Tips to Save Money, If Not Your Life

The best travel tip I have given of late has to do with giving tips. It’s a plastic, wallet-sized Tip Table, which lists check totals from $1 to $100 with the corresponding 15% tip.

The friends to whom I have given this card say it saves time, miscalculations and the hassle of borrowing pen and paper for higher math at meal’s end. It’s easy to glance down at $37 and see $5.55 in the tip column. You can round sums off, of course.

The card, made by Target Promotions of Los Angeles, costs 79 cents and is sold in bookstores and travel shops.

Another monetary tip is to adopt a group kitty for car travel, a pool of funds into which each passenger puts $50 for starters. This money is carried in a separate wallet by the designated spender, to be disbursed for gasoline, toll charges, ferryboat tickets, admissions to parks, museums, open air concerts--anything that the travelers share. Daily ice cream cones melted into that category for three teachers I know during their summer trip to Cape Cod.

Designated Credit Card

Those same travelers saved time by using one person’s credit card for all hotel charges and car rental. They found this more efficient than doing a round robin, with one signing for one night and another the next, since the cost of lodging varied. At the end of their holiday, they divided the charges by three; two of them wrote checks. Only one asked for a week’s grace before it was cashed.

A money belt is recommended as a safety measure for some destinations, but I know few women who wear one. Some complain that they are too warm; some won’t tolerate the added girth. These are travelers who have never been victims of pickpockets or purse snatchers.

I have worn a money belt for hiking or climbing, so that both hands would be free. A lightweight backpack serves the same purpose and leaves room for a canteen or apple.

Know Your Dashboard

It’s smart to learn some basic moves about a rental car before you start driving. It is dangerous to need to hit the horn in traffic and not know where it is. It is maddening to flip for the headlights at dusk and find only the brights.

Remember, when you travel with friends by car, you’ll uncover some personal quirks: grown women who honk when they cross a state line; women who, for good luck and faster service, call out the destinations of their post cards as they drop them into a mailbox; women who lick a thumb and stamp their palm when they see a white horse.

Well, my mother did it, too.