Having a Life is Expensive

Life is expensive!

The Kids and I are travelling to Washington D.C. next month with The Husband. He is going for a work trip. His air fare, hotel for 4 nights, and food for 5 days will be covered.

Air fare for The Kids and I ran us about $1500.  We are staying for 10 nights. We are on the hook for the hotel for 6 of those nights. That is a cost, to us, of about $950. We also rented a rental car for while we are there to the tune of $450. Altogether, we are paying $2900 for 10 nights in Washington D.C. for four people. That amount does not include food or souvenirs. Overall, I think it’s a great price.

This is one of those situations where we are choosing to live and enjoy our life rather than get out of debt faster. The Husband is heading to D.C. for a business trip and since it fell during our spring break, The Kids and I are tagging along. What I’m about to say is not justifying our expense, just explaining it. By travelling to D.C. now, we are “saving” money. The Husband’s air fare is covered, and we only have to pay for 6 of the 10 nights. To us, it was a no brainer that The Kids and I would go to.

I’m most bummed that because of this trip, we won’t get our credit card debt under $10000 by my next update. The trip will be paid for (in fact, I’ve already paid for our airfare and half our portion of the hotel), but the money I used to pay for the trip, $2900, won’t go towards extra debt payoff now. Assuming we don’t charge much more in the next 2 weeks, our balance on our credit card will still be about $10900. All told, that’s not too bad considering we added $3000 of travel expenses to the card, but look where we’d be if we hadn’t and were able to only allocate that money towards debt!

In all honesty, I think the trip is worth it. The memories and life experiences we are giving The Kids and ourselves, far outweigh the extra couple months we will be in debt.

I’m just going to keep plugging away. I know it’s a cliché, but it became one because it’s true, slow and steady wins the race. I’m going to continue to throw all our extra money at the end of each pay period towards debt. As long as we keep our spending in check, we will continue to pay more than we charge and we will see small gains each month.

The trip is worth it, but expensive. I guess I should stop complaining, we made a choice to spend $3000 plus food and souvenirs. We could have sent that money towards our debt and we didn’t. Plus side is that we aren’t adding to our debt to take the trip and have paid for every part of it so far: air fare and hotel, and we are saving money for the rental car. We aren’t increasing our debt to take the trip!

*SIDENOTE – The Husband’s company has been such a good company to work for. He submitted his reimbursement for the D.C. trip on Friday, it was approved the following Monday and in our bank account the very next Wednesday. I recently started reading a blog where the author often complains that travel reimbursements from her company take upwards of 3 months. We are very lucky that our reimbursements often take less than a week!