Let me call a spade a spade. I have not made any progress on the other elements of the trip planning in the last month. Even my attempts at a blog posts did not make it to fruition. However on the finance side things we have moved things along nicely. We are now about 1/3 of the way towards our goal and we did it just by changing our priorities a little bit. Essentially we decided on another way to allocate money towards the trip.
We decided that this year and next that we will put our entire tax return towards the trip. I am a keener and I filed our taxes pretty much the first day I could submit them. My logic has been, if you are owed a refund, you should get it in your bank account as soon as the system will let you. As a result, we are now about a third of the way to the amount we are chasing to fund the trip.
In the past that money had normally just gone into our yearly budgeting process. Most of that money often went toward some home repair or renovation that was required. This year we are fortunate in that nothing momentous needs to be done with the house so we can just cut that budget line dramatically. We recognize that although it has been fun to move the needle with small funding sources, it is the big changes that move it the farthest.
Family Travel Countdown 