Welcome to Tips for Family Trips!
I'm Allison Laypath. I started Tips for Family Trips because I want to help you plan debt-free dream vacations.
I live near Salt Lake City, Utah with my husband and two teenage children. We have been traveling with our kids since they were newborns… which adds up to nearly 20 years of family travel experience! We are a typical middle-class family who knows ALL about never having enough money or time, backseat tantrums (and sometimes front-seat tantrums), and many other common family vacation challenges.
A dream trip can mean a lot of things, and if you're like me, you have more than one dream. Some of my dream trips have been close to home and relatively inexpensive, like our road trip to South Dakota's Black Hills.
But for years, my BIG dream trip to Europe – anywhere in Europe – was stuck in the “Someday Zone”. There was never enough money or time. And it was intimidating because we had never traveled outside North America.
Flying across the ocean to an unfamiliar place with our kids… What could go wrong?
It pushed all my anxiety buttons. And it was expensive. And we could only go during summer vacation – the most expensive and crowded time of year. “Someday” started to feel like “never.”
Then my sister took her kids to Europe and she shared some of her tips for finding affordable flights. If she could do it, I could do it!
Six weeks later, we found cheap flights to Paris, and six months later, we traveled to London and Paris with our kids. The trip was all we hoped it would be and we made so many great family memories.
The great thing about planning a successful dream trip is that it makes your comfort zone bigger. We took an amazing family trip to Japan in June 2023. And just a few months later, we took a Christmas trip to Austria! Next up… an Alaskan cruise with my parents, in-laws, and kids in 2024.
We have done all of these dream trips DEBT-FREE! I love using credit cards because they PAY US to travel with points and travel rewards. We pay off our balances in full every month and never pay interest.
Avoiding high credit card interest rates and paying extra on our home and car loans every month saves us thousands of dollars in interest payments every year. That's money we save for our next dream trip!
My goal is to help you take your dream trip.
Check out all my travel tips on the blog. Click on Planning Tips, Save Money, and Destinations. Or use the Search box at the top of this page. You'll get lots of tried and true tips that can help you make the most of any family vacation.
Whether your dream trip is next month, next year, or several years away… Just deciding that it's GOING to happen makes a big difference and it's never too early to start preparing for it.
And why limit yourself to just one dream? There's room for more than one and lots of little dreams along the way. Let's start today!
