Free Vacations are the Best Vacations

Matt's in St. Louis now on business but I'm sure whenever he reads this post he will mutter under his breath - "It's not free." Which is technically true because the trip is considered a gift in the eyes of the government and is taxed as such.

Matt works for Edward Jones and one of the pros of the company is the diversification trips. It's a really big pro. Diversification trips are like a bonus - do a good job, win a trip. We have friends in the insurance business and they take similar trips. It usually takes a long time to qualify for these trips, like years. Matt has been back at Edward Jones for about a year and just won a trip. I'm really proud of him because he does work very hard and is always chock-full of integrity and honesty and stuff.

It's here that Matt would be all truly humble and try to downplay winning the trip: "It's an office where most of the clients already knew and trusted me...the company gives a lot of points towards the trip during the first year...it's hardly my doing at all..."

I really don't understand people with no ego. If I was talented like Matt (understanding investment stuff, building furniture, driving planes, playing instruments, racing bicycles, etc), I would be simply unbearable. You'd never hear of the end of me gloating and I would eventually be like the Kanye West of my town.

Anyway, Matt won a trip!

In case you couldn't tell from either knowing me in person or only on the blog, we are fairly thrifty people:

1. We eat oatmeal 6 out of 7 mornings. Not the expensive packet kind, either. Scooping generic oats out of a canister type oatmeal. The one cereal morning is usually off-brand low sugar cereal but it thrills my kids immensely.

2. The only time we eat out is when we have a giftcard or it's a super special occasion or someone else is paying.

3. We haven't seen a movie in a theater since before we had children. Even anniversaries are brought to us by Netflix.

In fact, the other day I showed Noah the Buzz Lightyear costume I got him for Halloween. He asked "Did you get this at a garage sale? Or from Walmart? Or from Mamaw?"

The kid knows what's up at our house. Those are really the only three options for new stuff.  (If you're curious, the costume did indeed come from a garage sale - $5!)

Needless to say, we don't go on fancy vacations. We're not fancy people (in case you couldn't tell from the myriad of blog posts that mention bodily fluids or dried animal genitals or me falling into a puddle for no apparent reason). And here we are, going to Maui.

The diversification trips are pretty amazing. You get to pick from, like, 40 places. Places like Rome, Japan, Aruba, New Zealand. You can win two trips a year. And if you win them both, you can combine them into one long supertrip. A Supertrip! Trips like 11 days at the Hilton in Bora Bora. Bora Bora! Or you can cash out your trips and have a pile of money instead!

Are you getting sick of the exclamation points yet?

Matt told me when he first started at Jones (9 years ago) that I would get to choose the first trip and that we would go without the kids, although many of the trips are family-friendly. Even though he would happily cash out the trip and do something exciting, like invest it in a high yield bond or something, he's content to pay the taxes and enjoy wherever it is I chose to go.  I've always wanted to go somewhere tropical and some of the tropical trips included places like Aruba, Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, Caribbean cruises, Anguilla, Costa Rica, several of the Virgin Islands and Hawaii. We could choose either Kona or Maui. Maui just sounds better, you know? The spots for the trips fill up quickly and some of our first picks were taken. My best friend told me she's always going to make fun of me for telling her "We settled for Maui."

The trip includes airfare, a week at the Fairmont Kea Lani (Rooms - all suites - start at $529/night! Can you believe that - we bid for rooms on Priceline. We're like $60/night people), breakfasts, dinners (including a luau!), and a rental car. I hope we can try to pretend we're classy but we'll probably give it away when we show up in Goodwill clothes and gawk at the lobby.

We're going in March so I have like 5 months to get something resembling a decent body shape and to train myself not to squeal in classless wonder when there is (I'm sure) bottled water in our room.

"Name brand bottled water! I'll bet they even have flavored oatmeal for breakfast..."