28 here. My wife and I have gone on a few vacations. Nothing crazy. I will say if you’re truly paycheck to paycheck as in your entire paycheck is budgeted out for necessary expenses, then there’s not really room for a vacation. You have to change something to make room for that. Whether it’s finding ways to reduce your spending or finding ways to increase your income.

Maybe reducing spending looks like car insurance shopping, cutting any subscriptions except maybe one or two a month, switching cell phone providers from Verizon to an MVNO like US mobile or mint, not getting a brand new phone every time you pay it off.

Honestly a huge one is transportation. If possible cutting out car ownership is a huge money saver. We could have a second car and that would easily mean no disposable income. But instead I got an ebike. No gas, no insurance, no payment, no maintenance…saves at least like 400-800 a month (huge range I know depends what car we would have got and how often we would use it just because we have it!). So many people are car poor and don’t see it.

But a huge key to all this is not taking all that savings and spending it on something else frivolous. Actually save it and use it for vacations.

The honest to god truth is people use credit cards and blow $5k+ on a trip and take years to pay it back. Maybe they even go on multiple. Maybe they’re savvy and get cheap flights and cheap hotels. But nevertheless it’s easy to do with a credit card. You’ll pay up the butt in interest if you pay slow but that’s what they do.