When you’re on holiday you can get in to a different mindset about spending money.  You might think what the heck its time to enjoy myself and spend freely, your relaxed and contented.  You don’t like thinking about how dangerously close you are to dipping into your overdraft.  What’s another few quid on the credit card when you have the happy glow of one too many cocktails!  Yes come on we have ALL been there. But the costs can QUICKLY spiral if you spending goes unchecked.  It’s not so much fun when you land back in the UK and reality hits! Payday might seem a long way away and the excitement of your holiday sadly now a distant memory! We have spent the last week on holiday in Spain so it was excellent timing for me to take part in a Scottish Friendly Money Saving Diary Challenge.

I made a point of not letting myself get TOO carried away! Holidays are something I love but deep down I know we have other spending priorities that are more important.  Our house needs some serious renovations.  I wanted to use a spending diary to try and see more clearly where savings could be made so that we have more funds to commit to upgrading our house! If I can save money on holiday then I can definitely save more during regular weeks.  By just being more aware about where our money goes and avoiding purchases which aren’t strictly necessary.

Holiday Entertainment

We had unlimited access to the theme park PortAventura World during our stay so for us a big cost would have been keeping hydrated in the heat! To save LOTS of money we bought a bottle of water each then made the most of the water fountains dotted around the park to refill them. It saved a small fortune doing this because bottles of water in the theme park were quite pricey and we developed quite the thirst in the sunshine. Even better if you have a supermarket near you buy your first initial bottles from them.  As they are much cheaper than the ones available in the theme park.

Then when we hit the beach, the boys grumbled they had no buckets and spades etc to play with, the next time we came I took a few of our plastic cups provided with the all inclusive drinks at the hotel which doubled quite nicely as a scoop or a mini bucket for sandcastles!!! Another saving, admittedly not on such a big scale as the water fountain tip but better to have a few extra quid now I am back in the UK where the boys already have their own buckets and spades – we certainly needed no more!

Our hotel in Lanzarote last year had some beach toys in reception available to residents so if your children don’t come onboard to utilising plastic cups see what your hotel has in stock before spending any money!

A saving we missed

One of the days on our holiday we visited Barcelona so the boys could see the football ground, we were away from the resort straight after breakfast and then missed lunch from our all-inclusive package.  This meant we spent quite a lot eating out that day.  A trick we missed was checking if the hotel would have provided us with a picnic lunch as part of our all inclusive board instead! That is something for us to definitely consider next time we are on holiday, because it would have saved us a good few euros!!! I did notice another family from a different hotel with sandwiches so they obviously had more sense and a better managed bank account than me!

So overall we did quite well spurred on by the money saving challenge, but we could have been a bit more frugal and arrived home to slightly less of a dent to our bank account!!!