The Intentional Spendthrift

My wife Suzie and I have been travelling around the Iberian peninsula for three weeks now, moving between hotels as we go. Last night, over a brandy nightcap, she asked whether the one in my hand was cheaper or pricier than the ones we’d had at our previous two stops. I had no idea. Worse, I couldn’t even tell her what this one cost.

That’s not like me. I’m normally frugal to a fault, so not knowing the price of a drink I’m actively holding is close to a personality violation. But things change when we’re on an extended trip: I willingly cross over to the spendthrift dark side.

It’s taken years to get here. In our younger travelling days, I’d spend whole vacations adding receipts in my head, running a private tally of every dime spent, and in the process, draining a fair amount of the fun out of the holiday. I also went through a phase of insisting a bottle of €4 brandy tasted exactly like a €40 one, and mostly convincing myself.

I broke the habit eventually, thanks to a tip from someone with the same affliction: preallocate the vacation budget and mentally treat it as already spent. Simple. Almost embarrassingly obvious. But it worked.

These days, the money is gone the moment we book the flights, at least in my head. Whatever we spend on brandy, tapas, or one more museum ticket isn’t a new expense, it’s just the pre-spent budget catching up with reality. The math still happens in the back of my mind, but I’m able to ignore it now.

Suzie, for her part, still finds this transformation amusing. She’s married to a man who still has the suit from their wedding 37 years ago, yet now watches that same guy order a second brandy without so much as a glance at the menu price. She likes to test the boundaries occasionally, asking questions like last night’s, just to see if the old vigilance resurfaces. So far, it hasn’t.

If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that frugality and enjoyment don’t have to share a body at the same time. I’m still frugal, just not while I’m on vacation. The accounting happens before the trip, not during it, and the whole holiday runs better for it.

So I’ll ask you the same thing Suzie asks me: have you ever caught yourself mid-spend, unable to say what something cost, and did it feel like failure or freedom?