Yup! Our travel budget has gone sky high.

Glad that I am exception here.:)

if american, low average travel
if elsewhere, travel is cheaper

'true' "average" by country or world

some of us travel extremely little

The question regarding whether/not I'm spending too much on travel (vacation) has been on my mind a lot recently. So this is a great thread. There's almost not travel in my work, so almost everything is on my own dime. Plus it's usually me, wife and 2 kids traveling together everywhere.

You are brave to disclose your income. But when you say your income is $115-125k, I presume this is your gross income? If so, your take-home after tax, insurance and retirement contribution is in the $60-70k range? In that case, $25k/year on travel is a pretty hefty travel spending. Makes me feel better to know there are others spending as much or more %-wise than us on travels. Out of my take-home, I spend 25% on travel and 30% on mortgage. With what's left, we still live comfortably but we're almost living paycheck to paycheck.

More to the point of this thread... even though we spend a lot on travels, we still can't afford J/F because there're 4 of us and we also travel internationally multiple times a year. J is something I do once in a while as a splurge, but only via award booking. Have to fly Y almost every time, except I will try to do PE if it's more than 12-14hrs of flying.

You assume that's annual income. Maybe that poster meant monthly or weekly ;)

My wife and I spend about 20% of our combined after tax income on travel every year, and do not fly for work, have no mortgage and minimal bills. We have 11-13 weeks a year vacation, which we spend 8-10 on actual vacation. We could easily fly J, but find very little value in it, unless its on points.

That seems like healthy budgeting. You must be able to save a lot of money. On the contrary, I have huge mortgage and huge bills due to 2 kids.

I'm envious that you get that much vacation per year. I get 1/4~1/3 of what you get for vacation and work in a field that's notorious for burnout. I feel like I have to get my vacation fix at least every 3-4 months to keep going. But due to limited vacation days, I usually only get away for 5-10 days at a time. I agree with you that I find little value in spending 3-5x to fly in J and much more value in spending the extra $ to stay in a luxury hotel. But on our typical vacation, we would take an 8-day trip to a place that takes 24hrs door to door. When the travel time is 1/4 of your entire vacation, I think there's all the more value in flying comfortably. Yet, traveling in J is cost-prohibitive and would likely push our vacation spending from our current 25% of take-home to ~50%. Totally unsustainable. On the other hand, I find it a torture to fly more than 12 hours straight in Y. So I splurge for PE on really long flights, knowing that PE is probably the worst value out of all the cabins.

if the guy is an equity partner & they go bust, he'll not only make no income, but have to pay off some debt

wow, just wow. Based on these figures, you can't afford to even fly basic economy or should be flying ULCCs only. If you have any other debts, you shouldn't be flying anywhere, you should be paying down those debts

Agree with your comment!

How do we know he has debts? My brother and his wife are teachers and make about $115-125K and they spend easily $25K a year on travel and have no debts.

Disagree. How does someone who makes $115,000 a year not have $25000 in extra disposable income?
One must have pretty poor budgeting skills not to be able to scrounge up $25k on a $115k salary to cover travel (or whatever they want to spend $25k on)

I can't tell if the last five or so posts are serious or trolling.

It's not possible to conclude that without knowing more about a person's whole financial picture. Consider person A and person B, each earning $115k annual salary. Person A supports a family of 4 and has a modest size mortgage and car payments. Assume this is the US, where health care costs for a family of 4 are a significant budget item, as is having to set aside money for one's own retirement. Even $5k of annual discretionary budget could be hard to identify, let alone $25k. Now consider person B with no mortgage or rent (maybe the house is paid off, maybe they're living free of charge in Mom and Dad's pool house) and no dependents (no kids yet or kids are grown). Earmarking $25k/year for travel may still not be trivial for person B but it is at least conceivable.