People thinking about vacations and holidays have a wide variety of options, from budget family vacations, budget getaways, luxury destinations, staycations, and many more, but the common factor that drives this form of goal setting is emotional stimulation. People want to ‘get away’ and although there are so many options, the way the brain works through decisions to spend money is pretty much the same for everyone. It’s known as Away From Home Horizons spending and it’s one of the 14 ways the brain compartmentalizes or thinks about spending money.

Very few people pull out the family budget spreadsheet or personal finance spreadsheet when considering out-of-home spending horizons because there is an emotional distance between the two experiences. It’s this distance that makes this spending category so lucrative for the businesses and people who influence your money.

There are 4 main ways the mind works with regards to spending horizons outside the home;

1. Horizons away from home: planned experiences

It is well documented in the field of social psychology that the main motivation for a vacation or holiday is the pursuit of pleasure: the search for emotional arousal. Therefore, there is often a great deal of emotional involvement in the decision-making process of choosing where to go, what mode of transport to take, where to stay, and to some extent a vaguely defined itinerary.

Most of the time, a significant proportion of the cost of these options is spent well before the enjoyment of the experience and by using a credit card instead of cash to pay for it. This produces a gap in time, and during that gap, the brain justifies the expense by imagining the feelings, memories, and experience before it got there.

Vacation time is experienced as a vital event.

2. Away from home: stays

Since travel planning and itineraries have visible up-front costs and only imaginary benefits, many people perceive that the costs may be too high to travel abroad to broaden horizons, but the driver of emotional excitement is still there, leading to to an increase in permanence. at home, known as vacations at home. These may involve planning trips away from home, or they may involve local resorts, because the upfront cost aspect is perceived as significantly less. However, because there is a greater degree of familiarity with places that are already known than when traveling abroad, the pleasure and experience for many people is simply not the same because the level of new variety and difference is not the same. .

3. Short stays away from home, at home and abroad

Vacations are important to people’s well-being due to stressful lives, difficult jobs, illness, depression, and routines. “Getting Away” is recognized as so valuable, that many charities donate vacations to the long-term, terminally ill and their carers. So it’s not surprising that there’s the vacation equivalent of snacking: the short break. These times allow enough variety to provide the desired perception of freedom, sensation, novelty, and connection with others before returning to the usual routine.

4. Money to spend on vacations

Something strange is going on with the way people think about spending money on vacations. Some have a specific credit card, a traveler’s check or a fanny pack with which to regulate spending during the holidays, but what nobody thinks about is that, whatever the theoretical amount that people set aside to spend, what think about your staying power – Vacation money is always spent before you even get on the plane. There is a reaction to the normal restriction of common sense, known as psychological reactance. Basically, people don’t like to be told what they should or shouldn’t do, so when you’re on vacation, there’s a certain degree of abandonment of normal social rules, people drink too much, sleep with people they normally they wouldn’t even talk, and they give very little consideration to how and where they spend their money. Expenses and decisions are made carelessly and without consideration because the money in the mind is already gone, and half the fun of a vacation is spending it with abandon.

Nobody who has really enjoyed a ‘classic vacation’ ever went back and compared actual spending to planned spending on the financial planning worksheet or family budget worksheet. This is why, as part of the preparation, the planning of a vacation, it is very useful to have included the motivation theory of financial goal setting, or rather smart goal setting. By investing in online personal finance software, it is possible to track and maintain financial goals, and these can and often do involve activities outside the home as the primary goal. Save up before the holidays or set aside a regular amount to splurge on short breaks when needed.

Certainly, online personal finance would rarely be accessed during the holidays, but it would provide access if your allotted spending money ran out. Then it would be easy to refer to personal finance worksheets and negotiate some other financial goals to unleash even more pleasure and excitement, instead of spending with abandon and suffering additional financial pain when you return.