Holidays can be expensive if you don't budget properly and it's easy to forget that your daily expenditure soon adds up.
Having recently come back from a short holiday in the Ardennes, my husband and I were utterly aghast at how much we'd managed to spend during a mere five-day break.
The rent for the holiday cottage was cheap, the food even cheaper and crossing the Channel cost absolutely nothing because we went with a friend who works for Eurotunnel. It was the amount we spent day-to-day that was practically obscene by my usual stingy standards.
Clearly when planning a holiday, you should think about what you can afford and look around for the best deals for the major expenses such as transport and accommodation. Many people do this it's part of the fun of planning a holiday but it's the money that's spent while on holiday that people lose sight of. Because there's nothing to do all day except have fun, many holidaymakers have a tendency to go a bit mad and I think this is what happened to us.
What we should have done is decided on our day-to-day spending budget before we went. We should have divided it by the number of days we were away to get a daily spending allowance and, even more importantly, we should have kept track throughout to ensure we wouldn't run out money before heading for home. As happens to a lot of people, we ran out and headed for the cash point instead.
So, on the basis of the mistakes I think we made, it's probably a good idea to work out a holiday spending budget before going and to stick to it. Use travellers' cheques so that you have the minor inconvenience of having to cash them bit-by-bit it'll make you stop and think every time you tear out a cheque. If you decide to use plastic instead then set your limit before you go, check exchange rates and think about how much you're drawing out when you visit the cash point. A debit card makes sense so you don't face a huge bill a month after getting home but bear in mind that there are benefits to using a credit card provided you ensure you've put enough aside to pay the bill when you get back.
We also suffered from shopping trolley madness. Obviously this doesn't apply if you're staying in a hotel but, when self-catering, it's so tempting to pull food off the supermarket shelves willy-nilly just because the labels are, thrillingly, in a different language. Let's face it; a tin of tomatoes is a tin of tomatoes.
There's the problem of holiday spirit largesse too. It's fun buying presents for people back home when you're in holiday spirit overdrive but, particularly, when dealing with a different and confusing currency, you can end up going a tad over the top.
As it happens, a great deal of what we spent went on buying vast quantities of cheap booze and ciggies. I know, I know, if we didn't drink or smoke we'd have saved a ton of money but, we do, and at least we can comfort ourselves with the thought that the savings made on these things will probably pay for the cost of the holiday. However there's no real excuse for going as spending mad as we did it's simply that, hey, we were on holiday!
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