Hi, everyone and welcome to Women Who Travel, a podcast from Connie Nass Traveler.

I'm Meredith Carey and with me, as always, is my co-host, Lala Eric Hoaglu.

Hello!

Earlier this year, we shared an episode all about making your travel savings go as far as possible,

and little did we know we wouldn't really be touching those travel savings

at all for the rest of the year. These last six months or so have put money in a really

different perspective for a lot of us. So this week, we've brought in two experts to help talk

through how our relationship with travel spending has changed and how we can best prepare for

next year. Joining us are Jessica Puckett, who covers all things points and miles

for Traveller. Thanks for coming on, Jess. Hi, thanks for having me. And Beret Lamb, the Wall

Street Journalist Personal Finance Bureau, Chief. Thank you so much, Varee. Hey, great to be here.

So before we get into our first question, we do want to remind everyone that neither Jessica,

Beret, Meredith, or I are

financial advisors. I've certainly made that clear when talking about my own finances in previous

episodes. So throughout this episode, please remember that we're speaking from personal experience

and reporting during this episode. So I can kick it off with the first question, which is how has each of your personal relationships with money changed since the pandemic began?

So my personal financial goal for this year was to bulk up some of my emergency savings fund.

That has kind of, the importance of that has only grown since, you know, all the uncertainty

that the virus has brought.

So in addition to trying to save for that, I'm really just using this time to reset financially.

I think it's a really good pause to kind of evaluate what is worth spending my money on. What are my priorities? And for me, I think like most

people, I've really shifted away from, you know, eating out in New York City, going to bars. We

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