We've Made One Hard-and-Fast Rule to Keep Vacation Spending Down

My family and I love going on vacation and we're always happy to give our credit cards a workout to buy flights, theme park tickets, and hotel nights. But, once we go on vacation, we try to be reasonable with what we spend in order to avoid draining our bank account and ending up regretting it.

In order to help us keep spending down on our trips, we've made one simple rule that we never break. Here's what it is.

This is our unbreakable vacation rule

The one rule that my husband and I made on vacation a while ago has to do with spending for our children.

See, when we were going places, my son would end up asking for items at just about every store that we went to. If we were away for a week and went to several theme parks or other activities like zoos, there would be multiple gift shops we'd end up funneled into (obviously with the goal of getting us to spend money).

We didn't want to turn every outing into a fight and since he's only 3 years old, he doesn't have much of a concept of delayed gratification. We had to decide on an approach that made sense. And, the way we did that was to make one unbreakable rule. On each vacation, he gets to pick one toy. And, we will always buy that toy on the last day at the end of the trip.

Here's why this rule works so well for us

By making this simple rule, my son knows what to expect -- and he has something to look forward to throughout the trip. He is confident he will end up getting to go home with something that he loves so he doesn't feel deprived. And he can spend the trip looking out for the perfect item that he's going to make his own.

Throughout our vacations, we'll take pictures of the different items that he may want to buy. We talk about which purchase he's going to make and how exciting it will be for him to finally select his perfect item. Then, on the last day of the trip, he gets to select the toy that he has decided on after careful consideration.

We make sure we're only offering toys at places we can feasibly go back to, but it's been pretty easy to make that happen since he usually wants one of the more recent toys he's seen. And, if he happens to find something at a gift shop from someplace we can't return to, I can pretty much always find a comparable item online to buy so he gets what he wants without us having to trek back miles.

This rule has worked well for us with our son, and we'll do the same for our daughter as she gets older and starts to want toys as well. Now, our trips don't turn into fights at gift stores, but instead we get to have fun planning which exciting toy he'll buy -- and our wallets get a rest until we make that special purchase on our final day of our trip.