Never Retire - The Trick To Saving On Travel Is Similar To How Many Of Us View Retirement
In our most recent installment on travel, we discussed how to save and how to go big and go often by going international.
We also illustrated why travel—particularly the spending part—is a core component of many Never Retire strategies.
In today’s installment, we focus on the email service I use for flight deals—Scott’s Cheap Flights.
First of all, it’s the best site I’ve seen for deals.
Last year, my girlfriend and I snagged $350 rountrip flights to Rome, thanks to Scott’s. Last month, we booked $480 rountrip tickets to Barcelona for February, which leads to the aforementioned trick that resembles how many of us who will Never Retire view retirement.
This trick comes from the founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights.
When people book travel, particularly a vacation, they tend to start with a destination.
This approach locks you in whatever the fares are for that location when you’re searching. If you’re deadset on going to London and its costs $1,000 for a flight when you’re looking, you might get frustrated or, worse, pay $1,000 for a flight to London.
Scott suggests working backwards.
Settle on anything from a region to the entire world, then watch as deals roll in for those places.
This is how Scott’s Cheap Flights functions. This is how we booked our destination city—Barcelona, as it turns out—for a trip we’re taking to Spain/Italy next year.
Decide you want to go someplace. Watch the emails trickle in.
Here’s a sampling of the deals I’ve received from Scott’s in just the last few days.
By a similar token, when you get that $88 rountrip to San Francisco email maybe it means now’s the time to book a trip to go see your daughter in San Francisco. On the dates when you can snag the deal. Not at whatever date you might have predetermined.
Pretty straightforward, but not necessarily intuitive.
Working backwards.
It’s a philosophy I use with budgeting money:
Traditional budgeting looks like this.
You get your first job as a self-sufficient adult. As in, you’re responsible for all of your expenses.
You know how much you’ll be making. From there, you say I can afford this much for housing, this much for a car, this much for my remaining necessities, and this much for discretionary spending. If you’re lucky — and when you budget this way, you’re often not — you can save a little each month. Or maybe take one big vacation every year.
I prefer to backwards budget. It’s step one to not letting work control you and dictate your life and subsequent budget.
When you backwards budget, you —
Commit to a relatively low cost of living (i.e., below-market-rate rent, no out-sized mortgage payment, an inexpensive car)
Adopt some form of a pots of money approach to personal finance
Decide what you want out of life
Structure work — type, schedule, income — around your lifestyle
So something like this.
I want to live in the city. I’m happy to rent. I don’t want to pay $2,000 (or more) a month on market-rate rent. So I’ll take on the very realistic challenge of finding something good — or even great — for below-market-rate.
Don’t need an Audi or Tesla. I’ll drive a Hyundai.
With low expenses before you even consider how much money you make, you can avoid lifestyle inflation and credit card debt as well as the seemingly natural human instinct of saying I make $60,000 a year (or whatever), so it only makes sense to live like I make $60,000 a year.
Counterintutitve, but also something that’s easy for many of us to execute—practically and psychologically—than the conventional norm on managing your spending.
It’s sort of the same style with many Never Retire approaches.
Traditional retirement is all about forward momentum.
You grow your savings in anticipation of having enough to retire and quit work altogether.
You establish your lifestyle in the hopes that, by the time the aforementioned happens, you’ll have it cemented and paid for.
Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way. Thus, this newsletter and the emerging discussions around semi-retirement, working in retirement, and Never Retiring.
When you settle on a Never Retire strategy, you tend to spread these things—working hours, money—across the lifespan, rather than build up to some, often, anti-climactic climax.
Or maybe you don’t buy the house early in life. At the same time as you’re trying to save for traditional retirement. This double burden sets quite a few people up to fail.
Instead, you do it backwards, paying cash—or close to it—for something you can afford when you hit relative old age.
We’ll leave things here for today.
In the next few weeks, we’ll do more on travel and dividend growth investing.
We’ll also evolve some of our core Never Retire strategies, with a focus on personal finance and planning.
Plus, I have a backlog of solid academic research articles that deal with the retirement issues we care about that I need to review.