When I was a kid, my family took vacations to California, Florida and Tennessee. The first time I stepped on an airplane, I was 8 years old and accompanied by a Cabbage Patch Kid named Erna Janine. It was 1983.
The grandparents who raised me were solidly middle-class. My grandmother was an administrative assistant to the head honcho at an aviation and electronics corporation. My grandfather had an equally boring job at Raytheon handling import/export. He was a lifer there, with a clock or watch waiting for him after 35 years of service. He smoked too much on flights to Egypt and Holland, bringing home wonders from a world I only knew from textbooks and postcards. We lived in a two-family home that my grandparents owned in a city 20 minutes outside of Boston.
My kids — ages 19, 17, 13 and 11 — have never been on an airplane. We have been on one vacation as a family of six, driving in our 8-year-old minivan across the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Florida. We used part of the money that my grandparents left me when they died. “Take the kids to Disney,” my grandmother said before she died of ovarian cancer in September 2013. It was a long ride, with kids from 11 to 3.
Growing up, taking a vacation was not a sign of luxury, but a yearly certainty for my family and most of my friends’ middle-class families. A trip to a dance show in Philadelphia, a week renting a house in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and a college adventure to California remain some of the coolest memories from my Gen X childhood.
Last year when my then-12-year-old daughter asked to try out for a competitive cheerleading travel team, I said yes, unsure of how we would afford the trip to Florida where the team would participate in a world cheer competition. As we stood in the gym after tryouts and my daughter signed her cheer contract, I felt elated but scared. I was so happy to give her this opportunity, but extremely anxious at the thought of coming up with the funds it required.
My husband did his best to stash away money for the trip while navigating and sticking to our monthly budget, which I track using a color-coded spreadsheet.
Over the past several years our living expenses, like those of other middle-class families in the United States, have skyrocketed. Many people have seen costs rise for groceries, heating oil, electricity, car insurance, property taxes and gas, without seeing cost-of-living increases reflected in their salaries.
It has become a monthly tightrope walk to keep our home and feed our children. Vacations, once a sure thing for families like mine, are a fantasy for us ― something our kids wish for as they watch friends from wealthier families share posts online about international excursions to lands they can only dream of.
My husband works as an electrical technician for a Fortune 500 company. I am a special education teacher in a K-2 school. We did what we were told to do to be stable. We went to school. We got decent jobs. We worked as much as possible. Our combined income is over six figures, and it still isn’t enough.
While my husband and I were able to pay for part of our trip with the money we saved, it wasn’t enough to pay for everything. We decided to, once again, drive the 1,400 miles from Maine to Florida to alleviate some of our travel costs. As the cheer competition got closer, I stressed about how we would pay for the rest of our vacation.
We spent evenings searching travel websites for deals and days working to squirrel away more money. According to Forbes Advisor , the average cost of a vacation for a family of four was around $3,600 in 2023, and that was for a mere three days.
Weeks before our trip, we still hadn’t booked a hotel. “We’ll have to use the credit card to pay for it,” my husband texted me while I was at work. I knew he was right. I have one credit card, which I’ve had for over 20 years but have not used in ages. We currently hold a balance from prior spending that we pay off bit by bit each month.
For many years, I immediately paid off whatever I’d charged; that was one of the few lessons about money I learned from my grandparents. But life caught up to us, and we could no longer keep up. As I weighed the benefits of charging part of our trip — family time, a vacation together after almost a decade without one — I stressed about taking on more debt for it.
“We do it all the time,” a co-worker said as I shared my plan. “It’s the only way we can take a vacation. A lot of people do it.”
She was right. A 2024 LendingTree study found that 51% of Americans planned to fund their spring vacations this year with a credit card. It also noted that “about 1 in 5 Americans, or 21%, admit they’ve gone into debt to travel in the past.”
Debt is staggering for Americans in general. Credit reporting agency Experian found that the average American consumer had approximately $6,501 in credit card debt last year. The same report found that the consumers who were hit the hardest were middle-aged.
While I was relieved to find we weren’t the only middle-aged, middle-class family using a credit card to partially fund our trip, I was also disturbed that many two-income, middle-class families no longer make enough to afford a vacation. Knowing that we were going (further) into debt made the prospect of traveling with the kids a stress-filled endeavor instead of a fun, relaxing one.
A 2022 study by LendingTree found that 18% of Americans who’d visited Disney went into debt for one or more of their Disney vacations. The study showed that the percentage was even higher for parents with kids under the age of 18 — a whopping 30% of those families took on debt to visit the happiest, most magical place on Earth.
In an attempt to mitigate how much we’d owe at the end of our trip, we stayed in a hotel with a refrigerator so we could shop at a local grocery store and avoid the exorbitant food costs at the theme parks and our hotel. The one time we did eat at the Magic Kingdom, surrounded by other families just like us, we spent $89 for four individual pizzas (the size of small plates), mini salads and three sodas. (I didn’t have one because I was not going to spend money on that.) The pizza was awful, and we were down almost $90. Bottled water at the Disney parks cost around $4.50, so we brought our own refillable bottles. The excessive, jacked-up prices on everything were astounding — and depressing.
I became angry watching families pull out their credit cards to buy memories that they would continue to pay for long after making them. Angry that this is what it means to be hardworking, middle-class people. Angry that working two full-time jobs isn’t enough for many families to fix their homes, pay their bills and just get by — never mind contributing to savings and indulging in luxuries like vacations.
A viral TikTok video from 2023 that showed a man’s dumbfounded reaction to receiving his family’s bill for breakfast at Disney World received over 9,300 comments and 990,000 likes, seemingly because so many Americans could relate to his pain. One commenter wrote: “I don’t even look! I just put my card in.” Another said: “It shouldn’t be this much to make a memory. They charge way too much.”
The reality is that things don’t look as though they will be changing anytime soon. According to a 2024 Bankrate survey , 53% of Americans are set to take a summer vacation this year, and “more than 1 in 3 (36 percent) are willing to go into debt to pay for it.”
When we returned home from our Florida vacation, I paid my monthly credit card bill, aware that next month my payment would go up. It is the cost of taking a vacation as a middle-class family, and too many of us know its sting too well. It is the cost of being middle-class in the United States in 2024. As a 2019 Wall Street Journal article noted, “The American middle class is falling deeper into debt to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.”
While my husband and I want to do more for our family, we, like many middle-class families, are struggling just to pay our bills. The rising costs of even the bare essentials that are necessary to live make it virtually impossible to go on vacations without taking on debt. Working hard should mean getting more, but it just isn’t enough.
While companies’ profits continue to increase , middle-class Americans get no breaks because businesses are not lowering prices. For many, salaries are stagnant even though the prices of necessary goods are not. Looking at our kids and having to say no to things we once could afford is heartbreaking for them and for us. Grocery store visits have gone from annoying to gut-wrenching. Buy store-brand , I’ve reminded myself. Make a list. Clip coupons. Put in your rewards number. Still, the total is more than I had hoped each week.
I now find myself constantly wondering how far I can go past the due date for each bill (which I once was able to pay on time). It’s a game of Russian roulette in which I’m sure my credit score will get dinged or I’ll lose some essential thing our family needs. It’s stressful and scary. All we want is to be able to pay our bills, receive cost-of-living increases that actually match the increases in the economy, and maybe — just maybe — take a damn vacation more than once every damn decade without having to put it on plastic and pay for it for years to come. Is that so much to ask for?
Nicole Johnson is a freelance writer whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post and several other publications. She is the creator of Suburban Sh*t Show , a place where she discusses the real and raw truths of motherhood, midlife, childhood dysfunction and marriage. Nicole is also a fiction writer currently working on a horror novel about motherhood.
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