Our 2026 vacation budget is $40,000. Our mortgage payment is $2,267 a month — $27,204 a year. So yes, we are budgeting nearly 50% more for travel than we pay on our house. When I first laid that out on paper, even I had to sit with it for a moment. Then I looked back at our data and realized: this didn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of 20 years of financial decisions, one remarkable refinance, and a deliberate choice about what we actually want our money to do.

I’ve been tracking every dollar we spend in Quicken since 2006. We have two kids, have lived in three houses, and our spending tells the story of a life that has changed a lot over two decades. This is our 2026 budget — the guardrails we set for the year, not a strict category-by-category spending cap. We spend intentionally and let the numbers tell the story afterward.

But first, let me explain that mortgage number. Because it’s not what it looks like.

The Mortgage That’s Almost Gone

We refinanced our current home in April 2020, locking in a 30-year fixed rate at 2.6% on a $337,000 balance. At the time, that felt like catching lightning in a bottle. In hindsight, it might be the single best financial decision we’ve made as a couple — and we’ve made some pretty good ones.

Our monthly payment is $2,267. Of that, $1,921 is currently going toward principal and only $346 toward interest. We have $158,066 left on a home that’s probably worth $700,000 to $800,000, meaning we’re sitting on somewhere between $540,000 and $640,000 in equity. We have put a lot of work into this house — two major renovation projects and countless smaller ones over the years — so the value has climbed considerably.

At 2.6%, there’s really no mathematical argument for paying this down faster. We were making extra principal payments for a while — that’s partly why the balance has dropped as quickly as it has — but we’ve dialed that back. The money works harder elsewhere. I’ve been building up a separate payoff fund as a psychological hedge, because even a great interest rate feels different when you can see the finish line. But from a pure numbers standpoint, we’re just letting this one ride.

All of which is to say: when you see “mortgage” in our budget, you’re not looking at a house-poor household stretched thin by a big payment. You’re looking at a nearly-paid-off loan at a rate that hasn’t existed in years, where almost every dollar of the payment is building equity anyway.

The vacation budget is genuinely larger. But context matters.

The 2026 Budget

Here’s how we’ve planned to spend this year. These aren’t spending limits so much as expected ranges — anchored in 20 years of actual data, adjusted for what we know is coming.

How Vacation Got to $40,000

The honest answer is that it happened gradually, then suddenly.

For most of our marriage, vacation was a modest line item. We spent $760 on travel in 2007, our first full year as a couple. By the time our kids arrived in 2014 and 2017, we were still spending under $10,000 a year on travel. Small trips, close to home, nothing elaborate. The kids were tiny and travel was hard.

Then in 2019, something shifted. We took a bigger trip — our first real family vacation at scale — and spent $22,210. Then COVID knocked 2020 back down to $5,811. And then the dam broke. We spent $22,370 in 2021, $35,131 in 2022, $42,946 in 2023, $34,384 in 2024, and $45,711 in 2025.

The crossover point — when vacation first exceeded our full mortgage payment for the year — was 2022, and it’s been above every year since. In 2025, we spent $45,711 on travel against $27,204 in total mortgage payments. That’s 68% more on trips than on the house. In 2026, we’re budgeting $40,000 for vacation — still nearly 50% more than the mortgage.

What’s driving this? A few things at once. Our kids are now 11 and 8 — old enough to actually remember trips, old enough to have opinions about where they want to go, young enough that we still have a window before they’d rather be somewhere else entirely. We’re also in a different financial position than we were in 2007. The mortgage is nearly paid off. We have no other debt. Both cars are owned outright. When required monthly payments are low, you have more to direct toward what actually matters to you.

Vacation spending is also lumpy in a way that makes the monthly budget number feel abstract. That $3,333/month figure doesn’t mean we’re writing a check to a travel fund every month. It means that over the course of the year, when you add up the ski weekend in January, spring break in Hawaii, summer in the national parks, and whatever falls in between, the total has consistently landed in the $35K–$45K range for the past few years.

A Few Categories Worth Explaining

Household: the Amazon budget line

Our household budget of $3,000/month ($36,000/year) is deliberately set above our recent average — and 2025 is a good illustration of why. Last year we spent $40,018 in this category, which sounds alarming until you look at what drove it. We bought nearly $10,000 in Polywood furniture for the pool and patio. $6,000 in new living room furniture. A new iPhone for my husband ($1,700). A robot pool vacuum ($1,200). It adds up fast, and it tends to cluster in years when we’re refreshing the house. Our budget assumes a calmer year — which it probably will be.

In a more normal year, household is exactly what it sounds like: the everything-else bucket. Anything that comes in a brown box and doesn’t belong in another category ends up here.

Utilities: pool and hot tub tax

We have a pool and a hot tub. That’s the whole explanation. Our utilities are higher than they’d otherwise be and there’s no getting around it. We’ve budgeted $752/month ($9,024/year), which lines up with what we’ve spent the past few years.

Auto: no payments, just operating costs

Both our cars are paid off — a 2017 Honda Pilot and a 2018 Audi Q5 we bought out at the end of its lease in 2020. The $720/month auto budget covers fuel, insurance, oil changes, and routine service. No monthly car payment anywhere in this budget. That’s intentional, and it’s part of what makes the vacation line possible.

Gifts: lumpy by nature

At $700/month ($8,400/year), gifts is one of our bigger categories — and one of the trickiest to track month to month. Christmas alone can consume several months’ worth of budget in a single November and December. Birthdays, weddings, and baby showers scatter unpredictably through the year. The monthly figure is really a yearly average; any given month can look wildly different from the budget.

In future posts I’ll go into the details of each trip — what we spent, where we stayed, what made it worth it. The list over the past several years reads like a highlight reel: Costa Rica, Alaska, Jamaica, Mexico, Hawaii, Utah’s national parks. Coming up: Aruba and Italy. Each one has its own story, its own budget, and its own version of the question every traveler eventually faces — was it worth it? Spoiler: yes. Always yes.

What This Budget Is — and Isn’t

These numbers aren’t a strict spending limit. We don’t have a jar system, an envelope budget, or a rule that says we can’t buy something because a category is full. What we have is awareness — and 20 years of data that tells us roughly what our spending will look like if we live the way we intend to live.

Tracking everything in Quicken for this long has given us something I genuinely value: the ability to see patterns before they become problems, and to make tradeoffs with clear eyes. We know that vacation has grown significantly. We know the household category can spike in renovation years. We know that our mortgage burden is shrinking every single month. None of that is a surprise — it’s all in the data.

The budget’s job isn’t to restrict us. It’s to keep the total from creeping in a direction we haven’t consciously chosen. When we spend $40,000 on vacation, that’s a choice. When the household category spikes because we bought new patio furniture and a living room set in the same year, that’s also a choice. The alternative — spending without looking — is what I’ve been tracking against for two decades.

Each month I’ll be reviewing actuals against this budget — what was over, what was under, and why. Because the monthly number only tells part of the story. It’s the explanation behind it that makes it interesting.

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All data is from our actual Quicken spending records, tracked continuously since 2006. Numbers reflect our household of two adults and two children (born 2014 and 2017). Monthly budget figures are targets, not hard caps. Actuals reviewed each month.