How To Fund Your Dream Holiday

International travel doesn’t come cheap, but there are ways to fund such trips. Travellers should plan ahead and invest for the goal instead of dipping into savings or taking a loan.

- Preeti Kulkarni & Priya Nair

An eight-day vacation to the UK can easily cost you `1.3 lakh, while a six-day tour around Paris and Switzerland could set you back by `1.2 lakh. And a nine-day trip to Eastern Europe can be yours for `1.1 lakh – if you don’t mind taking a package tour. These are the approximate amounts you may need to shell out for your international summer holiday. These are big spends that cannot be funded through credit cards – after all, you do not want to start your holiday on borrowed money.

Invest For A Stress-free Holiday 

Despite the huge expenses involved, there’s no escaping the annual getaway. Financial planners believe that holidays – and expensive ones at that – have lately become an integral part of a family’s budget. Given that an international holiday can cost upwards of `1 lakh per person, it calls for extensive planning to ensure that your finances don’t come under the very stress that you are trying to beat.

So, the best way to fund your holiday is to plan for it. And many travel enthusiasts are choosing to do just that of late. “People across age groups are planning their travel well in advance. Generally, retirees are better equipped as they would have a corpus, but youngsters may not be adequately prepared,” says Pankaj Mathpal, CEO, Optima Money Managers.