Monday, February 16, 2009

Rome, what a line of credit is for!

In this time of global economic crisis, is it irresponsible to finance family vacations on debt? Seriously, I want to know. When we came to Europe I planned to use our line of credit to do travel. This was long before any hint of sub-prime mortgages and the ensuing madness was in the public eye. Alas the move was $ignificantly more expen$ive than I thought and we maxed out the line of credit by the end of the first month. Chris and I are extremely frugal people and we have been consistently paying down that line of credit, only to blow it back up with each trip we take. This has made me feel uneasy. The line of credit was supposed to start at $0 and be payed down in between trips, not get maxed out first and then paid down enough to take the next trip. I reasoned however, that we are faced with a unique, relatively short-term opportunity living in Europe and that to sit here and do nothing would be more irresponsible. The lesser of two evils perhaps? That just happens to be the fun option too? My rationalization flies completely out the window though if one were to look at where we spent this money....the bulk of our vacation dollars the first 3 years had been spent traveling home to Canada. This is why I don't know when the next time we travel home will be. This is why we spent a bunch of borrowed money on our Swiss trip this summer, a french chalet this Christmas, and just now a 4-day trip to Rome. I think we are doing the right thing in a big-picture kind of way, but it does make me feel uneasy all the same. I really hope that in 20 years time when the boys are asking why everyone else has a nice RESP to go to university with that looking over these memories of our time here will still feel like it was all worth it.

Enough of my guilty conscience, next time I will post about what we actually DID in Rome!!!