Illustration: Hannah Buckman
Over the last decade, I’ve become experienced at something that, despite my expertise, I don’t discuss much: vacationing while broke. Based on what I know about economic trends, I’m in good company. It’s expensive out there this summer — food, gas, all of it.
Traveling while broke is one of the high-wire acts of modern life, and I wish we talked about it more, because almost everyone is doing it.
It’s one thing to be broke when you’re young and unattached, but once you’re traveling with kids, the narrative changes and the glamor of improvisation vanishes. There can be acute shame in vacationing as a family with little money, and the only reason I’m writing about it now is that I’m not broke anymore.
For parents, vacations are supposed to be the reward for all of our hard work and responsible planning. Being a parent while on vacation means modeling competence and organization. There are stakes: Everyone’s supposed to have fun and relax. If the parents are stressed, the vacation is a bust. That’s science.
Due to the dizzying buffet of economic circumstances in our times, depending on whom we’re visiting, we’ve held the status of both the “poor cousins” and the bougie city folk — sometimes over the course of the same summer. I’ve experienced the dramatic tension of both roles: silently marveling at the abundance of a friend’s snack drawer, thrilling the hosts with offerings of wine and Ben & Jerry’s.
Broke-ness is highly subjective, of course. Millions of families simply can’t leave their homes — no time off, no reliable car, not enough money for gas, no one with a spare room. My family has always had a car (often, it has needed work at some point while on the road, an eventful hiccup that never fails to throw me into a frenzy of dread and self-loathing), and we’ve usually been working in some capacity in academia, which means there’s time off. Every summer, we hit the road.
More than once, we’ve gone into the red from buying lobsters fresh off the boat or a round of sundowners while the kids play on the beach. We’ve treated ourselves to date-night dinners that we could not afford while the grandparents watched the kids. Who can pass up free babysitting?
Some readers unfamiliar with this terrain might wonder, Why stress yourself out like this? Why not just eat sandwiches, drink Bud Light, and save yourself the stress? Why not be frugal and virtuous? Most of the time, that’s what we’ve done. Packing sandwiches in a sticky Costco cooler bag has long been the final step before leaving on a trip. But as backward as it may sound, sometimes people splurge on things they can’t afford as a way of saying “Fuck you” to their precarious condition.
In a culture that equates luxury with power, to consume luxury is to show the world, and yourself, that you have a bit of power too. Some people might think this behavior is highly irresponsible, and I gently suggest that they kill the cop within.
In one of my favorite novels of the past five years, The Golden State, by Lydia Kiesling, a mother named Daphne hits the road with her toddler, Honey. Daphne is a low-level administrative officer at a university — the same job I was doing when the book came out in 2018. It’s a road-trip adventure story, but Daphne only has a little more than $1,000 in her bank account, and she spends the trip mentally…
Read More: How to Vacation With Kids While Broke