Top Tips!VACATION FUNDING

You don’t have to sell your soul or downsize your home to travel to the places you want to see in life. Relatively small changes in your spending and saving habits will get you where you want to go. Ray Au reports y wife and I attended a wedding in July; a pretty big wedding in Repulse Bay with Mahjong to start, an eightcourse Chinese banquet to follow, and then dancing. Handing over our lai see packet at the entrance it struck me, as it always does, what a sensible idea this monetary proof of love is.

By asking for wedding presents newlyweds run the risk of getting saddled with 20 juicers and some rather unpleasant or at least random “home accessories”. A wedding list at Harvey Nichols or Lane Crawford is all very nice but basically redundant for couples over 30, who already have all the crockery and chinaware, irons and toasters they need (in duplicate). Hard cash on the other hand is always useful.

Our friends are planning to use their lai see to pay for their honeymoon in South Africa. With 200 guests, all putting in HK$500 minimum, they are definitely on to a winner. (I checked: return flights for two to Cape Town in August with Qatar Airways come in at around HK$22,000, so they’ll have plenty left over for safaris and road trips.)

So the day after the wedding, as my wife reminisced about our blissful but comparatively modest honeymoon in Sicily, I sat back and felt bad. Fifteen years into marriage, we are still funding holidays with whatever is in our bank accounts when our travel date comes around.

This month, caught on the hop, we are headed for a two-week self-catering holiday in Koh Samui. Rents are still relatively cheap at the moment as the island bounces back from lockdown. It’s going to be fun, and we’re flying direct from Hong Kong… but can I do better by my family next year? Obviously, I can’t ask friends and family to subsidise us but what proven ways are there to fund and save for travel?

Banking Basics

It occurs to me that the first step is to open a dedicated savings account. Over the coming year, I can then save for our summer jaunt directly and methodically.

Looking into this, I’ve found that setting up a savings account costs nothing (or close to nothing). Just make sure that you don’t face any minimum balance penalties when you actually start to spend the money you’ve saved. I’ve also ensured that I have ATM and online access to the account, so I can draw money directly from the account when booking and travelling. The money I set aside for our trip should be the money I actually spend – no juggling between accounts.

Using a single, dedicated account will also help me budget during our holiday. I can keep an eye on