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Hello /r/personalfinance

I'm a long-time lurker and occasional poster here. I almost never see any posts about going on vacation so I could use some advice on whether I should go on this vacation or not..

I'm a 28 y/o male, ~$75K salary (including bonus) plus $600 from brother for rent (~$4700/mo roughly total). Right now, I only have about $10k total in the bank, plus $1000 in cash. My monthly expenses is roughly ~$3000. I have no retirement savings mainly because I just graduated from college back in May 2014 and company offers no 401k matching. I was focused on paying down debt. I was also making a lot less when I first started at around $45k.

Right after I graduated, I got too excited about buying a car so I bought one for $19k total. I also had student loans for about $13k. Early last year, I bought a crappy condo for $250k with a VA loan that needed a lot of updates. I went with a crappy one because I got burnt out from the bidding competitiveness (SF bay area) plus it's in a good location and I liked the layout of the place. The remodeling took 2 months, very exhausting but i was very happy with the results. I paid ~$11k total but had to take out a $4k loan from Lowe's (0% interest rate for 18 months) for the updates.

Overall around summer last year, I was in debt for around $29k ($14k car, $11k student loans, $4k loans). I was very happy with my place but I felt house poor. So I rarely went out for the rest of the year.

Fast forward to now, I paid off the student loans and the Lowe's loan. Car loan is down to ~$9k. It feels great to finally see my net worth pretty high on Mint. Granted a lot of it was from the house equity but still it felt very satisfying. I feel like I'm finally getting comfortable and worth something...

I have some family/friends traveling on May to Asia. If I go on this trip, I'll probably end up spending around $3000-$4000. I don't know if I deserve to go on this trip. I haven't reached my goal yet to be comfortable which is reach 6 months worth of expenses (~$15,000) and have no debt besides the mortgage.

Sometimes I think about my age as well. I'm 28 y/o and I've only traveled once since I graduated. I went to NYC back in 2015 for 2 weeks but only ended up spending $1000 cause I crashed at a friend's place and spent credit card points for the flight. But then again, I also know some people who have gone years with no vacation so I don't want to feel like I'm entitled to one..



Submitted March 29, 2017 at 04:27AM by sgtbrecht http://ift.tt/2nuaDwg

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