How To Travel Without Financial Guilt

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Here's what's coming up on this edition of The Retirement Huddle with Mark Howard and your host Ron Studts.

**Mark Howard** (0:08)
So many people are talking about legacy today as being time spent with family while everybody's here instead of dropping a bunch of money in their lap once you're gone.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:19)
It's time for The Retirement Huddle with your local financial coach Mark Howard. If retirement is a game, you're in it to win it. The huddle is where your financial battle plans are drawn, and Mark Howard is here to help with the X's and O's. So let's kick it off and break the huddle. The Retirement Huddle starts now.

**Ron Stutz** (0:47)
Let's talk about what a lot of people have been thinking about a lot lately about going on vacation or traveling. And, you know, this summer, but also people give a lot of time to thinking about traveling and taking special vacations after they get retired. How do you make sure you avoid feeling guilty about it? You know, a lot of people have been saving for a long time, and then after you get retired, you start, you know, spending that money. Whether it's a week at the beach with a family, a long-awaited international trip, or a special milestone or anniversary, planning for that vacation can either be a ton of fun or may be burdened by the stress of how it's getting paid for.
So let's talk about how to work these trips into your retirement plan. And the one thing that it all has to start with, and a lot of people, unfortunately, spend more time planning their week-long vacation than they do planning for their retirement, which could be 20, 30 years. You got to plan for it, and make sure that you have a good plan in place. And that pretty much applies to everything, doesn't it, Coach?

**Mark Howard** (1:57)
Well, it does. And the plan needs to include fun. It needs to include vacations. Actually, all of our plans do. We go ahead and bake that in to the expected budget. And we look at it from a monthly standpoint, typically. So if a client says, you know, we are going to want to do a vacation every year. Maybe it's going to be Europe.
Maybe it'll be Mexico.
Caribbean, you know, we're not really sure. But we typically feel like it's going to take, you know, $12,000 to $15,000 a year to go on the type of vacation we would like to.
We bake it in. It's just that simple. So we got a plan in place. Everybody's at ease. It's not cutting into the investments. It's not cutting into daily expenses. And it's almost like a travel bucket. We've created travel buckets for some people. It's like a line item on their annual spreadsheet. However you do it, it's permission to spend. That's what it's all about. And we keep an eye on it for you. And we allot it. We plan accordingly. And if you've only budgeted for a weekend getaway and then you've got an all expense paid resort for a week that you'd like to go to and doesn't match the budget, we can still typically make it work. And if nothing else, we can show you, this is where the money needs to come from to pay for that. And it's fun comes in so many different ways, if you will.
Some people that thought they were going to travel a lot have called us after they retired and said, hey, we've decided we want to buy $120,000 motorhome. How should we do it? And we showed them how to do it. And we showed them where the money should come from. And we can show them that if you live in your nineties, this purchase is not going to blow up your plan.
So, that's the confidence and clarity that our plans give. And it's just, I don't think you can put a price tag on it, but it's all about doing the things that you weren't able to do because you had the confines of the job and your time wasn't your own. Once your time's your own, boy, let's have a blast.

**Ron Stutz** (3:53)
Yeah, and once you go on vacation, whether it's a long weekend or whether it's a month-long trip around the world, I mean, it's supposed to be fun. So make sure that it's fun and you don't have to worry about how you're going to fund it.
Also, understand the rhythm of retirement spending. I mean, once Coach Mark Howard gets set up on the game plan, well, then these things happen almost automatically and you don't have to worry about them.