How much do your family vacations cost?
 

Hey RS,

I am curious about how much you spend on vacation and how much vacation you take during the year.

I was talking to a client yesterday and she said she gets 10 weeks of paid vacation. She works at Fortis and she's on some grandfathered employee contract (she's one of their oldest employees), that's why she has so much vacation.

I was curious what vacations look like in your household.

We just booked an all-inclusive in Mexico for two adults and a toddler for $4,600 all in for seven nights. We usually do at least one of these trips a year and then at least a couple smaller three to five nighter local trips a year.

Are you guys around the same?

Too poor to go anywhere for vacation.

I get 5 weeks, but I usually have a few carry over days (I had 8 carry over for the start of this year). My wife only gets 3 weeks right now (but she has the flex every 2nd friday)

Traditionally I do two main trips in the summer:

For July I do the 5-6 day fishing trip in Bamfield with my Dad & Uncle (doing this for the last 10+ years). We tally up all the bills at the end of the trip, and split exactly 3 ways, usually works out to about $1500 each.

For August we do the camp trip to the lake in the North island in our trailer, usually about 10 days. Food, Gas, Supplies, Campsite rental is probably all in at ~$1200.

Other than that I burned a bunch of V days by taking some of the fridays off that coincided with my wife's flex days over the summer. I could get used to that flex day shit.

We're not really lusting to go on any fly away vacations right now.

I currently get 5 weeks. Past jobs were between 4 weeks and unlimited.

I have historically set aside between $500-700/mo for vacation related spend but my kid is at an age (4.5y) where we'd like to travel more and that amount just doesn't cut it. Our trip to Australia last month rang up a $13k bill while our next targets are Disneyland, Hawaii, and Japan - none are cheap so I've now become quite focused on collecting travel points to help make it more manageable but I need to set aside more money for travel.

Even those local getaways are expensive for what they are though - we looked at popping over to Victoria to visit some friends over Xmas and it'll run us $2k for 4 days after everything.

:alone:

i got 30 days of vacation a year. But i always carry some over into the next year.

We usually take 1 big vacation and then a couple of smaller ones to north american/sun destinations.

Price depends on what we do but suffice to say it aint cheap with the ole ball and chain. Its much cheaper if i just go myself. Like this year in may i drove down to SF myself and spent less than 1k for 3 days of peace and quiet. That included hotel, gas, and food for a head full of memories driving my inlaw's lovely SC430.

Doesn't matter what you spent in the past. After 2022 everything has gone up, flights, hotels, food, etc.

Before the two of us would try to spend less than 10K on 2-week trips to Europe, and less than 8k for trips elsewhere (domestic, US, LATAM, Asia). Went to NZ this year and it was over 12K but it was for 3 weeks.

Now? Who knows. Everything fucking keeps going up.

We budget a max of $10k for our annual 'big' overseas vacation per year for 2 ppl.

Last year (and probably for a few years moving forward) we had to reduce that scope and so went to Atlantic Canada instead due to inflation and also did a bathroom reno.

Get 6.5 weeks of vacation, in my working history I’ve never once carried over vacay to the next year, I value time off over everything.

As DINK’s I feel like we Yolo quite a bit lol..

Ie. we go to penticton/osyoos multiple times a year to visit friends, some times we’ll get away cheap, gas, food, wine tastings $600-$700. Other times we’ll buy boxes of wine and get a hotel for a few nights and just blow money eating out and drinking and it could be $2000.

As CB said, shit is getting crazy now in general. Our recent Disney trip going to Disneyland and Universal over 5 nights, 6 days, was touching 10k. Didn’t expect it to go that high but we also have the mentality of we do whatever we want while we’re there because in a few months/years, you won’t remember the 1-2k you saved, but the memory of the thing you didn’t do because you wanted to save money will haunt ya lol

I'm not sure I want to know how much I spend on vacations... for me, the important thing is to spread out the spending. For example, my family of 4 will be going to Japan in March for 2 weeks. Back in August, I spent $8k on flights already. I have gone to exchange CAD for Yen once, and will probably do that 2-3 more times. Hotels booked as well, but those I won't get charged until later. The other major cost I need to pay up front for will be train passes and tickets to Universal Studios. Apart from that, I guess I'll spend the cash for food?

I don't think I could dig up $15k in one month just for vacation purposes.

about the same, but leave the kid with someone else.

I don't think it's possible to do any vacation involving a plane these days for less than $5K.

We're super frugal and we did Disneyland last year with the kids for ~$5K. When it comes to family vacarions, we stay at 2.5/3 star properties with free breakfast, prepare our own meals for the road, and optimize wherever else that we can.

Just dont go to hong kong. flights expensive, hotel's expensive, and food's expensive.

Only ever been on one family vacation in 1989. I personally haven't been on an airplane since 1992. Though every single property we own is debt free because we busted our asses off for every dollar, It's really an empty life lol. Happy that you guys are able to share in good times with family. You can't take that money with ya...

Employees at my workplace gets anywhere between 15 - 35 days of paid time off a year. Unpaid leave can also be negotiated. I think I have just gotten into the 30 days club a year or two ago, and it'll be a while before my vacation allotment starts trickling towards the 35 days end.

With travel being fairly expensive, we only did a long weekend getaway to Victoria this past summer. When everything was set and done, our total trip cost came out to ~$1200.

I've been wanting to do a Drumheller dinosaur trip for a while, and it was supposed to happen this year. But then some semi-expected home repairs came up, and that took away both our travel budget (and then some) as well as the time for us to go.

I know le wifey could totally use a vacation to let off some steam, but we are not quite in the position to do something proper just yet. According to the news, plane tickets are supposed to be trending cheaper, so there is hoping that we can make it happen some time next year.

Vacations in my household are difficult. I get approx 8.5 weeks of paid vacation and I can quite literally take any time of year off no matter the duration with little to no notice if I wanted to. However, the wife only gets 3 weeks and she works in a place that not only has blackout periods (Xmas for example) but the hoops she has to jump through for approval is painful so planning is kind of hard.

That said, I've honestly not once taken a vacation with the family or even when it was just her and I before kids and had a total tally of how much it costed us in the end because I probably don't know lol.

Where are you all working that you have 6 weeks vacation?:speechless:

I get 4 weeks per year. We try and be as thrifty as possible - especially now with two kids. Did a Kelowna trip in the spring and stayed at our friends house. Did a summer trip to Salt Spring Island and stayed at my wife's aunt's house. Finally a trip to Tofino for a wedding, stayed in AirBnB house.

I don't know if we will be doing any flights until childcare costs come down. Road trips until then.

I get 5 weeks, and my wife gets 4 weeks. But she has to submit all 4 weeks one year in advance (nurse union things...)

We try to be as smart as possible with our travel and use points/deals, but other costs always add up. Our last big trip was a road trip to California last year and that cost us 7-8k even with using AirBnBs split with friends and points for hotels. I imagine it would cost 30% more this year if not more.

We were going to go to Yellowstone this year but that got canceled. We had flight credits to use but then once we calculated the other costs for traveling (hotel, food, etc) we felt it wasn't worth it. There were some other house costs this year that ate up our budget so we didn't want to spend more money traveling.

Hoping that we can save enough to go to Japan next year, but that's unlikely.

Some of have that sweet compensation from landing the right job, or others, like myself, have been working the same job for a long-ass time.

i get 3 , wife gets 6.
she takes weeks off.
1st trip with inlaws to a cruise but it's going to be cut down quite a bit.

bro in law is debt free so he's doing better but we are just starting with a 30 yr mortgage and this 7% is really killing us.

we still try to make it work but we cut down to zero ubers and zero eating out to make up forit.

vacation this yr is bahamas carnival cruise we'll see what happens next yr.

I looked at my credit card bill. I need to declare bankruptcy. :pokerface:

I'm in on the I don't have a family gang :alone:

I just read a post on reddit asking how immigrants are finding their life in BC. One comment hit hard, it was something like (and I'm obviously paraphrasing here) "Canadians are obsessed with acquiring properties. It doesn't matter if they work 5 jobs and spend no time on vacation or with family, if they have 3 or more properties under their belt they have found meaning in their life. Fuck that, I'm moving back to Europe. You can keep your goddamn mountains"

But that being said rb I hope you know that as long as you have your health it's never to late to do what you want to do with your life now.

we're going for a quick 8 day trip to mexico city in jan. flying on points and just paying taxes, points for one of the two hotels (4 nights), and so we're only up to about $800 so far on spending. we don't really drink and party so i figure maybe $200-300 per day for both of us, so maybe only about $3k for this trip. i got a lot of my travelling out of my system in my 20s/30s so i dont feel the strong need to go anywhere for 3-4 weeks at a time anymore. also work is pretty demanding so it's hard to up and leave like that too.

We wanted to go to Japan disney next year but flights are $2.8k each for spring break. Bought LAX instead for $400 each.

Miss the days when direct flights to Japan were $550-750.