hey guys it's Tasha and Joseph from one big happy and welcome to part two in our
Singapore travel series in this video we are going to be walking you through how
step-by-step how to plan a trip a big trip an international trip so this
should cover everything that you need to take a month-long vacation in Africa to
a weekend nearby
if you don't already know we are taking a family vacation to
Singapore this fall and we are very excited about it and we're doing this
video series on everything that it takes to do this international travel so this
video in particular we are going to be talking about how exactly you plan a
trip so number one set a budget setting a budget is going to be the most
important step reason being if you don't have the money then you probably
shouldn't be taking a vacation it's not a great idea to increase credit card
debt to fund a vacation now that being said if it's kind of shorter term
vacation during the year you kind of know how much you have to take those
trips don't then pick places that you know your budget will not extend to
cover yeah like if you've got a like a four hundred dollar budget maybe not
Hawaii this time this year maybe next year maybe not this year exactly so what
you want to do is you have a rough idea of where your budget is going to take
you and I think if you've done any travel at all then you know and if not
well start researching and then you'll you'll figure it out and part of this
too will depend on how you like to travel because some people are cool with
hostels like even like family hostels and but some people and some people want
well it's my vacation if I'm gonna travel I want luxury accommodations and
so you obviously that means your budget is
gonna be larger so then step number two you have your budget and we touched on
this a little bit now you're gonna decide where you are
going to go and the reason like Joseph said why we put budget first is because
your budget is going to dictate just how far your vacation dollars are going to
go so a couple ways that we like to kind of think about where we want to go so
keep a bucket list so as you come across places maybe in travel magazines or ads
that seem really interesting just put it on a list somewhere a digital list of
places that you might want to go in your lifetime and so then when it's time to
travel you can just review that list and say oh well let's see what these have
these places look and if you know you want to travel but aren't quite sure where
to go yet you can always Google you know great places to travel great place
for first-time travel that kind of thing family budget international travel just
lots of different you know there are lots of different options also you can
follow travel bloggers or vloggers or people on Instagram who travel a lot
because they'll take pictures of their lives and say ooh that's pretty I want
to go there step three check your passport and visa
requirements for the place that you want to go before booking your flights if you
jump straight to you oh I have my flight now and then realize that you're gonna
have to have a visa or a vaccination is another thing and then your passport is
more than you're gonna expire in a couple months gonna have to redo all
that yeah so we actually had to get new passports because our passports were set
to expire within sixty six months of our travel day I think it was like less than
60 days actually and Reeves didn't even have a passport so we did this backwards
which is why we're recommending don't do what we did when you start to think
about travel look at your passport fortunately we had plenty of time
and that's see there's a little bit of cheat room but but if we had done a
last-minute flight we might have been kinda screwed so then step number four
research travel insurance and I know our step orders like order of operations for
trip planning is different from what you'll see a lot online and the reason
why we say this to do these things before you even book your flight is
because depending on the type of trip insurance that you want you have to get
it within a certain number of days of making your first purchase for the trip
so if you wanted insurance that would cover like it cancellation for any
reason you want to make sure you know that in advance you get some quotes in
advance so you know how much it's gonna cost as part of your budget and so then
the minute you book your flight which will be spoiler alert the next step that
you take you then hop on over to your travel insurance provider that you have
already pre decided on and go ahead and book your travel insurance step 5
finally booking your flights now you want to give yourself as much time as
possible to find a great deal so some websites allow you to set alerts you
might be able to use points from a credit card to find a great deal but
plan in advance that's the best way to find a great deal consistently sometimes
they're last-minute flights and if you're able to just pick up and go then
you know keep that open as an option but more than likely you're gonna be
looking six months or so in advance yeah especially if you're traveling with
someone else besides you so we're traveling with a family of four so we
need four seats so it just made more sense for us to just look far out to get
good deals rather than waiting for it last-minute travel deals step number six
research the places you want to go the things that you want to do and the
reason why we say to do this before you book your hotel if the last thing you
want to do is book a hotel over here when everything you want to do is over
here and it's crazy expensive to get from here to here and then you bust your
budget just on transportation costs or it also takes a
really long time I've done that where my hotel was about 45 minutes from maybe even
one hour from the city center and so most of my day seemed like was sitting
on a bus getting from one point to another yeah that's not how you want to
spend it and we were actually this close to doing that making that mistake for
Singapore because we kind of we wanted to stay on Sentosa island which is like
a resort island that has theme parks and stuff like that and it has a beach so
that's where Singapore's Beach is but we only planned on spending one day
actually doing the activities on Sentosa every other day we're going into the
city we're going to Little India we're going to Chinatown and it's like an hour
to get off of Sentosa and into the main city and the last thing we want to do is
spend two hours a day commuting while we're on vacation we do that every day
no thank you that's true especially and Reeves doesn't do our commute every day
yeah he would not like that and with a toddler we might want to be able to pop
back to our hotel for him to nap so all of those that's why it's important to
just kind of plot out where you think you might go and then base your hotel
selection on that step seven after picking the things that you want to see
you can also then figure out how you want to get around whether that's going
to be public transit renting a car walking biking whatever the distance is
from your hotel to the the things you want to see or really the distance
between each attraction you can kind of figure out how long and and how much it
also you can fit in any given day considering how long it's going to take
you to get from place to place absolutely yeah all right and know that
you know all of those details you can go ahead and book your hotel and we did a
lot we're gonna do a whole video on how we decided where we wanted to stay
because I think we researched this for months didn't we oh my god now so we
pulled the trigger quick on one hotel just to reserve something and
but something a refundable rate and then we continued looking because we didn't
want to overlook and then regret not booking something
and so our hotel I think will be the most expensive part of our Singapore
trip not even our flights so normally its flight and then hotel and then kind
of everything else but we kind of had to go back and forth and just kind of think
long and hard again about what we wanted out of the vacation what we wanted that
to feel like and look like and how important the hotel was to us and it was
kind of important so you'll hear more about that when we do the hotel video
but that's it eight steps to planning your vacation and let us know if you
have any questions what you think about our eight steps because like I said they
they are kind of the order is different from what you'll see in other places
yeah and so we're always open to getting a better better way of doing things so
if you think that hey we've missed something or anything like that drop us
a line we'll respond and don't forget to thumbs up and subscribe for more
videos like these and we will see you guys next time
bye