Vacation Anxiety: Stay and be Blue, Go and Wallet’s Bruised?
The summer begins. If we are students, school’s finished or just about finishing. Even if we’ve been out of school for years, summer still brings with it a sense of a natural break, a time to be free, a time to go on vacation. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who complained about the onset of summer.
Summertime is usually vacation time. Vacation time often means planning a trip. Sometimes it’s to a far off land, if we are economically fortunate enough, and sometimes it’s to someplace fairly local. Places that are close by might not be exotic, yet they can be different enough from the daily grind to give us a feeling of getting away from it all.
Lots of folks these days are feeling economically pressed. When you struggle to make ends meet, it’s hard to think of going away on vacation. Then again, as hard as you work all year long, you feel you owe yourself a break. In truth, a break of some sort, from the day in day out routine of work and chores makes good sense to me, at least in terms of personal renewal. Your wallet on the other hand is a different story.
Going away on vacation can serve to refresh us, renew us and inspire us. However, if funds are tight, the idea of a vacation can cause us more than a bit of anxiety. And frankly, do you really want to go away only to come back to bigger bills?
What’s the solution?
Well, I can’t speak for anyone else. I am not in anyone’s pocketbook. I only know how I look at the world. To me, going into debt to go on vacation is not the way to go. Racking up big credit card bills with the mentality of worrying about it later is not the way to go. I think the solution is a bit of planning.
Perhaps, we should be planning 2012’s summer vacation and saving for it now. A little bit put a way each week might do the trick. However, what if we didn’t save for this summer? What if we are tight on funds?
In most areas, I have found that there are more things to do than we are often familiar with. A quick look on the internet might bring to light any number of relatively low cost, sometimes close to no cost, alternatives to pricey vacations. It is up to us not only to plan but to be creative within the constraints of the budgets we have. This can help us alleviate a sense of anxiety when vacation time rolls around.
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