Budget Mondays

Monday – 4/21/2014

It’s Monday – a painful day for most people, yours truly included. Sometimes it is made even more painful as we remember just how much money we ended up spending over the weekend.

Budget

It’s one word that can make people cringe, angry and sad all at the same time, a rare occurrence indeed. There are plenty of reasons for this – people are told at work that their budgets are being cut, their ideas cannot be funded because they are not in the budget, and in our personal life, our budgets don’t usually quite match up to our desires.

Easter may have been late this year, but the summer weather has yet to fully hit embrace large parts of the country, and so thinking about summer travel might be seem a little strange. Before you know it, however, the summer weather as well as travel opportunities will be in full swing, and as always we will look for ways to make this topic enjoyable as well as budget friendly. Summer travel can be hectic, fun, and create a lot of great memories with family and friends — there is no reason it cannot also be budget friendly.

Let’s look at a few suggestions:

1) Call before booking online — talking to hotel staff on the phone might enable you to get a better deal, or explore additional options that might not always be available on the corporate website.

2) Go against the traveler type — business hotels, and chains that cater to business travelers, as normally booked solid Sunday-Thursday, but are empty on the weekend, and leisure hotels are usually the opposite. Taking advantage of these trends might add up to big savings.

3) Use other airports — every major travel hub has more than one airport, and flying in and/or out of one of the other airports might save you some serious travel dollars.

Happy Reading!

http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2013/05/21/5-budget-travel-tips-you-havent-heard-before