out of a jar. Image by Olya Adamovich from Pixabay

Step #5: Set up your Travel Savings Bucket

Once you have a monthly figure, break it down into the frequency of your pay schedule. In general, it’s easier to save consistently if you put aside the amount immediately off your pay. Personally, I work within a looser budget, and my spending categories aren’t always strictly regulated. But I took the time to figure out how to make this work for me, and how much I could save per pay. And I make sure to put that money into my travel savings as soon as I get paid.

You need to have somewhere to put this money you’re saving. My bank has a savings account type that’s free to setup and free of expenses and I have two of them – one of which is dedicated to travel. Maybe for you this means envelopes of cash, or a travel jar. My only suggestion would be that this should be separate from your regular, daily banking account. Because if it stays in your main account, you’re going to spend it.

If, after a couple months, you find that your new budget cuts aren’t working, then reduce your savings amount. It’s better to find something you can stick with consistently then to constantly dip into it because you’re putting aside more than you can handle. And if something comes up one month and you really can’t afford to save for travel, that’s okay too. It makes no sense to go into debt to “save” for travel.

Step #5(b): Alternative Option

If putting aside a set amount of money from each pay doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean you can’t save for travel. Another option might be to have a monthly budget category for your discretionary expenses and roll any leftover money at the end of the month into your travel savings. Or maybe you use a “loose change” method, where you dump all loose change into a jar each week.

Neither of these methods have worked that well for me, but the point is to find the money to travel in a way that works for you. The key is to be intentional. If you’re intentional about your approach, then you’ll see your travel budget start to grow over time.

Step #6: Start to Dream

You might think that this step should be higher on the list, but hear me out. In my experience, dreaming about a big trip and then seeing the price tag for it before you’ve established your travel savings plan, is just as likely to make you overwhelmed as it is to encourage you to save. You’ll see the price tag and your immediate reaction will be that there’s no way you’ll be able to come up with that kind of money in this lifetime.

But, if you’ve gone through all the previous steps, you now have a realistic idea of how much you can save in a month, a year, or 5 years. You can now look at that big ticket trip with a better understanding of how long it would take to save for it. You might still decide it’s too expensive, but you’ll be making an informed decision. And maybe you’ll discover that your dream trip is actually possible. Saving for 3, or even 5 years, might not seem like that long if you thought it would never be possible.

That’s why, in my opinion, it is better to have a full understanding of your potential for saving before you start to dream of the trips you want to take. Remember, you can always go back and increase or decrease your savings goals as you figure out your travel dreams. Maybe the trips that you want to take cost less than you imagined, and you can take more trips on your budget than you thought, or lower your monthly savings. Or maybe you decide that your dream trip is worth packed lunches for a year.

(Side Note: I am a big fan of dreaming and planning trips that I know I probably won’t ever be able to take. So I am 100% not saying to stop thinking about dream trips… but you don’t need a budget when you’re fantasy travelling.)

Step #7 (Bonus Step) – Brainstorm new ways to find money

I hesitated to include this step, because I want this to be a post about finding the resources to travel with in the budget that you already have. I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to believe that I’m already busy enough without needing to find an additional stream of income to be able to travel.

But I decided to put it out there as something to consider.

Perhaps you have found that what you can save is not going to get you on the trips you want to go on in the time period that you want. If this is the case, you might consider brainstorming an additional income stream. Perhaps you can pick up a part time job. I had a colleague once who picked up shifts at a movie theatre so that he and his wife could afford to go on a cruise. Or maybe you’re crafty and can start to sell some of your creations. There are many ways that you could pad out your travel budget if you so choose.

Final Thoughts

If you have ever been frustrated with thoughts that travel isn’t possible for you, I hope that what you take away from this post is that budgeting and planning to travel doesn’t just happen. It takes planning, and intentionality. It might take time and patience, but if it’s something you really want to do, it is may be more possible than you initially thought.

And if travel saving isn’t possible for you right now, I hope you’ll still stick around. You can enjoy reading travel posts, and dreaming about travel, even if you never plan to travel. And, as I mentioned in my travel story, travel and exploring isn’t just about the “big” trips. Sometimes it’s about a tank of gas and a bit of research into free, or low cost destinations close to home. I’m just as interested in exploring that type of travel here.

How do you budget for travel? How do you fit travel and exploring into your life?

Until next time,

The Thing About Fear – Acknowledging the Fears that Stop Us

Published on May 5, 2020November 16, 2020 by Meaghan Elizabeth

Fear. There is a lot of fear in the world right now surrounding Covid-19. There are direct fears related to the illness itself, as well as fears that have arisen as a by-product of the pandemic. The economy. Jobs. People’s mental health and emotional well-being. Education. Toilet paper, yeast, and hair cuts. And the list of fears goes on. It can feel like we are trapped in a hamster wheel of fear with no apparent way to escape.

In thinking about these fears, I started thinking about the other fears that we face throughout our lives, and the ways that those fears can impact our lives. Some fears are big, and life changing in big, immediately apparent ways. Others are small, and we can learn how to move past them in a relatively short amount of time. Most fall somewhere in between. And sometimes it’s the fears that are easy to overlook, or easiest to justify, that have the greatest potential to keep us from moving forward.

Fear is a natural response to something that we see as dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. At it’s most basic, fear is an emotion that exists to keep us safe. It’s what tells us that we should be careful near that cliff, and that we shouldn’t get too close to that bear. But I think that sometimes fear gets it wrong. Our fears don’t always tell the whole truth. Sometimes our fear overacts to the situation. And sometimes our fears tell outright lies.

How do you define “Safe”

Sarah Rhea Werner, the host of the Write Now podcast has a recent episode about fear that I found to be very helpful. In this episode, she passes along information and advice about fear that she received. She talks about fear being a response intended to keep us safe, but she suggests that sometimes the trouble comes from the way in which our fear defines “safe.” Sometimes fear defines safe as comfortable.

Writing that blog post. Starting that Podcast. Going out for that promotion. Pursuing your “big” dream. These are all things that require us to move out of our comfort zone. They require us to face risks and yes, they can cause us to face the potential of pain. But these things do not typically put us at risk of actual harm. (I acknowledge that there are situations where these things might put us at risk of harm and still be good things, but I am going to focus on the general here).

The risks we face in these situations are more along the lines of the risk of failure. Or of being criticized, or ridiculed. There are risks in opening ourselves up and being vulnerable. There is risk in stepping out of our comfort zone to pursue the thing that simultaneously excites and terrifies us. Chances are that writing that blog post is not going to cause me actual harm. But our fear wants to keep us safe and comfortable. And that means sticking with what we know.

This type of fear is easy to give in to and accept. Because of that, these fears have a great deal of potential to hold us back and stop us from trying new things. And here’s the thing. Sometimes when fear stops us from doing something, it can actually cause us pain or lead to us being hurt in a different way. Fear of stepping out in relationships can save us from being hurt by other people, but can cause us loneliness and sadness.

I have let fear stop me from doing many things over the course of my life. Fear has stopped me from talking to people I wanted to meet. It has stopped me from going out for the worship team at my church. It has stopped me from applying to jobs that I wanted and was qualified for, but that felt too big and scary.

Fear has stopped me from pursuing my writing dreams. I am afraid of failing. I am afraid that people won’t like what I create. I am afraid that I’m actually a terrible writer. I am afraid that it will be hard, and that I’ll give up. And if I’m going to give up eventually anyway… why bother even starting? I also fear that it will work out. What if I succeed? Success brings with it a whole new level and category of fear. It is much easier to stay within my comfort zone.

The Comfort Zone

As much as I might wish otherwise, I have choosen to stay within my comfort zone, and let fear stop me from doing things, on many occasions. The majority of risks that we face in this zone are ones that are already known. We can handle them. They don’t stretch us, they don’t grow us. They leave us exactly where we are. There’s a reason it’s called the comfort zone.

But consider this. Our comfort zone is not static. It’s not surrounded by an impenetrable stone wall. It can, and should, change and grow as we move through life. If a baby stayed within its comfort zone, it would never move to solid foods, never learn to walk, or talk, or play. It would lie in one place forever. As we grow and try new things, our comfort zone can expand to incorporate that new thing.

Not everything we try becomes part of our comfort zone. Some things will always scare us, and we will decide they’re not for us. At some point in my childhood, trampolines moved outside of my comfort zone. I don’t like jumping on them, and I especially don’t like watching others jump on them. I can’t imagine that they will ever become part of my comfort zone. And that’s okay. We don’t have to be comfortable with everything. But sometimes we step out despite our fear and the sky doesn’t fall. So we try it again. And again. And eventually we can’t remember why we were afraid of it in the first place. We might discover new fears related to the original thing, but we have made progress, and our comfort zone has grown.

Many things we do fall into the grey area between our comfort zone and our fear zone. These are the things that scare us every single time, but we decide that they are worth it enough to keep doing them. Travel can be one of these grey areas for me.

If I hadn’t taken a BIG step out of my comfort zone, I would never have gotten on a plane and moved to England for a year. There’s a lot of travel that I wouldn’t have done had I not stepped out despite my fears. I love travelling. But there are fears that I face before and during each trip. Road trips can make me anxious about car accidents. I worry about illnesses and injuries. I worry about travelling alone and travelling with someone else. I worry that I will plan a bad trip.

But I do it anyway. I keep planning and booking trips because, for me, it’s worth it. I remind myself that accidents can happen close to home, as can injuries and illnesses. Sure, travel brings with it certain risks that are outside of our daily norms, but I work hard at not letting that stop me. And I have people who help me get past my worries and point out when I am being extreme.

Standing on the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh — Climbing up to the top of Arthur’s Seat was outside of my comfort zone. But if I hadn’t done it, I would have missed this amazing view.

Acknowledging our Fears

Another thing in the episode that I found helpful, was the concept of acknowledging our fears and thanking them for keeping us safe before we then put them aside and move forward with the thing that scares us. It reminds me of the Marie Kondo method of purging and cleaning, where you thank an item before getting rid of it. The thanking does nothing for the item, or the fear, itself. But acknowledging that something has served it’s purpose, can help us move past it.

It’s not about ignoring our fears, or pretending they don’t exist. Sweeping something under the rug, or hiding it in the back of the closet, doesn’t make it go away. I have found that the more we hide our fears and ignore them, the more those fears tend to fester and grow. And often, while we’re ignoring our fears, we aren’t pursuing the thing that scares us. That big dream gets tucked away in the closet alongside the fear. When we acknowledge the fear, and bring it out into the light, we can begin the process of moving past it or learning how to live with it.

We are going to face many fears over the course of our lives. Some of them will be really big, and no one will question these fears. Some will be small, or unique to us, and it will seem like no one else will understand them. Is anyone else out there afraid before a big event, like say a Tuesday, that they are going to fall up the stairs and completely destroy their face? Or is that just me?

The important thing, I think, is that we acknowledge our fears and we make a decision about what we’re going to do with them. Are we going to walk away from the thing that scares us? Or are we going decide that the thing we want to do is more important than the fear. Sometimes walking away is the best decision, either forever or for right now. But sometimes we decide to move forward and walk down the scary path. Maybe we’ll get hurt. And maybe it won’t work out. But maybe it does work out. And maybe deciding to move forward on the thing that scares you will make all the difference in the world.

What about you? Is there something that fear is stopping you from doing right now? Is there something that you are currently doing in-spite of your fears? I would love to hear about it in the comments!

Until Next Time,

Starting a Travel Blog during a Pandemic?

Published on April 28, 2020November 16, 2020 by Meaghan Elizabeth

As those who know me may be aware, I am almost notorious for starting writing projects and then not carrying through with them. I have wanted to keep a blog for years, but have not yet managed to keep one running consistently for any length of time. I just haven’t managed to find the right topic, or the right amount of motivation or ‘go get ‘em.’

We could go into the reasons for that, but that is not what this post is about. This post is about the journey I have recently taken to move to a point of starting up this blog. A journey that was almost over before it even began this time. I think it would be some kind of record to have a blog last for a negative amount of time… but I am getting ahead of myself.

At some point in the last 6 months or so, I started thinking about starting up a new blog or writing project of some kind. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to work on, but my creative writing juices were beginning to stir after having been largely dormant for quite some time. I had ideas again! I just needed to figure out where I wanted to channel my creativity.

As I started thinking about what I wanted to work on, I started playing with the idea of starting a travel related blog. I didn’t do much more than mull the idea over initially, though. I wasn’t sure what that type of blog would look like for me, or whether or not it was actually something that I would want to work on long term. But the idea started to wander around my mind.

Then, sometime around the end of February, beginning of March, I decided that I needed to stop coming up with reasons why I shouldn’t and start focusing on the reasons why I should. I decided to just dive into the planning, and see where it took me. I knew that I wanted to write about travel and books, but I also wanted to leave the blog name open enough that if I decided to switch up the topic a bit, I would hopefully not need to pick a new name and start over yet again. I finally settled on a name, and I wrote and posted my “About” page. I was all ready to start writing and posting!

Enter Covid-19. And a new, pandemic shaped, day-to-day reality. My writing plans were completely derailed.

Sure, I suddenly had “extra” time in my days. Though my day job has thankfully been able to switch to full time work from home, all of my weekend and evening activities were cancelled. But “free time” didn’t automatically equate to an abundance of motivation or interest in sitting down to write. Work was busy. I was tired. Not to mention dealing with all of the new and added stresses related to a world that seemed to be verging on chaos. Some people were converting the time and additional stresses into a recipe for productivity. But this wasn’t the case for me. Even if I had wanted to be crazy productive, I didn’t suddenly find myself with a cup overflowing with creativity. I have a hard enough time on a normal day convincing myself to sit down and write, and now I had what felt like a million other reasons and excuses that needed to be overcome.

And if all of that wasn’t enough… I was supposed to be writing about travel?

The entire travel industry had essentially ground to a halt. I had no idea if my summer travel plans were going to be cancelled or postponed a year. I wasn’t even travelling to work anymore. And I was supposed to be writing a blog about travel? I mean, sure, I wanted my blog to be about travel and reading, and it could be argued that this was the perfect time to talk about reading. But what was the point? I had finally overcome all of my excuses and self-imposed roadblocks, and before I could even start my project it had been halted.

Days turned into weeks, and I didn’t write, and didn’t write, and didn’t write… But then I gradually started working on shifting my focus from the chaos around me. I started making a conscious effort to spend less time focusing on all of the things that I couldn’t control, and couldn’t change. And I started thinking about writing again.

The more I thought about it, the more I started thinking about how important it is to keep dreaming, and hoping, and looking forward to a time when we are on the other side of this. It’s not always possible to look forward when there is so much going on in the here and now. It can feel impossible to believe that there will even be another side. Especially when we don’t know how long this pandemic will last, or what changes it might leave in its wake. The hear and now can feel very unknown, and very scary.

But then the sun comes out from behind the clouds. And the flowers start to peak through out of the dirt. The birds sing. The air starts to feel like Spring. And just for a moment, you catch a glimpse of of a world that’s a just a little bit more “normal.” And you find your day filled with just a little bit more hope. I started thinking that maybe through writing I could bring more of those glimpses into my life. And maybe I could give someone else a glimpse or two along the way.

I can’t say how much of a writing schedule I will manage to keep in the upcoming days, weeks, and months. And I don’t know how many posts I will manage to write. I don’t want to add too much additional pressure onto myself right now, but I’m also not ready to give up on this writing thing quite yet either. I’m not sure how much of what I write will be about travel or reading right now – and I’m not really all that concerned about overly restricting my topic choices for the time being. But I’m going to put one foot in front of the other, and take it one day at a time. I’d love for you to join me along the way.

Until Next Time,