Friday, June 19, 2009

Spending More or Less

D and I treated ourselves to a rare dinner out (nowadays!) to celebrate our latest sale windfall. The topic of our upcoming vacations away came up. He isn't keen on not going and would like to go on one and cancel one as his first choice.

So we ended up discussing how much each trip would cost ie. how much we would save by not going, how satisfying it would be to be so close to meeting our working account amounts. That wasn't getting us anywhere.

Then I thought of something. How about tallying up how much our current yearly vacations to ski and cottage would cost, market value?

I was frustrated and didn't want to feel as if I was the bad person here. Plus I thought D was acting a bit spoiled!

It came to $24000 / yr! Based on how much it would be to rent a similar ski condo, seasons passes and to rent our own cottage based on the rates we were going to charge had we gone ahead with the rental idea.

The figure above does not include mortgage payments, food, transfers or any of my solo trips this year to Newfoundland and Alaska nor the trip to NL we didn't go on.

In reality, our current lifestyle could not have been afforded by D if he was still single and he knows it. I saw the light bulb go on.

I suggested that we could each get a lump sum yearly to spend on travel of our choice based on our income ratios if he felt that was fairer but that would mean a 50% decrease in skiing and 0% extra vacations. He opted to leave things as they are.

I thought it was a great exercise because it made both of us feel that our travel spending is more than adequate and not spending another $10000 in the latter half of this year make a lot of sense and not seem like a sacrifice.

However the cancellation fees will amount to just over $1000.

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