Euros. Copyright Gretta Schifano

How do you budget for your family holiday? Are you good at planning your budget and keeping to it? If so you may want to enter a competition run by Caxton FX for bloggers. They’re offering a £500 charged Global currency card as a prize for the blog post with the best top 10 tips for budgeting for a family holiday. The rules for entering the competition are at the end of this post. Here are my tips.

Before you book

Work out what you can afford to spend on the total cost of the holiday itself including while you’re there.

Booking

Once you’ve worked out your budget then book your trip as far as possible in advance to take advantage of early booking discounts and the lowest flight prices.

Meals

When you’re budgeting and booking think about how much you can afford to spend on food. Some holidays include some or all of your meals, others don’t.

Cool bag

Take an insulated cool bag and an ice pack with you so that you can save money by buying drinks and lunch ingredients from shops and supermarkets for when you’re out and about. You can freeze the ice pack at your accommodation.

Insurance

If you travel abroad more than once a year it’s probably more cost effective to get an annual travel insurance policy than to buy insurance each time you travel. (You can read my post here about how to find family travel insurance.)

Passports & EHIC. Copyright Gretta Schifano

EHIC

If you’re travelling in Europe make sure you take a free EHIC card for each member of your family to avoid paying unnecessary medical fees.

Spending money

To avoid over-spending work out how much spending money you have for the whole trip and divide this by the number of days you’ll be away. That is your daily budget for spending money.

Overseas spending

Be careful about using your credit and debit cards abroad as they can charge extra fees each time you use them outside of the UK. If you don’t want to use your usual cards another option is a prepaid card – as offered by Caxton FX – which you load up with cash before you go away.

Know the price of things

Make sure you have an idea of the exchange rate for the currency where you are so that you understand how much things cost. If, like me, you find it hard to remember numbers then make a note of how much £1, £10 and £50 is in local currency on your mobile phone or a piece of paper which you carry with you.

After the trip

If you’ve used your credit card for the trip make sure you pay off the bill in full at the end of the month to avoid credit card fees. Then start looking for deals for your next holiday!

If you’d like to enter the competition to win a £500 the rules from Caxton FX are below.

The rules:-

•Post a blog about your Top 10 Tips for budgeting for your family holiday

•Tweet a link to the post and add the hashtag #holidayplanmums

•You can enter as many times as you like, Caxton FX will judge the competition and the prize winner will be announced on 4th July 2014

Terms and conditions

1.Competition valid until 4th July 2014. Winner will be announced on 7th July 2014.

2.Available to UK based bloggers

3.Prize money will only be issued on a Caxton FX prepaid card. Caxton FX cards are subject to application. If verification checks are not passed, an alternate prize winner will be picked.

4.The prize is non-transferable.

5.Entrants must post a blog containing their top 10 tips for budgeting for a family holiday and tweet a link to the post using the hashtag #holidayplanmum.

6.The winning entry can be republished under the Caxton FX blog with reference to the entry being a prize winner.

7.The winner will be notified via e-mail or twitter direct message and announced on the Britmums website (http://www.britmums.com).

8.Employees of Caxton FX and Raphaels Bank are not eligible to enter this competition.

9.We reserve the right to amend these rules at any time.

Good luck!

Caxton FX are giving me one of their cards loaded with £50 worth of Euros in exchange for writing this post. I’m going to use it when we go on our family holiday to Sicily this summer – hurrah!