I turned 30 this year and we wanted to do something special in order to celebrate. Dannie and I love to travel, but admittedly, we haven’t done as much as we’d like. We changed that this year and everyone has been asking us how we planned our vacation on a budget.

Well, we found a place that met all of our needs after a bit of searching. We’re super picky but the place we settled on gave us exactly the experience we were hoping for. At first, the price tag on our vacation was going to be roughly $3,000!

Y’all know that was not about to happen though. Instead of settling for that price, we ended up using a few tricks to bring the cost of our trip down to only $1,125!

Here’s how we did it:

How to save money for a big trip

At the beginning of the year, we knew we wanted to take a big trip for my birthday. The only problem is that we had no idea where we wanted to go. Regardless of that fact, we made a goal to set aside some extra money in our savings account that would be used for our vacation.

Because, you know, trips cost money! The key is to start saving early.

We came up with an idea of how much we were willing to spend and then we started putting money into our savings account over the course of the next few months. We already planned to put the whole trip on our credit card to take advantage of cash back bonuses we would get, but we wanted to make sure we’d be able to pay the credit card off in full as soon as the purchase posted.

The easiest way to save up for something is to divide the cost by the number of months you have to save and just put that amount away monthly.

Do your research & stay flexible

Dannie has warned me multiple times that if I didn’t take her to a warm beach sometime in 2018 we were going to have some serious marital issues. Rather than test my luck, I started researching places that would be nice for us to visit.

Miami was my first choice because neither of us has ever been there. We did a lot of searching around and found some hotels that would be great and would put us in close proximity to the beach.

We were set…

That is until we made one of our bi-weekly Costco runs and remembered that they have a great travel program.

When we went to their site, we found out that a 5-day stay at an all-inclusive resort in San Jose del Cabo (Mexico) would cost much less than spending the same amount of time in Miami. We would be saving money because we wouldn’t have to pay for a rental car/Uber rides, eating out at different restaurants, alcohol, entertainment and perhaps, most importantly, we could stay right on the beach front without having to sell one of our kidneys to afford it!

Pro tip for affordable travel: weigh your options and be willing to change your plans…even at the last minute.

We planned out our whole Miami trip and then decided on Mexico about 1.5 months before we planned on leaving. That may have been cutting things a little close for comfort, but that decision literally saved us thousands of dollars!

Plus, by booking through Costco’s travel department we got some freebies to go along with our trip. They gave us $138 worth of ‘Costco Cash’ and $200 in credits that could be used at the resort when we got there!

View from our balcony

Rewards points are your friend!

Another thing that helped us save money is the fact that we had about 30,000 Delta airlines miles from previous flights and from using our Delta American Express credit card that we had signed up for ages ago.

These points came in handy because we were able to use Delta’s “pay with miles” option to turn $740 worth of plane tickets into $178! By using the miles, all we had to pay for was the taxes and fees, the actual tickets were free.

Tell me again how credit card rewards and frequent flyer miles are useless? We didn’t do anything extra to get those points but they helped us save $562.

And it doesn’t stop there, we also had another 38,000 points saved up on the credit card that we use for all of our budget spending. Those points helped us shave another $385.72 off the total cost of our trip. Read: Are Credit Cards Bad?

Outside of the airport

Stay on a budget during the vacation

By the time everything was said and done, we had already saved ~$950 on our trip before we even left home. In a previous life, we would have used that as an excuse to throw caution to the wind and blow the “saved” money while we were on the trip.

This would have been a mistake. It’s a mistake that a lot of people make when they try to vacation on a budget. They do a great job of saving money on the trip costs only to turn around and waste the extra money on random things once they get to their destination.

It’s a good thing we’ve learned so much during this financial journey because that’s really the only way we were able to avoid falling back into that trap. Instead, we only spent $300 while we were in Cabo. This included all of the tips for the staff at the resort, all of our souvenirs and our excursion to tour the city and some of Cabo’s famous landmarks.

Cabo San Lucas Arch

Another way we saved money was by choosing an inexpensive all-inclusive resort instead of a regular resort. We ate at every single restaurant the resort had to offer and thoroughly enjoyed all of the drinks they gave us. It didn’t cost us a single penny extra since it was included in the package (I’m pretty sure the resort actually lost money on us)! We’ve never had the all-inclusive experience before, but we’re definitely hooked now.

Dannie wanted to eat Japanese food almost EVERY day

That’s it!

This was definitely the best trip we have ever taken. If you’re still trying to figure out how to vacation on a budget, please use some of the tips I’ve mentioned above. Also, share some of your tips with us in the comments below because we’re in the planning stage for our next trip.

We’d love to know what else we can do to save even more on our next budget-friendly vacation!

Until next time!

$tay Wealthy Friends,

— DJ