What Does Travel Actually Cost in Retirement?
Travel is the number one thing people say they want to do in retirement.
Research consistently shows that the majority of adults over 50 plan to travel, and that desire has been growing year over year. International trips, bucket list experiences, extended time abroad. All of it is on the rise.
And yet most retirement income plans don't have a real line item for it.
So what does travel in retirement actually cost? And how do you think about it honestly without turning every trip into a math problem?
The Honest Answer Is: It Depends
Travel costs in retirement vary enormously based on where you go, how you like to travel, how often you go, and what phase of retirement you're in.
A weekend with the grandkids looks nothing like a two-week international trip. A cruise has a different cost structure than renting a house in Portugal for a month. Domestic travel is different from international.
What matters more than a specific number is understanding how travel spending tends to work in retirement so you can have a realistic conversation about what your plan needs to support.
Early Retirement Is Usually the Most Active
Research on retirement spending consistently shows that people tend to travel more and spend more on experiences in the early years of retirement than they do later on.
That makes sense. Early retirement is often when people are healthiest, most energetic, and most motivated to finally do the things they've been putting off. It's also when the freedom of retirement still feels new.
Over time, travel tends to slow down naturally. Not because of money, but because of energy, health, and changing priorities.
Financial planners often refer to this pattern using the terms go-go years, slow-go years, and no-go years to describe how activity and spending shift across the arc of retirement. A plan that accounts for higher spending in the earlier phase tends to be more accurate than one that assumes your expenses will be flat throughout.
The Questions Worth Thinking Through
Rather than chasing a specific number, here are the questions worth working through with an advisor:
• How much travel do you realistically want to do in the first five to ten years of retirement?
• Are there specific trips or experiences that are priorities, and do those have a rough cost attached?
• How does your travel vision naturally shift as you think about later years?
• How does travel fit alongside your other income needs and spending priorities?
Getting clear on these questions makes the planning conversation much more useful and much more personal.
What This Means for Your Plan
A retirement income plan that includes a real travel budget, even an estimated one, is more honest and more useful than one that doesn't.
It means your overall picture accounts for the years when you're likely to spend more. It means you're not drawing down unexpectedly because travel spending was never part of the picture. And it means you can enjoy the trips you take without second-guessing whether the plan can handle it.
What We See at The 611 Group
At The 611 Group, this is one of the most practical conversations we have during our mid-year review process. Not just how much someone has saved, but what they actually want to spend it on and whether the income plan reflects that. Travel almost always comes up. And almost always, it needs a real place in the plan rather than a footnote.
A Final Thought
Travel in retirement isn't an indulgence. For most people it's one of the main reasons they saved in the first place.
It deserves a real place in your plan, not a footnote.
If that conversation hasn't happened yet, it's worth having before retirement, not after.
Willie Schuette
The 611 Group Wealth Advisors