Give Up The Drinks At The Bar. Save Money & Bring Your Own

Remember TO BYOB

Like most families, we enjoy trips to our favorite cities. These trips can be expensive.

We love eating out in the city in our favorite restaurants and staying in familiar hotels. We love our family traditions.

Regardless of how you do it, it can be hard to save money when you travel.

We have found a few ways to shave pennies off of regular expenses with Groupon and finding free entertainment in the city. As our kids have gotten older, it has become harder to save money and in fact it has gotten more expensive. 

One way we have found to save money, is by giving up our weekend cocktails at the bar.  Look, there is a time and place, but this one of those areas where we choose to instead shave pennies. Go ahead and judge us, it’s ok.  While you judge, we are shaving pennies off of our monthly expenses and continue to save toward retirement.

On a recent trip to San Francisco, we stayed at a great hotel, with good food and a pool. It was cooler, but the kids didn’t seem to care and had a great time swimming.  Instead of buying a $8 dollar drink (or two) at the pool bar, we instead went to the local store and picked up a bottle of vodka & few diet cokes for just over $20 bucks. That purchase covered our drinks for the 3 nights were there.  Between the two of us, instead of 8-10 drinks over the 3 nights (figure $100 with tip) we did it all for just over $21.50  Yes, we drank good vodka.  Part of this was the discipline to give up drink at dinner (we both chose the water) and the other is just smart decisions.  One simple way to shave a few pennies and start the journey of mastering personal finance.

Remember that life is a game never won or lost, only played.