Ever felt like planning a family vacation as a single parent is more stressful than staying home?
You’re not alone — but what if I told you it doesn’t have to be that way?
Budgets can be challenging, especially as pricing for everything has increased due to high inflation over the past few years.
In my previous post, Solo Parent, Three Kids, One Big Adventure: Why I Decided to Take This Trip – Single Parent Life, I decided to plan a 12-hour road trip for Spring Break trip in 2025 — solo with 3 kids. To do that, I knew I had to make sure my budget was in order.
With a good plan — a solo trip with kids is doable and can even be fun! Below are some easy steps you can take to budget for a solo parent-family vacation:
- Pre-Trip Savings & Planning
- Budgeting with Your Kids
- Staying on Budget During the Trip
Pre-Trip Savings & Planning
Setting a Realistic Budget
Setting a realistic budget can be tricky. Luckily there are a variety of resources out there to help you estimate costs for trips.
If you don’t have a trip in mind, consider:
- Travel timing – when are you wanting to travel
- Destination – where do you want to go
- Length – how long will your trip be
- Type of trip – like a road trip, plane travel, bus, or train.
This will help to build out your budget categories. For my family, our trip constraints were already built-in:
- Travel timing: My kids’ Spring Break from school.
- Length: 11 days available, taking the weekends into consideration
- Type of Trip: Road Trip using our vehicle
- Destination: Pensacola, Florida
Estimating Vacation Expenses
Here are some common categories to consider in your budget. I try to keep it as simple as possible. It’s easy to create too much noise in your budget by going too micro on categories:
- Accommodations – this can be hotels, short-term rentals, cabins, etc.
- Transportation – cost for a rental car, airfare, train or bus ticket, tolls, gas, and parking fees.
- Food – I find this to be one of the highest-cost categories! We have to eat, and costs have gone up over the year, especially with my kids getting older. This budget category adds up if you’re not careful.
- Souvenirs – my kids love to buy all kinds of stuff when we are on trips. As a family tradition, we buy an ornament for our Christmas tree.
- Activities – costs for doing all the things in the area. When researching, try to find free or low-cost items you can do as a family.
- Buffer – things never go as planned, so it’s good to build a buffer into your budget to account for all the unforeseen items that might come up.
- Home – don’t forget about pet care or any other help you might need for your home while you are gone.
Software Used
These days, there are so many tools to help in budgeting and finding estimates. These are the tools I used:
- YNAB – I create a new budget category for each trip we take under our “Vacation Dreams” budget group. I add notes that break down each expense category, then create a target amount for our vacation.
- ChatGPT – I used ChatGPT for several things:
- Estimates on gas, based on my vehicle type.Average food costs per person at the destination we were going to.Mapping out the best travel routeFinding places to eat.Things to do in the area.
- Reviewing my budget categories and amounts for any errors or things I was overlooking.
- Hotels.com – I receive a corporate discount through my company and have some travel rewards that I could use. So, I often use this website over others.
For our Spring Break trip, this is how our trip categories looked like:
- Accommodations – 3 hotels. Hotels on the way there and way back at the halfway point. Then our hotel in Pensacola.
- Transportation –tolls, gas, and parking fees.
- Food – I planned to get groceries when we arrived and eat breakfast in the hotel room. I estimated the costs of eating 2 meals a day (lunch and dinner) for 4 people.
- Souvenirs – I didn’t plan to buy any souvenirs for myself but did budget for my youngest child. For my older kids, I worked with them on a personal spending budget, which I go over below.
- Activities – there are a lot of things to do in Pensacola! I made a list of each of those places, the costs (if applicable), the days they were open, etc. I gave my kids a “presentation” on all the options and we ranked each item by “have to do!”
- Buffer – I added a generous buffer to this trip, as I wanted to make sure I could cover any unforeseen items. Especially since we were traveling across multiple states.
- Home – I worked out cat care while we were gone.
Saving in Advance
I typically save for trips in advance. It sometimes takes me years to save for a large trip. By using the targets feature in my YNAB budget, I will use the vacation category as a sinking fund, adding money from every paycheck. Once I put the funds in the category, I try my best to leave the funds alone.
There have been times that I wanted to go on a trip, but there was no way I could save for it on time. In situations like this, I will adjust my expectations and move the trip back to a more realistic timeframe where I can save enough money to take the trip, or I will plan for a different location/trip so that I can save enough by that time.
Here are a few tips for saving:
- Automate the savings where it moves automatically.
- Use software, like YNAB, to create a budget target that you’re working towards every paycheck.
- Use cashback, rewards, or gift cards for trip-related purchases.
- Use travel hacks (I have been looking into this, but haven’t done it myself yet)
Budgeting with the Kids
I’ve been working with my kids on how to budget. They receive a weekly allowance and have three categories:
- Spend
- Save
- Share
For our trip, I worked with my older kids to create a personal spending budget for the trip:
- How much money would they receive between now and our vacation?
- How much would they want to distribute towards the vacation?
It’s interesting how different my kids are. One kid wanted to spend every single penny. The other was more conservative and distributed a portion for the vacation but kept the rest in the budget categories.
This was a good exercise, as it made them think in advance about how much money they wanted to spend on this trip. I also set the expectation that I wasn’t going to give them any extra money, so it was up to them to spend how they wanted to. I was hoping this would help eliminate any “begging” or “whining” for things during the trip.
Staying on Budget During the Trip
Having a budget is great when planning.
Staying on a budget during the trip can be its own challenge.
I haven’t always been great about sticking to my budget categories when we are on the go. For this trip, I planned to do daily check-ins with my spending for the day. I also planned to input the expenses into YNAB, as we go, so I can see in real-time how we were doing against the budget amount.
I’ll share how I did on my budget in a future post.
What’s Next
To follow along with our 2025 Spring Break vacation, future posts will cover:
- 12-hour Road Trip Logistics with Three Kids
- My Packing Plan for a Road Trip with Kids
- 2025 Spring Break Vacation Recap
- 2025 Spring Break Lessons Learned
Single Parent Travel Tips—What’s Worked for You?
- What’s been your biggest challenge when trying to plan a trip on a single income?
- Do you have a go-to budget-friendly destination or travel hack that works for your family?
- What kind of travel resources or planning tools would help make your next trip easier?
✨Traveling on a budget as a single parent is hard – but not impossible. Share your wins budgeting wins or challenges. Let’s share and support each other!
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