107. Guilt-free travel: How to plan, save, and spend on amazing vacations
27:43 Share

Before we start today's show, I have a really exciting announcement that I've been wanting to share for a long time. On January 1st, 2025, I'm releasing a new book called Money for Couples. For the last three years, you've heard me on this podcast speaking to different couples every single Tuesday. I've spoken to over 170 couples on this show about their money psychology, the money messages they heard from their family, the peculiar dynamics that they have around money and where they get stuck.

and how they can get on the same page. Well, behind the scenes, I've been working on the definitive book to help couples get on the same page with money, and that's what I wrote for you. It's coming out January 1st, and in the book, I'm going to share how to talk about money, including the exact words to use, when to talk about it, how to teach your kids about money, even the exact agenda and account setup that my wife and I use in our finances.

I'm going to show the tactics to make instant improvements, like how to set up your accounts to automatically work together and how to assess your financial health.

And finally, you're going to get a deeper understanding of money psychology in your relationship. And you're going to discover why you and your partner see money differently and how to get on the same page. Now, it's one thing to listen to couples or watch couples every single week. I love doing that for you. But it's a whole different thing to be able to have the book and to be able to work through it with your partner. Okay?

I'm so excited to get this book in your hands. You can pre-order it using the link IWT.com slash money for couples and stay tuned for a lot more on this book this year. Again, go to IWT.com slash money for couples to pre-order my new book about getting on the same financial page as your partner. You know, money doesn't have to be boring. I get a lot of questions of people who have set up their accounts who have money being saved and they're like,

What now? What's next? How am I supposed to design my rich life? That is why I created the journal. The journal is something you can do either on your own or with a partner. Imagine yourself 15 minutes in the morning. You have a

cup of steaming tea, and you're sitting down following the prompts that help you envision what your rich life is. What's your perfect week? What's your perfect month, year? This journal is designed as a no numbers journal. It's not technical, but it's going to help you understand what you truly value and also what you don't care about.

I recommend you pick up a copy of this journal. You can do it solo or with a partner and it will help you design your rich life. Get it at any bookstore now. Have you ever wondered how to plan a dream vacation? How much it costs? What type of activities you can do? What type of upgrades you get?

I want to talk about it today on today's episode because so many of you have asked about travel and a lot of the couples that I speak to on this show decide that part of their rich life is spending money on traveling. So I got a bunch of questions from you on social media. Today I'm going to cover how do I come up with the ideas for where to travel and

How do I think about hotels? How many activities do I pack in? What are some of the most magical experiences that I've had? And also, yes, we will talk about money. Let's get into it.

First question, when do you start planning and how do you plan for a trip? Okay, for the big ones, these would be things like a honeymoon or in our case, we do a big annual trip every year. I would plan about 12 to 15 months ahead. What does that mean? It means

the time block that we want to go. I am going to make sure that we can go, that we block it off in the calendar, that any meetings are rescheduled. And it also means that I'm thinking about things like weather. I'm thinking about things like, do we need to be somewhere else at a certain point? I don't want to leave this stuff up to chance because a rich life is never an accident. It's never like you trip and fall and suddenly take a magical three-week trip

No, it takes a lot of planning. So I plan ahead. Furthermore, some of this stuff gets booked up. Some stuff already gets booked up over a year ahead. Places like certain safaris, they're already booked up. So I want to be thinking ahead. I don't always book everything 18 months out, but I'm looking, I'm planning, I'm talking to my wife. If we're getting other people involved, we're starting to say, hey, these are the dates we're thinking of. Are you able to make it? Et cetera. All right. How do I pick the places to go?

Well, this is one area of life that I would actually consider myself pretty intuitive. And for me, this is unusual. In most parts of life, I'm pretty linear. I like to write things down. I compare it. But

For me, traveling is a lot about what do I feel like? Do I feel like a beach retreat, a busy city adventure? Do we feel like being outdoors? These are the kind of questions. It's a lot of feeling. Of course, I check with my wife or if we're traveling with friends, we might ask, but it's really about what are we feeling?

Often we'll do something that's very contrasty. For example, we were in Japan, very calm. And then we went to India, the opposite of calm. And we kind of love that contradiction. Sometimes we'll do super luxurious and then we'll do very gritty. We love that combination as well. So that's how I start thinking about it.

And from a geographic perspective, I know nothing about geography. So I write down all these different places and then I plot it on a map and I'm like, oh, that's over there. I had no idea. So that also helps narrow down where we decide to go.

You know how many people's conscious spending plans I see every week? What's fascinating is the categories of spending, especially the ones where people spend way more than they think they do. For example, subscriptions. Let's take a look at some recent numbers on how much people spend on subscriptions. $100 a month on subscriptions. $205 a month. That's from someone spending 76% of their take home each month on fixed costs.

$211 a month, $147 a month, and $487 a month. This is literally thousands of dollars a year, and most of us have forgotten about all the subscriptions we are actually paying for.

Thankfully, this episode's sponsor, Rocket Money, can help you easily find and cancel those unwanted subscriptions. Rocket Money monitors your spending and helps you lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money will even try to negotiate lower bills for you by up to 20%. Just submit a picture of your bill

and Rocket Money takes care of the rest. They'll even deal with customer service for you. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's features. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash Ramit. Give it a shot at rocketmoney.com slash Ramit. That's rocketmoney.com slash Ramit.

My team and I create tons of material every single day. Scripts, voiceovers, emails, all kinds of material that we need to be good and we need it to happen fast. And one of the things we use is Grammarly, especially their new AI tool. For example, every Saturday, we send out my podcast newsletter. I break down an anonymous person's conscious spending plan. And I like going really deep to break down the numbers and show you things you might have missed in your own finances.

Well, guess what? That is a lot of copy. Before, it would take my team a ton of time to work through everything I had written and edit it and make it right for email. Now, Grammarly does it for us in seconds. Grammarly Premium actually gives us suggestions on how to make our writing more impactful for you. It identifies gaps in the writing and shows personalized suggestions to improve the whole thing. And it can even add images like that.

Save time with one click and go from editing drafts in hours to seconds. Get AI writing support that works where you work. Sign up and download for free at grammarly.com slash podcast. That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash podcast. Easier said, done.

Next question. Do you use a travel agent? Yes, always. I know this seems like something people used to use in the 80s. Nowadays, they're called travel agents or travel advisors. And I use a travel advisor in two different ways. Sometimes it's big blue sky. I'll call them up. I'll say, we're thinking of taking a six-week trip. This is kind of the...

style we want to do. We want adventure. We want to end on calm, etc. Maybe we're bringing family of different ages. Here's some ideas I have in mind. Can you come back to us with some options? And they will help us sketch it out. This is the type of full featured firm that we use for our honeymoon, which was in multiple different countries and continents over six weeks. That needed a lot of logistical support.

On the other hand, sometimes I know exactly where we want to go. We want to go to this place on these dates and we want to stay at this hotel. Can you arrange it for us? So we have a different travel advisor that we'll use in a much more surgical fashion. Why do I use a travel advisor? First, they handle a lot of the logistics like booking hotels, things like that. Second, you get perks. So they'll upgrade you. Your room will automatically get upgraded. On a recent vacation I took,

Our travel advisor managed to get us triple upgraded, which was amazing. The room would have been way more expensive if we had paid for it out of pocket. We only paid for the base rate. You'll also get things like free breakfast, which is handy when you're traveling, sometimes free airport transfer, etc. So yeah, we use a travel advisor and I'm a big fan of them. How do you ball out on a budget?

Well, I don't know about the budget part. For that, I would recommend checking out my friend Chris Hutchins' podcast, All the Hacks. He does an awesome job talking about traveling, miles, et cetera. Chris is awesome. He knows all about that. But I will tell you how to spend a lot of money to create a dream trip. And I've done this in a few different ways. Some of it was our honeymoon. Some of it was recently I had my 40th birthday and my dream was to bring a

a bunch of friends and family to a resort. I planned everything. I said, all you have to do is just show up and everything was taken care of. I covered it all. That was my dream to bring my loved ones together and spend a bunch of time just hanging out, doing a cooking class, et cetera. I got a question from somebody in our money coaching group. If you're interested in that, you can join at iwt.com slash money coaching. And they said,

I want to spend a little bit more. I want to take this dream trip. What should I do? And I think the extent to which they had thought about it was something like, I want to upgrade our flights. Okay, that's great. You can arrive there being refreshed, etc. But it felt like they were thinking a bit small. So I wanted to encourage them. And I said, can I tell you what I would do if I had your amount to spend?

They were like, "Yeah." So I said, "Okay, this is what I would do. These are trips that I've taken before. I would arrange to have a car waiting at the airport. No looking for a taxi. Somebody's there with a sign. They take our bags. We're in air condition. They've got little hand towels. You're just comfortable. You're going, "Wow, this is totally different than how I normally get to the hotel." Of course, the hotel would be an amazing hotel depending on what you like. And maybe you upgraded it, use a travel advisor, etc.

When we arrive at the hotel, I would know, let's say we're traveling with family, I would know that one of my family members really loves massages and I would already arrange for a massage to be waiting for them. So as soon as they got there, I would say, mom or dad or whoever it may be, I would say, you know what? They're going to take your bags. Why don't you go to the room, get cleaned up? We've got a masseuse waiting. Whenever you're ready, they'll be waiting for you at the door and they'll take you there.

That's how you start to spend money to create amazing meaning. Okay, a few more things that I would do on a trip like this with loved ones, etc. I would schedule a food tour for the next day. So we're in this beautiful resort. Cool, that's great. We can eat there too. But I want to get out in the city. I want to see the local places. So we would have scheduled a food tour. They'll take us to the market. We'll find all this stuff we normally would never eat ourselves. Oh, it would be amazing.

What else? The next day, we would do a cooking class at the hotel. The chef would come out. They teach us a few things, but mostly they do the work for you. So it's pretty easy. And then you get to enjoy the food and some drinks. Awesome. I would plan one day of doing nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. If people want to go out into the city or they want to go out on a boat, they can do it. But it would just be downtime. Being able to

Engineer leisure time is one of the best luxuries you can possibly do, especially when it is with your loved ones. One other thing I would do, I would arrange a special dinner one night. It would be outside, beautifully lit, candles and everything. And I would let people know ahead of time, we're going to go around the table and we're going to say one thing that we have really appreciated about this trip. Okay, that's it. And

with the chefs or the culinary team, I would coordinate with them and I would say, hey, my mom grew up in this area. Can we cook a special dish from that area? My dad loves this. Can we make sure that we have this type of dessert?

A lot of these places love those type of requests. They want to make something special. So you're there, you've got the candles, you've got the beach, everyone's going around saying something they appreciate, people are crying, and then the dishes come out and you say, you know, mom, I wanted to say we love you so much and we appreciate you. We know you grew up here.

And this dish is really a reminder of where you came from, which made all of us possible. Okay. That is how I would create an amazing experience. And if you think about it, all the purposes of accumulating money and saving it and investing it, to me, this is one of the highest and best uses of your money in living a rich life. One of the worst feelings in life is feeling stuck.

You hear it sometimes with podcast couples here. They feel stuck around their money. I felt stuck in my business. I had made a bunch of decisions years ago and I woke up feeling trapped. So after thinking about it, feeling stuck, not sure what to do, I went to a CEO council that I'm a part of and I just laid it out. And after listening to me, they were like, oh, it's so obvious. You need to change this, move this person over here, change this resource allocation. Boom.

I wish I had done it years earlier. If you feel stuck in your career and you also wish you had a group of peers who could help you get unstuck,

help you accelerate your career, then I'd like to invite you to check out this episode's sponsor, Sidebar. Sidebar is an exclusive, highly curated leadership program where you can tap into a group of supportive peers, including Fortune 500 executives and innovative startup CEOs. You can get expert advice, new perspectives, and most importantly, raw feedback, which is so rare on how you can get unstuck.

When you become a member, you get matched with a group of eight to 10 peers. Then you meet with your group twice a month for 90 minute facilitated sessions and have real time messaging access to the entire community. Learn more at sidebar.com slash Ramith.

and join thousands of top senior leaders from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta who have taken the first step towards accelerating their careers. That's sidebar.com, S-I-D-E-B-A-R.com slash R-A-M-I-T. When I was in my early 20s, I was not into clothes. I wore free t-shirts from tech companies, and I really did not want to seem like I tried too hard.

But I started to realize that clothing is the first thing people see about you. They don't see how nice I am or how much I know about personal finance. They see what I'm wearing. And like it or not, that shapes a lot of how people perceive you.

Now, I take a lot of pride in the clothes I wear. And I love knowing that when I buy something, I'm going to keep it for years and I know that the people who made it were paid well. I actually hired my wife, who runs Next Level Wardrobe, a luxury personal styling company, to style me for my Netflix show and all of my events, including what I wear day to day for more casual outfits.

If you're a professional who wants to dress better, maybe you recently got a promotion, maybe you've gone through body changes, or maybe you're just tired of wearing the same clothes you wore in your 20s, I recommend you check them out. When you hire them to work with you virtually or in person in New York, they'll help you clean your closet, buy the right items with the perfect fit, and they'll help you put together polished outfits you can wear to work.

You'll be able to open your closet every single day and know exactly what to wear for every single event. They'll help you look like an elevated version of you. And they work with professionals of all ages and sizes. I love the convenience. Next Level Wardrobe has over 125 star reviews from happy clients and they've been featured in the Wall Street Journal. Take their free styling quiz at nextlevelwardrobe.com slash Ramit.

Elevate your style using Next Level Wardrobe at nextlevelwardrobe.com slash Ramit. That's nextlevelwardrobe.com slash Ramit.

How do you discover off the beaten path experiences? Okay, so first of all, let me just say there's nothing wrong with on the beaten path experiences. I think a lot of us have this idea that I want to live like the locals. And then I'm just like, uh, in your own hometown, how often do you sit and just converse with tourists? Not that often. I'm in New York. I live in LA. I

It's not like a bunch of tourists just come up to us whenever we're out and just start talking and we spend four hours with them. So there's nothing wrong with on the beaten path experiences. A lot of times they're actually pretty cool. But with that said, I will tell you how I do some of the unusual experiences that we do when we travel. One is I just keep a bookmark per country. So anything that looks interesting in Italy, for example, I have it bookmarked under Italy. So next time we go to Italy, I have...

Let's see, a special stationery maker. I have a behind-the-scenes tour of a shoemaker. I have all these things that I want to do in Italy, and they're all in different parts of Italy. All right, so that's number one. I just start keeping a list. Number two, I read the travel sites and the magazines. So everything from travel and leisure to Rob Report to Flyer Talk, all of them, and I'm

And I'm just constantly, you know, for me, it's fun and I'm reading it and then I'm bookmarking anything that looks interesting. Third, if I know people from those countries, I will ask them, what is an unforgettable experience that we should make sure that we do? And a lot of times if I have friends who have traveled and have similar travel styles, I'll ask them and they'll share a lot of stuff too.

Finally, this is where I want to encourage you to get really creative. Airbnb experiences actually has amazing places you can check out in different countries. But like I'll post something about how we went to in Kyoto, we went to a stationary maker who's been doing it for generations. And I got like a million people. Where did you find this?

And I'm like, part of the fun is actually getting creative. And it's really thinking, if I could see anything, what would it be? And then figuring out how to do it. It makes travel so much less passive and so much more interesting. So if you love fashion, could you do a behind-the-scenes fashion tour in Milan? Or might you hire a student at one of their fashion schools to take you shopping?

That'll be cool. Again, whatever it is for you. I like the idea of getting creative and making it personal for what you want to experience. What is your philosophy on hotels? People in our family say, let's get a cheap one since we're only sleeping there. Well, I love hotels.

For me, they're a part of my rich life. I will say that my philosophy is we typically save a little bit of money on city hotels, but we splurge on beach resorts. You know, city, you typically are out a little bit more and they're usually not as good as beach resorts. But I personally love hotels.

for reasons that I wasn't aware of when I was younger. For me, I love hospitality. I love customer service. Hotels are the Olympics of customer service and hospitality. The design...

has to be instantly welcoming. The staff is highly trained. The services they offer are always thinking ahead of what you need. In fact, even some of the stuff in the room can be quite detailed. And I just love the idea of being taken care of. So for me, those are some of the reasons I love beautiful, nice hotels.

And when I look back, I think that they really inspire me. So when I come back, I go, wow, that was beautiful. The customer service was amazing. It inspires me in a personal level and certainly for my business as well. How do you balance making dinner reservations and setting plans versus open times or playing it by ear? When we first started traveling,

We planned things like way, way, way too much. And we had a little bit of a disagreement. And finally, we were like, okay, we got to not...

pack it in as much. Our purpose here is not to pack in as much as possible. It is to have an amazing, unforgettable experience. And this kind of really takes some thinking because the way we were raised when I was a kid, if we went to Disneyland, we got there when it opened and we stayed until the very end because we were going to pack it all in. We're going to scrape all the meat off the bone. And I remember a friend of mine told me this thing. He said, if you ever go to a museum,

You spend a 90 minutes max and the first 30 minutes are in the cafe. And I was like, what are you talking about? When I was a kid, we never went to a museum. And when we did, we'd be there all day. By the end, we were all crying. We wanted to get out. And he said, no, that's not the point. You can always come back. That was so life-changing for me. It taught me about the abundance of knowing I don't have to see everything.

just what feels good right now. And I can always come back. So our new rule, my wife and I then adapted it from packing up the schedule to saying we want to do one big activity per day. Now we do one big planned activity every two days.

That's what we do. And beyond that, we have a list of things. They're all bookmarked in Google Maps. Most of the time we're out, we're doing stuff because we're feeling good. But sometimes we're like, you know what? We don't feel it. Let's just hang out. Let's go back to that place we went to yesterday. We loved it so much. Or let's just hang by the pool. On a two-week trip in terms of dinner, we might do one upscale dinner reservation, probably do two other, I would say, mid-level, and then we play it by ear.

We like eating, but we don't necessarily love super fancy food. But that took us trying all these different places for us to realize that. It's about a cadence in terms of planning. But I would also say even having this conversation by yourself or with a partner lets you hone in on what is important to you. I'm not a huge fan of taking a trip

going to a country and when you land trying to figure it all out. I know that some people love that. It's super spontaneous. I think there are some things lost with my approach, but if I'm going there, I want to have a magical experience. And I don't get a magical experience by just randomly wandering around with nothing planned. I do want to have some stuff in a map. So if I'm wandering by it, I'm like, oh, cool. Like I got to check this out. I wrote about, I read about this.

And there's room for wandering, but I don't want to do that for my entire trip. If you are a business owner, listen up. As your business starts to grow, you and I both know what happens. Those things that you used to do manually start to break. They start to take up all your time and you decide, I'm going to look for some automation.

The things you used to do take a week, but how do you automate these things? Well, if this is you and you are in charge of your business, there are three numbers you should know. 36,000, 25, and one.

36,000, that's the number of businesses that have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system. It streamlines accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. 25, NetSuite turns 25 this year. That's 25 years of helping businesses do more with less, close their books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs. And one,

because your business is one of a kind. So you get a customized solution for your KPIs in one efficient system with one source of truth. You can manage risk, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins. It's everything you need all in one place. And as you know,

I like to see all my numbers in one place. That's exactly what NetSuite can help you do. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance absolutely free at iwt.com slash NetSuite. That's iwt.com slash NetSuite, N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E to get your own KPI checklist. iwt.com slash NetSuite.

One of my money dials is generosity. For example, I love tipping big. I love buying gifts and experiences for my family. And recently, I bought my parents a subscription to Delete Me, this episode's sponsor.

Delete.me is a subscription service that will remove your personal information that's being sold online. If you've ever Googled your name, you'll notice tons of search results with your personal information being shared online. That's not okay. It's not okay for you. It's definitely not okay for your family, including your parents. Now, Delete.me will remove it all. Your name, address, phone number, all of it. It automatically works in the background to scan and delete your personal information

from over 30 data brokers, but they'll do custom requests on over 580 data brokers total.

The thing is, identity theft is a real issue. An estimated 15 million Americans had their identity stolen in 2021. We've had a number of people on this very show who were victims of identity theft, and often it put them into tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, and it ruined their credit. That's why I find Delete Me so valuable. It's a service that I personally use, and I love it. They

They reviewed over 4,600 listings for me and removed dozens of pieces of personal information. I knew it would be important to protect my parents too, but I also knew that they probably wouldn't sign up themselves. So I just got it for them. So if generosity is one of your money dials, great. If you care about your parents at all, if you have ever given them a hug, just sign them up. You know they aren't going to do it for themselves, but you also know that they probably need it.

So if you want to get your personal information and the personal information of your loved ones removed from search results on the web, go to joindeleteme.com slash Ramit for 20% off a plan for you or your entire family. That's joindeleteme.com slash Ramit, R-A-M-I-T for 20% off. How much money should you put away for vacation? Well, this falls under guilt-free spending.

So you tell me if 20 to 35% of your take-home pay is for guilt-free spending. And if traveling is really important to you, maybe you're spending, I don't know, 15% of take-home on travel. That's a lot. And if it's one trip, that's a huge trip. If it's two trips or four trips, you know, you can do the math. In our CSP, travel is wildly overrepresented. Wildly.

But that's because we also don't have a car payment and we don't have an expensive 1% AUM financial advisor that we're paying or some really expensive mortgage with all these phantom costs. So we take some of the money that we would ordinarily be putting towards those things or credit card debt and we put it towards what's important to us, which is travel. What's been your favorite stay so far? Well, I've had a lot of magical trips. One of the most memorable was definitely our honeymoon.

My wife and I were inspired by some older couples who basically told us they had taken these really long honeymoons. And we were like, who the hell takes a honeymoon that long? And then we were like, wait, what if we do that? And so we created a six-week honeymoon. We started in Italy. We went then to Kenya on safari, then India, and we finished in Thailand.

And it took a lot of planning. So we used a full-featured travel advisory firm. We also invited our parents to Italy because...

We wanted to bring them with us and we love them. They're mobile, they're healthy, they like each other. Italy's also kind of a nice, safe entryway for everybody. So we brought them with us and that was magical, you know, to be able to take my mother-in-law to the Vatican and to be able to do a food tour with a chef in the farmer's market and then make all this food. It was awesome.

After we had our time with our parents, they left. We continued on in Italy. We saw some amazing things. We saw some fashion stuff, design stuff. We went on safari and that was also amazing. We went to three different camps and we just experienced so much. Of course, we saw amazing animals. We started waking up really early. We stayed at a very warm family-oriented place. We stayed at an ultra luxury place. We did all kinds of stuff. Then in India,

I've never really traveled like that. I have family in India. So when I go there, I stay with them. But this time we didn't tell anybody we were coming because I knew if we told them we were going to go get wrapped up and seeing all of our family, I said, this is our honeymoon. This is the one time we're not telling anybody. And instead we stayed at the most amazing hotels in the world. In fact, my favorite hotel, Udaipur is in Udaipur. It's incredible.

incredible. We saw Taj Mahal and I saw it in a different way than I had ever seen it before. Incredible seeing it with my family. Incredible seeing it with my wife for the first time. Seeing Golden Temple, going behind the scenes, doing tours that I'd never done in India and finishing off in a beautiful resort in Thailand. So that was a beautiful trip. And I think one of my favorite memories, gosh, I have two favorite memories of that trip.

Both of them from Thailand. One of them was I was just incredibly happy and I was doing some journaling and I realized, yes, I'm on my honeymoon. Of course, that's why I'm incredibly happy. Yes, we're eating the best food and we're with each other. But I was also happy because I had set a vision many, many years ago in my 20s. Before I even met my wife, I knew that one day I wanted to go on an incredibly amazing trip.

honeymoon without regard to cost. I did not want cost to be the first or second or even third thing that I had to consider. So I started saving and investing money way back then.

And to be able to be in these places without worrying about how much it costs to order a drink, to me, it felt like an incredible accomplishment. And I was really proud of the work that I had done, that my team has done to help so many people with their money, which in turn has helped my team and has helped me and

And helped me create this experience for my wife and me. So that was amazing. And then my second and even more favorite memory was just a day later, my wife and I were reflecting on the trip. You know, what did we love? What will we change? And she said something I'll never forget. She said, at the end of a trip like this, normally I would be sad. But I know that we can come back whenever we want. Think about the abundance of that answer.

It's amazing to have a partner that thinks in the same level of abundance as you do. To be aligned is incredible. And guess what? Almost every single year after that, we did take a huge, amazing trip. The only thing that derailed us was COVID, but we didn't mind. So we stuck with it. We love travel. It's become part of our rich life. And it feels incredible to be aligned with my wife, Cass.

What if I have debt? How do I balance debt payoff with savings for enjoying a vacation? Now, this is a good question. All right. First off, I don't believe that you should wait to live a rich life until some distant day in the future. I believe you should live a rich life today and a richer life tomorrow. At the same time, you can't be doing whatever you want and then just

rationalizing it by saying, this is my rich life. No. There are some tough decisions to be made, particularly if you have high interest debt, like a credit card debt. Now, I'm going to actually be talking more about money and

and travel because I've noticed some peculiar things that people do when it comes to planning for their vacations. I'm going to talk about it this Saturday on the podcast newsletter. It only comes out once. So if you are not signed up right now, you will never see this piece again. Make sure you are signed up at iwt.com slash podcast newsletter. Sign up right now and I will send you that article that I wrote on Saturday.

Thanks for listening. Send me a little note. Tell me what you think about this episode and send me any other questions you've got about travel, money, vacations, and the rich life. I'll talk to you next week. Thanks for listening to I Will Teach You To Be Rich. I'm Ramit Sethi. Please follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you haven't read I Will Teach You To Be Rich, my book, pick up a copy. You can get it at any bookstore or any library, and it will show you the specific tactics for how to build the I Will Teach You To Be Rich system into your personal finances.