TexasAggie

Ohhhhh! I like Tracy's idea of meeting in Italy!

Hi lucygirl, I too am always up for meeting another Fodorite as the chances for having a lot in common are really high DH and I are based in Denver if you're ever headed this way!

Tracy... so sorry to have been a bad email correspondent of late. Our annual report filing date is February 22 so I've been really buried in work of late. I hope your German classes are still going well

Bluehour

Something to consider:

I just read a Los Angeles Times report that said the U.S. State Department will reject passport applications from parents who owe more than $2,500 in back child support. Yes, just $2,500, according to the story.

I don't know if there are exceptions for compassionate cases (say, to visit a dying family member back home).

Another good reason to do the right thing, moms and dads ...

tcreath

Hello Jill! No worries! I assume this must be a busy time of year for you!

The German classes are going well, thank you! I quite enjoy it, although it's much different from the Spanish I took for four years in high school and I find myself occassionally throwing Spanish words into the mix by mistake!

I hope your travel plans to Austria and Italy are going quite well! Did you find an apartment in Rome that you are happy with?

Lucy, I'm in Charlotte so if you ever find yourself out here....

Tracy

Dionysius

To tcreath:

I like reading your trip reports but when you say

" We do travel overseas several times a year…..."

do you mean 3,4,5 times because I went back and I could find only 2 trips per year that you normally do??

sshephard

I try hard to avoid jumping into a discussion where there are so many who seem so sure (and maybe a little self-righeous?) about a position that is so different from mine.

My parents (who lived through the Depression) were very middle class. And they were very careful about their debts. But they borrowed money every other year to do one thing: travel. From age 2 to age 18, my parents took my sister, brother and me on summer trips, mostly to Washington and Oregon, where my grandma, my uncle and my aunts lived.

Those trips had a fundamental influence on shaping the person I am today. They also allowed me to form life-long family relationships.

Am I glad that my parents borrowed money? What do you think?

Do I spend money I don't have in order to travel? I am a public school teacher in South Dakota. What do you think?

I have no problem with the hard-working, wealthy and/or frugal travelers on the forum who are able to pay cash for their cars, houses and the four or five times they travel every year. Can you pay cash for your $250 per night hotel rooms? Good for you!

I do have a problem with people who seem to imply (if not state outright) that there is something wrong with those who incur debt to travel. If I died today, I'd still owe about $1000 on the trip my wife and I took to Croatia last summer. But I'd be smiling because I've already been to heaven: it's somewhere along the Dalmatian coast.

Here endeth the rant. (I've got to go now. The hotel in Rome that I'm staying at wants my credit card number and if I don't let them have it, they may give the room away.)

tara3056

My husband and I are still fairly young - I'm 26; he's 31. We bought our house 5 years ago and, being so young, it felt like a real accomplishment. When we bought it, we figured we would "upgrade" after 4 or 5 years, but I think we've decided to stay put. We've put a lot of love and energy into this house and I don't want to start all over again, with a higher mortgage payment. This house is so comfortably within our means that we're choosing to prioritize other things, like travel, over "upgrading" and we've probably built up 40k in home equity.

We've paid off his student loan entirely, although I still have one. It is at a fixed 2.75% rate for the life of the loan (thanks, federal gov't!), so it doesn't bother me to keep that one around for however long until it's paid off. We charge things to our credit cards, sure, even thousands of dollars at times, but I usually pay them off in full each month, or at the most, within 3 months if it's a very large charge. We invest 15% of my husband's pre-tax income into his 401k (I don't work) and have done since he started working at 23 (best decision we ever made, BTW). Our retirement nest egg is now bigger than my parents (who are in their 50s) because I came from a lower middle class family who never managed to save very much.

So overall I would say we're fairly responsible and in a pretty good position, financially speaking. That said, do I hesitate to go into debt in order to travel? Nope. Our first trip to Paris in 2006 was around $3000. We paid it off within a month of returning home and it was worth every penny. It gave us the travel bug that I'm so grateful we got while we are still young and child-free. Last year we spent a month in Europe, a trip which cost us about $11,000. We'd saved a little over half of that before leaving and paid off the rest 3 months after getting back. Absolutely worth it. We'll most likely do the same thing for our 2008 3-week trip.

My feeling is that as long as one can manage one's debts, debt isn't always a bad thing. I don't mind paying interest, as long as it is at a reasonable rate, if it is worth it to me to have what I want now instead of constantly waiting. Interest isn't evil. We're planning for the future but living for today. Life is too short to postpone travelling. Note that I'd be singing a different tune, however, if someone had little disposible income, revolving debts left unpaid, and then wanted to charge an expensive vacation on top of everything else.

Oh, and for all those who say "well what would you do if an emergency happened and you were in credit card debt from a trip?" Where there is a will, there's a way. DH and I were once nearly 10k in credit card debt when we essentially lived on our credit card after he got laid off following 9/11. He got a new job after a couple months, we paid it off, saved for a down payment and bought our house around a year later. We're in a much better position now than we were back then should another emergency happen.

copper675

As several people have mentioned, it all depends on how you see debt. I'm about to graduate from college- I have student loan debt that will realistically take me the next 10 years to pay off. I'm NOT sitting around and pinching pennies for the next decade before I let myself travel again. My credit card is paid off and I save specifically for my trips, so in all, it works out ok. Venice is sinking, pollution and environmental effects are destroying many historic sites, and as a previous poster said, life is too short. I don't want to get 30 years down the road and regret all the opportunities that I missed abroad.

Just my 2 cents.

tcreath

Dionysius, that was more of a generalization, as we usually travel abroad twice between a stardard calendar year. But if you want technicalities...we went to Italy (Rome and Umbria) in March 06, Croatia and surrounding countries in November 06, and Ireland in February 07 (all of which I wrote trip reports for), so technically that was three times within 365 days. We then went to Japan this past October (again, I wrote a trip report on the Asia forum), will be going to Germany in April and are considering Guatemala for October, so again that will be three times within one 365 day period.

There you have it!
Tracy

tcreath

Dionysius, I just reread my response above and I hope I didn't sound too harsh because if so it wasn't intended.

We average about one overseas trip every four to five months or so starting in 2003. We also take numerous weekend trips and smaller trips closer to home that I don't write trip reports on (such as a summer 07 trip to Montreal and Vermont, our Thanksgiving weekend in Savannah, etc.) and earlier trips abroad before I became a regular on this board. I do love to travel and we do travel as much as we can, but much of this is because we are planning on starting a family in the near future (I hope to get pregnant later on this year) and we want to get some of that "travel bug" out of our system before doing so.

Traveling abroad is definitely expensive, and I've responded to several posts in the past few months stating that I can no longer afford to travel to Europe as often because the airfare has gotten so much more expensive, hence our looking into Guatemala (or other Latin American countries) instead. We used ff miles for Japan and our upcoming trip to Germany, and we always travel during off-peak season because hotels and airfare are usually cheaper....and we don't like crowds so this works out well for us. I just don't like to go into debt to travel so in addition to traveling off season our trips are often shorter than many on this board (most being about a week or less), which allows us time to save up for the next vacation. Okay, that and I can't be away from my job for more than a week at a time or else apparently the office will fall apart...

Sorry if my previous post sounded defensive. I had a pounding headache (luckily it went away!) and posted it without reading it first.

Tracy

Dionysius

tcreath:

Oh my mistake..... I always thought when fodorites are talking about traveling the year, I thought they meant calendar year. I didn't realize some meant fiscal year!!! Oh well.....

WTnow

< If I died today, I'd still owe

I think that is part of the problem as many of us know people who have died owing money and devastated their loved ones that they left behind. It was so devastating to my FIL that I will never forget that.

People do not think about dying, getting sick, run over by a car or losing their jobs or even the next generation, but as someone else has mentioned we have seen too many people get in way too much trouble because of debt. Most thought it would never happen to them.

Debt really affects all of us.

The debt level in the U.S. is the highest it has EVER been and the savings the lowest and there is a serious problem due to all this debt that will affect us all and generations to come.

Have you looked at the world stock markets lately? Or the foreclosure rates? Or the dollar ( about to weaken more today as rates must be continued to be cut to try and save the stock market from crashing.) The housing downslide has barely begun, nor has the credit crunch.

Growing domestic and international debt
has created the conditions for global economic and financial crises!

America has become less a family-based, frugal society of strong real savings and small government. It has become a more consumptive, more debt-dependent with nil private savings.

I find that very sad and dangerous for us all. People will do whatever they will do, but yeah, I worry when I hear about people going into more debt for travel. I just hope they stay lucky. I hope we all do.

sshephard

Sorry for my surly post yesterday. I don't know what got into me.

I will say that if I had died last night, no one would have incurred any debt. My financial plan includes provisions for those who survive me.

As far as saving money being good or bad? I do remember Ronald Reagan saying that it was "un-American" to save too much money. He said we should spend. Our consumer economy is based on Americans consuming. And, I'm afraid to say, I do my fair share.

By the way, do you remember the "trickle down theory?" I'm guessing that some of the good people on this board are able to pay cash for cars and trips because they benefited from Reagonomics. Because of my income as a public school teacher, however, there wasn't much that trickled down to me.

I also know that Bush Jr.'s tax rebate plan is premised on the hope that we will all spend it quickly and that we spend it in the US. We should pay off our credit cards or put it in the bank. But neither of those give the economy the quick kick it needs.

I also know enough about the economy to realize that our nation's debt is one of the biggest threats to our future. Was that debt caused by my trip to Eastern Europe last summer? Perhaps a little.

And just for the fun of it, I'll throw out one more thought to see what people think:

If the US economy is threatened by overseas debt and if our trade deficit is potentially harmful to our economy, shouldn't those of us in the US stay home? Should we really be spending our money in Europe? Have you seen everything there is to see in the US? I know I haven't. Come to South Dakota! But don't come today - it's -15 F right now and we're heading for a high of -1.

tcreath

Dionysius, no problem. Each year changes. Sometimes we travel overseas three times within one calendar year, sometimes two. Most of the time it depends on if we happen to stumble across an awesome airfare or not...as was the case with our $320 flight to Paris and our $300 flight to Ireland, as both of these were spontaneous purchases. So when I say several, I mean 2-3. Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of traveling to Europe more than that...never enough vacation time or money to go around!

Hmmm...not sure what any of this has to do with the original post and my response to it, but since you asked...

Tracy

Mimar

One could save up money for a year, then use it to take a trip. Or one could take the trip right away, charge it on a credit card, then spend the next year+, paying off the debt plus 20%. Which makes more sense? (And cents?) What's wrong with waiting?

So many Americans carry huge credit card balances. I read about a soldier, about to be shipped to Iraq. He and his wife ran up huge amounts living life while he could. But he survived Iraq and now has these overpowering debts. But what if he had died? His wife would have been hardpressed to pay the debt. She probably would have gone bankrupt.

LAwoman

One could have taken a vacation a year ago, and then paid it off over a year at 3% interest (the typical rate we get) and it would have cost them less than if they saved all year and took it now - because of the drop in the dollar.

toedtoes

I think there is a difference in thought:

1. People incurring more debt than they can pay off.

2. People choosing to charge now and pay later.

3. People choosing to save now and go later.

and

4. People having enough income to be able to never buy anything on credt ever.

The first is bad for anyone. The fourth is a goal that is not realistically attainable by everyone.

The second and third are the choices that I think most of us on this board choose between. There are benefits and disadvantages to both and it's a personal preference on which one we choose.

I do use credit for things. I may not necessarily pay it off each month in full (although I normally do). However, if I died tonight, I would not leave any debt burden on my family. My assets will pay for all of my debt with some to spare.

bellastarr

I'm sort of like you ToedToes, in that I do have some debt, but I know that if I were to meet my maker somewhere traveling one day, my assets would more than cover my debt. I also pay double or triple the minimum each month, and have very low interest rates. I have a great FICA score, and have built an excellent credit profile over many years.

I adore traveling and will continue to do so. I have faith that I can figure out many ways to pay for my trips. I also don't spend money here at home on alot of very expensive things like clothes, cars or trinkets of any kind. So I've kind of pared it down to my traveling life, my art life and my work-to pay-for-it life. About ten years ago I figured out that if I just shuttled back and forth between a desk job and home to write out checks to pay the bills without following my dreams until the last dollar of the mortgage was paid off, I might be too burned out and bleary-eyed to enjoy anything, so I started to balance things out more with traveling, and now I go and owe, then pay the piper more happily.

I admire those who were taught early never to have any debt.

travelgourmet

"One could have taken a vacation a year ago, and then paid it off over a year at 3% interest (the typical rate we get) and it would have cost them less than if they saved all year and took it now - because of the drop in the dollar."

And this is an important point. As long as one is disciplined about debt, then it can be a very good tool. A 3% interest rate is likely less than one would earn on even a low-yield investment like a CD. In a case like this, it makes <i>more sense</i> to charge your vacation, and to pay it off over time, even at the minimum level. As I noted earlier, someone with good credit could also contiually flip their accounts, earning whatever sign-on promos might be available, and lower the net rate to less than zero.

Similar arguments could be made for outstanding auto loans, depending upon the rate. Same with many student loans. And a mortgage is likely only a concern if you are underwater, have an abnormally high rate, or cannot realize the full deduction for your mortgage interest. Any debt where the net interest rate is less than what your investments earn is not a huge concern.

There are a lot of ways to use credit wisely, and I think the anti-debt crowd is often blind to those instances where it is the smart money move to not pay off every debt.

WTnow

&lt;There are a lot of ways to use credit wisely

Sadly, VERY few use credit wisely and many get caught with their pants down. Just look how much trouble banks , investment firms, bond insurers etc are in trouble ....and they are supposedly experts at juggling credit. LOL!

As far as underwater mortgages, more are under today than ever before and again we are only at the very beginning of this cycle, so tons more will soon be underwater. It is a trend that will continue for a long time. Japan's housing bust lasted over 15 years.

I had a friend who was underwater for eleven years, as home prices are sticky and move slowly. Not fun. Too many have used their homes as ATM machines and will have to pay the piper. People who have inherited million dollar homes have lost them out of stupidity with credit.

I can hardly think of a worse time to be credit happy, spending money that one does not have. Many &quot;secure&quot; jobs will disappear. I distinctly remember a friend telling me why it would never happen to her, two weeks before it did in the 2000 recession.

It does not mean that anyone who uses any credit is a fool, but neither does it mean that all those who travel under debt while owing much more debt are making a wise choice.

Most people who get into credit trouble, never think it will happen to them.

WTnow

&lt; I also don't spend money here at home on alot of very expensive things like clothes, cars or trinkets of any kind.

That is KEY. If one is not wasting money just spending on nonsense ( as so many do) one has plenty of money for travel as travel is not really very expensive.

If one must piddle away money on nonsense, at least sell it once it bores you on ebay or something and fund travel that way.