You get used to the bad weather when living in the UK. The rain and the cold days might be bearable during your regular schedule, but the summer holidays can provide you with the perfect opportunity to get some much-needed sunshine. You can take your chances by heading to another part of the country for a short break or guarantee yourself some sunshine with a hop abroad. Either way, it would be nice to have some extra spending money for a summer vacation.

The travel expenses never seem to stop when you finally get some time off for a summer vacation, and you don’t want to have to restrict yourself during your few days off during the year. What’s more, you do not want to have to keep making sacrifices in the following months to make up for what you spent during your time away. It is important that you ensure that you can afford a summer holiday before it arrives using the advice below.

1. Save

Saving money has always been the common-sense approach to affording a holiday. However, it always seems that you never have enough put aside when the summer rolls around. You can never predict having to pay for an unexpected bill, and families with several children will need everything from their paychecks to get through the week.

However, you can try and save money if you start out correctly. You can begin small by putting aside any spare change that you find. Then try to match this amount the next time that you want to add to your savings pot. You may end up scraping together more each month than you realize. Before you know it, you will have a steady stream of savings that gathers with the money that you aren’t using.

2. Bank Loan

Check with your current bank, and you may find that they can offer you the chance to apply for a short-term loan. This loan involves money that is transferred straight into your bank account that you slowly pay back over time. So long as you arrange to borrow an amount that you need for a holiday over a long enough period, your repayments may not be as large as you may expect. You can also use the small amounts of money that you put aside in your savings to make these repayments.

3. Know When To Use Your Credit Card

Paying back outstanding credit card debt can help improve your credit score, like repaying a bank loan. However, you may not know that there is a time and place for using these types of payment methods. For example, an airline may include a surcharge whenever you pay for flights using a credit card. This is done to protect the airline from losing money in case you fail to make the repayments. It would be nice to use this money for nice things during your trip abroad, so you will benefit from buying plane tickets using your debit card instead.

It is perfectly fine to make one-off smaller payments with your credit card, so make sure you research what is best paid for with your credit or debit card. You don’t want to have to come home from your summer vacation to pay off debts you can’t afford.

4. Salary Sacrifice

A salary sacrifice scheme is often in play for employees in the UK without you paying much attention to it. Just read your current pension scheme contract for confirmation of this. In short, a salary sacrifice scheme is set up by your employer to remove some of the money from your wages to put it aside. If you don’t receive this money, you cannot spend it after all.

While the most common reason to enter a salary sacrifice is to build up finances for your retirement, as mentioned above, you can also use it to save for other things like a holiday or a new car. That is why you can look up how does a salary sacrifice scheme work at LV ElectriX. This is a good way for people to ensure they have extra finances available if they are bad at saving in the traditional way.

5. Cut Things You Do Not Need

A common problem for a lot of people in life is that you cannot afford everything. Life would be pretty boring otherwise. However, anyone who is looking to save for a holiday probably wants to go away more than anything else. That means you must make some sacrifices in your monthly spending.

The current age of streaming has made it very easy for people to build up a series of subscriptions to services, many of which you do not use. You are not forced to keep any of these monthly subscriptions, so go through and see what you can get rid of to save money. You can survive without Netflix for a few months. You can always re-up your subscriptions again after your summer holiday.

6. Find Discounts

Not every holiday destination is created equally. Unfortunately, you will be asked to pay more for certain hotels or transport in a city than in other, more rural, places. As such, it would be silly to try and save up for a holiday in a location you know that you cannot afford. A beachfront summer vacation home may be nice, but there is no point in trying to save for it if you have to sacrifice too much during your daily life. Try and be realistic, and your savings goals will be much easier. However, there are ways that you can receive more for less.

Some holiday resorts will offer discounts during certain times of the year. Keep your eyes peeled for these discount offers, and you may be surprised by what you can afford for your holiday. Sadly, you may have to sacrifice going away during the summer to qualify for some of these discounts. Fortunately, this shouldn’t be a problem if you are going away abroad.

7. Thirty Day Rule

The thirty-day rule is a savings technique that you can use during your daily life to save more money for when you need it most. This method has been used a lot during the recent economic climate.

The thirty-day rule stipulates that you have to wait thirty days after spotting something that you want to buy. if you still want the item after thirty days, then it is perfectly OK to buy it. This rule is used to help cut down on impulse spending. This means that you will stop spending money on non-essential items. Without these goods in your life, you should have plenty of money saved by the time you go on holiday. Of course, you don’t have to apply the thirty-day rule when you finally make it to your summer holiday destination. You never know when you get to visit this part of the world again. This is what you have saved for, after all.

Your Next Summer Vacation

Saving for a holiday isn’t as difficult as you may think. Try to make the right choices during the rest of the year, and you should have no trouble affording the summer break that you deserve.