We’re going to come right out and say it: we recently stopped listening to a travel podcast about ten minutes in because we couldn’t take it anymore. Without naming names, the host basically declared that if you carry any credit card debt, you have no business doing any traveling. And then — in the very next breath — tried to sell us a travel credit card.

The hypocrisy aside, the thing that really got under our skin was the premise: that travel is a luxury, a reward you earn only after you’ve achieved some arbitrary level of financial perfection. We couldn’t disagree more, we’ve been traveling long enough to have some actual thoughts on why.

Let’s be clear about what we mean. A week at an all-inclusive resort on the other side of the world, where you pay someone to bring you drinks by the pool? That’s a luxury. A road trip to a state park two hours away where you sleep in a tent and eat food from a cooler? That is also travel — meaningful, perspective-shifting, genuinely restorative travel — and it costs almost nothing.

Some of our best trips have been the cheap ones. There was a week of camping in Michigan years ago that we still reference as a benchmark for every trip we’ve taken since. We didn’t spend much. We came home changed. That’s not a luxury. That’s a basic human need: to step outside your context, reset your thinking, and remember that your normal life is only one version of normal. You know the quote: “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.” (Thanks, St. Augustine)

The point is that travel — specifically the act of changing your environment, breaking your routine, encountering people who don’t live the way you live — is good for you in ways that are hard to put a dollar value on. It builds empathy. It shakes loose calcified thinking. It forces rest. These are not luxury goods. These are things humans need.

We don’t use travel credit cards. We’ve thought about it, we understand the argument, and we still don’t use them — partly because of the ethics of a system that essentially passes merchant fees on to every consumer who doesn’t play the points game, and partly because, well, a researcher we respect spent a full year using only a debit card and spent significantly less money. Make of that what you will.

What we do instead is treat travel like any other planned expense. Not a splurge, not an afterthought — a line item. Chris uses a budgeting app (YNAB, this is not a sponsorship or affiliate deal, just an honest recommendation) and maintains specific buckets for specific things. One of those buckets is travel.

The rough estimate matters more than people think. We don’t try to predict every meal, but we do ballpark transportation, lodging, any big-ticket experiences we already know we want, and a buffer for the unexpected. Then we ask: does this fit? And if it doesn’t, we ask: what can we adjust?

The word “budget” carries a lot of shame. It sounds like deprivation. Like saying no. But the actual practice of budgeting — or planning, or whatever you want to call it — is really just deciding what you value most and pointing your money at it deliberately. You’re not sacrificing travel. You’re prioritizing it.

There’s a real tension in personal finance advice between delayed gratification and enjoying the life you’re living right now. We’ve landed somewhere in the middle, and here’s why: the future is not guaranteed. You can work and save and plan for decades and have your health or your circumstances change in an instant. That’s not an argument for recklessness. It’s an argument for intentionality on both ends — making sure you’re building toward something and making sure the journey is a life you actually want to be living.

If you spend years depriving yourself of any joy in pursuit of some future financial finish line, you may reach that line and find that you’ve spent 20 years becoming someone who doesn’t know how to enjoy things anymore. That’s not a plan. That’s a trap.

We do believe in avoiding high-interest debt when possible. Not because some podcast guy said so, but because debt is a very specific transaction: you are asking your future self to pay a premium so your present self can have something now. Sometimes that trade is worth it — a roof repair, maybe. A life-changing trip, possibly. But it’s worth naming the trade clearly and deciding with open eyes.

We also think hard about the real value in a trip versus the Instagrammable version of value. We’ve paid for a dinner that was built entirely around its aesthetic — decor that Chris described as “the back of a limo” — and we’ve paid less for a meal that we still talk about years later. Expensive doesn’t mean valuable. The same logic applies to travel broadly.

Flying a budget airline and using those savings for an experience you’ll actually remember? That’s not being cheap. That’s being smart about where value actually lives. Even as you’re working toward something big in the future — make sure you enjoy the journey.

We’ll be honest: our travel has been frequent enough in recent years that we’ve mostly been keeping pace rather than getting ahead. What we’d love to build — and are actively working toward — is a travel slush fund. Not earmarked for a specific trip, just there for when an opportunity shows up. A fare deal that’s almost too good. A spontaneous long weekend. We want to be in a position to say yes to those things without scrambling.

That is a form of privilege, and we know it. Not everyone has the margin to save for an unknown future vacation. But it’s also a goal worth building toward, and it illustrates the broader principle: the more intentionally you plan, the more freedom you actually have.

You don’t have to be financially perfect to travel. You don’t have to be rich. You don’t have to have the right credit cards or a certain number of points or a spotless balance sheet. You do have to have a plan — one that reflects your actual values, accounts for your actual circumstances, and leaves room for actual living along the way.

Travel isn’t the enemy of financial responsibility. In our experience, it’s one of the clearest expressions of it: deciding that this — seeing something new, understanding something more, resting in a way that actually works — is worth planning for. So we plan for it. And then we go.

Thanks for stopping by! Check out our Go See Do Explore Podcast, available wherever you listen to podcasts. To read about some of our previous trips, visit my Trips Page. If you like my photos, be sure to “like” my Facebook Page and follow me on Instagram! For my list of gadgets to make your travels easier, click here.