In college, I loved Cancun so much, I went back twice. Yes, it was expensive, but I was a relatively well-paid student as a pharmacy technician.

So when I read one of my favorite personal finance bloggers write about a Cancun technique for saving money, I was intrigued. This could be the biggest breakthrough of two awesome things since Reese’s combined chocolate and peanut butter.

The article starts off with a bang. $60 for enter the club. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m so old that it use to be only $25… and we thought that was a lot of money.

It seems like the numbers change, but everything else is the same. That cover gets you in and includes All-You-Can-Drink watered-down crap. And then you have to tip bartenders to get drinks too. But it is awesome, because it is a party… probably the biggest party you’ll ever go to. I bonded with some of my longest and best friends by agreeing that going to Coco Bongo at 2AM was a wise decision.

That’s probably too much memory lane of Cancun. The idea behind the Cancun technique is that people will pay $60 because it is important to them.

Young people pay for partying. People pay a ton for a college education. Parents send their kids to private elementary schools that are more expensive than my wife’s college.

Personally, I’m willing to pay for financial freedom. I “pay” for that by saving and investing money.

It doesn’t really matter what’s important to you, but that you recognize that you going to be spending all this money anyway. You might as well budget for it.

Martin goes into a more specific breakdown here.

I found this article to especially timely for me. My wife and I celebrated our 8 year anniversary a couple of weeks ago. She booked a spa day for us. The place was a little unique. For $55 you can use their salt pools and saunas as long as you want (until they close). They have a few different ones and it was incredibly relaxing. It was more economical than a $60 or $90 massage.

They even had a couple of sitting areas with magazines and an outside area. It felt like being at a resort on vacation.

The thought hit me, could I actually blog from here a few times a week? They’d probably frown on my laptop being in the pool, but bringing a phone would be easy to slip into robe. It’s like one of those ideas that you say is completely nuts… until you start to justify it.

However, the logistics play a second role to spending $55 a day. That’s when I saw that there was a $1600 annual membership that included 12 guest passes. At $110 a pop for the two of us to go once a month, it would be $1320. So it’s only $280 more a year to make it so I can go at any time.

I think you can see where the Cancun technique comes in. I’m not at the point where I’m going to pay the $1600 anyway. However, the idea of trying to save $150 a month to make this happen seems reasonable.

What do you think? Are you going to use the Cancun technique to reward yourself?