How do you budget/plan for trips and days out?

[SushiGo]

I'm working through our yearly budget. One area we often overspend on is trips and days out.

There’s some obvious ways we can save money BUT what I am really interested in is how other families decide how often you will go on a day trip or activity throughout the year, and would love to hear your long term planning tips.

Do you have a budget per month and book it all in advance? Do you spread it around so there's more to spend in the holidays?

Do you book things as and when but have an idea of how many high, medium and low cost things you can afford to do each year?

Any other approaches I haven't thought of?

We have memberships to National Trust and another place so try and max those. I'm bad about picnics though and that's where the added costs creep in!

We went to Blenheim and I think it must have cost £150 not including petrol.

Holidays we don't budget for, we just book when we've decided what we want to do, but I'm going to work on that after this summer.

No proper budgeting but I try. and see how to stretch the money. We do maybe one-two large attraction a year now, depending where our main holiday is.

So, for days out we try and take food with us and maybe just get an icecream there. Or if the food is a bit special (amazing fish and chips at a museum once). then we budget it accordingly and may not have a takeout during the month.

Some things are Christmas and. birthday presents. So one year we got Merlin passes in the Christmas sale where we didn't do a lot of other paid for activities for that time. Theatre trips or experiences (Harry Potter World, Zoo keeper) are also often presents.

We also have NT membership and did EH one year when we did a UK holiday and it was worth the expense. Last year we converted Tesco Clubcard points into Cadw membership when on holiday in Wales as it was cheaper than paying entry fees each. time.

Tesco also paid for other entries.

The one thing I do budget for. as I normally need to book months in advance are Christmas concerts.