On the heels of all the learning in the last two years, there have been some setbacks but generally great progress.  

It is easy to revert back to old habits when trying to book the necessary large expenses first, such as flights and accomodation.  The dreaded credit cards enter the pictures.  Without a surplus of funds to work with, the easiest way is just to use a credit card online.

I think what happened is that all the recent success on stocks and options trade caused me to get ahead of myself.  But no worries.  Once the markets began to stabilize, I let the trading sit there and got back to the basics of how to budget once again.  The first thing I did was immediately free up some funds for this trip by selling some stock positions and depositing them into various bank accounts. The second thing I did was start to project my budget all the way into the next holidays for a year and beyond.  I realized that there had to be massive funds available for the inevitable planning that would come next for these trips.

It is one thing to plan month-to-month but for a budget to be most effective it can go longer term than that.

As for credit cards, I found a way to pre-load them in advance using available cash.  In this way, they began to function more and more like debit cards.  This was the direction that I wanted things to move in.