Newbies

We are the Cox’s. We are a quasi-normal, family of four. We love to travel, but we’ve always had to do it on a budget, and still do. Recently, we’ve learned some helpful things which allow us to have greater adventures and stay within our limited budget. This has opened up the world for us, literally. We’re still newbies but we now know the path to become expert travelers. Please follow along with us as we go from newbies to experts.

Motivation

We’ve always set aside money for travel. This was a non-negotiable part of our monthly budget. When the kids were younger, our trips were short and nearby. We live in Iowa, and a typical trip for us was Chicago, St. Louis, or Minneapolis. We looked for places that we could visit on a fairly short drive, stay in a cheap hotel, and we would visit zoos, children’s museums, and parks. We tried to pack in as much fun as we could as cheaply as possible.

As we got older and our budget grew a little bit more, we took longer trips. We visited further away places, like Florida, Virginia, and Washington DC. We bought a camper, and we use it a lot. We never flew, every place had to be within a couple days drive, because once we bought 4 plane tickets and rented a car, the budget was already almost blown. Flying internationally, let alone intercontinentally might as well have been flying to the moon.

One day, when our daughter Emma was a freshman in high school, she told us that she wanted to take the school trip to Greece. This was one of those trips contracted through a travel agency that they market to high schoolers as a “class trip” but only like 5% of the kids actually go, because it’s just too expensive for the average family. Thinking that it wouldn’t be that bad because it was a group trip marketed to kids, I asked “How much will that cost?” She said, “It’s only $4400!” Uh, okay, that’s not gonna happen. She might have well asked for a Porsche. And then I said something which probably changed our lives. “Emma, I promise you, when you graduate from High School, we will travel anywhere you want to go.” That was both a promise seemed completely unattainable, and a promise that I had no intention of breaking.

Revelation

In December of 2021, I started to realize that I had a future 8-to-10-thousand-dollar bill coming due in a year and a half and I was looking at having to completely drain our savings to pay for that. I would have, I just wouldn’t have been happy about it. How can we reduce the cost of this trip?

We were watching TV one night, and a commercial for a Capital One travel card came on. I thought, okay, well, I guess if I applied for a travel credit card, I might be able to pay for one of the flights, maybe? I googled travel cards like crazy, with no real direction, just trying to get the best possible credit card that could, maybe, pay for a flight. I settled on the Citi Premier card, it was offering an 80,000-point bonus and filled out an application. It was approved.

Now what? I had no idea what I was doing. I had this card, I needed to spend $4000 on it in 3 months to get the 80,000-point bonus. Not a problem for a middle-class family of 4, we almost spend that on groceries in 3 months, but what do I do with the points? How do I cash them in, what are they even worth? Then I hit YouTube – hard – and I kept seeing people talking about how they traveled all the time, for free. What? Now, spoiler alert, there is a lot of exaggeration on YouTube. However, points and miles are actually really valuable, and surprisingly easy to acquire. Fast forward one year and I had booked 2 round-trip flights to Cabo San Lucas, 2 nights in the All-Inclusive Hyatt Ziva Los Cabos, 4 nights in an AirBNB in Cabo San Lucas, 4 one-way airline tickets from Chicago to Zurich, 2 Nights in Zurich Marriott, 4 nights in an AirBNB in Munich, 3 nights in an AirBNB in Venice, 2 Nights in an AirBNB in Rome, 4 one-way tickets from Rome to Stockholm, 3 nights in a Marriott in Stockholm, and 4 one-way tickets from Stockholm to Chicago. All of that cost me a total of $3100 out of pocket. Of that, $2500 of that was AirBNBs which we prefer to use because having a kitchen saves us money on food. However, AirBNB doesn’t have a real points program. Also, that could have been much better, but I overspent on an AirBNB in Cabo ($1200), because it was our anniversary. The power of points is absolutely real. All of those points were acquired in one year of normal spending for us, just using the right cards.

We still have a lot to learn, and I invite you to learn with us. This blog will be about making the most of your money and your time. I’ll probably delve into some of our other vices/hobbies like running, camping, and beer. What I’ve learned in the last year is that there are a lot of things which are attainable if you stay focused on a goal.