Planning for Retirement: The Cost of Travel
A couple of months ago, I was on vacation in Singer Island, Florida with my wife, Linda. One night we went out to dinner with an old college friend of mine and his wife. They live nearby in West Palm Beach.
The conversation turned to their plans for retirement. They were going to move to Tennessee, where they had just bought a piece of property, and build a house.
Aside from the fact that they really liked this area in Tennessee, another reason they wanted to leave Florida was to substantially lower their cost of living in their retirement years. As his wife said to us, “We’d like to be able to travel.”
And then it struck me.
Everybody always says that about retirement: “When we retire, we’re going to travel.” My wife and I are guilty of it too. But does anyone ever realize how expensive it is to travel. I must admit, up until that point, when I really started giving it some thought, I never did either. When I started thinking about it, it hit me like a ton of bricks, especially when I recalled a business trip I had recently taken.
Last November, I keynoted a sales meeting for 300 insurance agents in Junction City, Kansas. I arrived there on October 31st, spoke on November 1st and flew back home on November 2nd. I flew on Southwest Airlines, stayed one night at a Courtyard Marriott in Junction City, the next night at a Courtyard Marriott at the Kansas City airport. I rented a car from Avis for one day and ate dinner at a local joint in Junction City one night and at Ruby Tuesday’s the next.
Not exactly an extravagant trip, yet when I turned in my expenses the bill was around $1,000! Can you imagine how much a real vacation would cost? I’ve never given it much thought, because whenever we have gone on vacation, we’ve never paid for airfare!
My family and I have traveled all over the world on frequent flyer tickets and hotel points. Once I retire, or cut back drastically on my travel schedule, good-bye miles and hotel points, and my wife and I are not the type who likes to rough it. Yes, I love outdoor activities like hiking, biking and kayaking. But I also love hotel rooms, room service and especially private bathrooms with toilets that flush. 
I realized if this is what we want, we better start planning for it. Luckily, the beginnings of a solution were right in front of me. At the time, we were staying in our Marriott time share on Singer Island. We talked to our salesperson there and realized if we invested now in buying another week, every year we could trade in one of our two weeks for 90,000 Marriott points. We could then use those points to travel, for free (hotel room and airfare), all over the world. Over the course of time, we would easily recoup our initial investment.
I’m not writing this to plug a Marriott time share; that’s just part of our solution. The other part is, of course, to keep saving your money: something we’ve always done. But most of all, it’s to define what “We’d love to travel,” really means. Do your research. List 10 places you’d love to see and then figure out how much it will cost (adding in for inflation and price increases), so that you can formulate a plan to achieving that goal.
Thinking long term entails more than just a wish list. It takes a lot of thought and careful planning.