We took a road trip over the weekend to Lexington (about a two hour drive from where we live … if you drive the speed limit). The biggest thing I would like to tell you is if you’re going to save money, you need to get your family involved and turn it into a game.
Talk it out with your family… tell them that you’re going to work on saving money, tell them why and how it will benefit them. Trying to shove the concept down a tween or teens neck won’t work, but if you make it fun then it will work.
The carrot always works better than the stick, and my Daughter is a budding entrepreneur so she negotiated her way into getting 10% of what we save at the end of the year.
We started saving by planning the trip. We decided that we wanted to stay two nights. The timing of our trip was pretty much set since it was during Haley’s spring break. Unfortunately this was also during the time of the state tournament so hotel rooms were at a premium. We decided to spend one night in a hotel and another night with relatives who lived in the town. That saved us the expense of a night in the hotel. We have trips only a few times during the year anyway and we want to make it special (and Haley likes to swim) so we got our usual spot with an indoor pool. If we had wanted a budget hotel we could have saved an extra $50 but then we would have had a riot, but I did get a consensus on staying one night with relatives. Sometimes you have to pick your battles.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about how the trip went… how we saved money while shopping.
