About Trip Jar

Honest travel advice for people who care where their time and money go.

We’re Allen and Jodie, and Trip Jar started with a pretty simple idea: travel matters, but so does what it costs.

We love to travel, but we’re not interested in pretending every hotel is amazing, every restaurant is a hidden gem, or every expensive upgrade is “totally worth it.” We spend our own money, take the trips, eat the food, stay in the rooms, talk to the people, and then tell you what we would tell a friend thinking about doing the same thing.

Sometimes that means telling you something was absolutely worth the money.

Sometimes it means telling you to save it.

And sometimes the best part of the story has very little to do with what we originally went there to see.

What You’ll Find Here

Trip Jar is for regular people, couples, and families who want to travel well without feeling like they need an unlimited budget or a spreadsheet with 47 tabs.

We write about the places we actually visit — hotels, cruises, restaurants, attractions, excursions and destinations — with a particular focus on the question we find ourselves asking all the time:

Is this actually worth our time and money?

You’ll also find practical travel advice, things we wish we had known before a trip, costs that caught our attention, places we’d happily return to, and a few we probably wouldn’t.

And because Jodie and I travel together, you’re going to hear from both sides of the trip. We don’t always order the same thing, notice the same details, or even agree on what was worth it.

That’s probably a good thing.

Where the Name Trip Jar Came From

The idea behind Trip Jar goes back to something wonderfully low-tech: a jar sitting on the counter and watching it grow.

A little money goes in.

Then a little more.

Eventually, something that felt like “maybe someday” starts looking possible.

There is something satisfying about seeing that jar fill because it turns a vague dream into something tangible. You aren’t simply wishing you could take the trip anymore. You’re moving toward it.

That little idea eventually became much bigger.

What if families could start with a trip they wanted to take, understand what it was really going to cost, figure out what they needed to save, watch themselves get closer, and eventually go?

That’s the bigger vision behind Trip Jar.

Dream it. Save for it. Go.

The travel stories and recommendations you’re reading here are one part of that.

Trip Jar itself is growing right alongside them.

A Little About Us

I’m Allen. I’m 55, a husband, dad, grandfather, lifelong traveler, Air Force veteran, and I’ve spent more than 25 years in the fire service.

That career has probably influenced the way I think about travel more than I realized for a long time. You spend enough years seeing how unexpectedly life can change and eventually “we’ll do it someday” starts sounding a little less reassuring.

That doesn’t mean I think everybody should blow their savings and get on an airplane tomorrow.

Quite the opposite.

I think the best trips are the ones you can actually afford to enjoy.

Jodie is my wife, travel partner, reality check and a huge part of Trip Jar. She’s a small-business owner who has been the person friends turn to for trip ideas and itineraries for years.

And she is absolutely not a supporting character in these stories.

She has her own opinions about the hotel, the meal, the cocktail and whether my latest “great idea” was actually a great idea.

Frequently, it was not.

Why Subscribe?

Because planning a vacation involves real money and something even harder to replace: your time.

We want Trip Jar to help you make better decisions about both.

Subscribe and you’ll get our newest Trip Jar story each Monday, along with shorter Notes during the week about travel, things we’ve learned, places we’re considering and the occasional behind-the-scenes look at what happens when two people in their 50s decide it would be perfectly reasonable to build a travel company from scratch.

No endless sales pitch.

No pretending everything is wonderful.

Just the places we went, what happened when we got there, what we spent our money on, and whether we’d do it again.

We’re glad you found us.

— Allen & Jodie

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