Jenny Wichelow

I prefer to say prepaying instead of saving for, because psychologically, when you think about prepaying for something, it's already yours.

When you prepay for something, then when the time arrives to actually go on that trip, you're not thinking about money.

At least the most expensive elements of that trip have already been paid for.

You've eliminated a huge element that could cause a lot of stress in your whole experience of that trip.

The last thing you want to do is be on your trip and be worried about money.

You might as well have not gone on the trip, right?

So get as much of that out of the way up front as possible.

Do all that math now and start planning for it.

Pre-pay every month towards that trip to Japan.

So when you go there, you're not worried about how much money that costs you.

Maybe like you pay a smaller portion of the trip, but you're responsible for like organizing everything, right?

And doing all this sort of grunt work that's involved.

So there are ways to balance it out that don't necessarily have to be financial.

There's always a random tranche of money, a small amount of money that's there in case something comes up that we didn't plan on.

I think any sort of planning always has a cushion baked in, and inevitably there's always something that's going to come up.

Pre-planning so you don't get there and you're in disagreements about how you're going to spend your time.