A travel budget planner that covers the whole trip
Nearly everyone budgets the flights and the hotel, because those have prices attached and you pay them in advance. Almost nobody budgets the eleven days in between, which is where the money actually goes.
The pattern to avoid: booking costs are decided months early, feel like "the trip budget", and are then mentally filed as paid. Everything spent while actually travelling arrives with no number attached to it at all.
Four buckets, and only one of them is hard
Every trip cost fits in one of these. Splitting them out is most of the work, because it exposes the one that has never been planned.
- Getting there. Flights, trains, fuel, transfers, bags, seat selection, parking at the airport. Known in advance, easy to total, and the one people already do.
- Sleeping. Hotels or rentals, plus tourist taxes and cleaning fees that are frequently not in the headline price.
- Daily spend. Food, local transport, tickets, coffee, the thing you did not plan to buy. This is the bucket that breaks trips, and the only one measured per day rather than per trip.
- One-offs. Insurance, visas, vaccinations, roaming, gear, pet or house sitting. Individually small, collectively a surprise.
The only number you need while you are there
Total your first two buckets and the one-offs, subtract that from what the trip is worth to you, and divide what remains by the number of days. That daily figure is what you actually carry around.
It works for the same reason it works at home: a per-trip number is too abstract to influence a decision you are making outside a restaurant, and a daily one is not. If you have read the monthly planner, this is the same idea with a shorter horizon.
The costs that are genuinely invisible
These are the ones that show up on a statement afterwards and make the trip cost more than you remember agreeing to.
- Before you go. Travel insurance, visas or entry fees, vaccinations, luggage, adapters, a suitcase that finally gave up, currency exchange spread, roaming or a local SIM.
- While you are there. Tips where tipping is expected at a rate you are not used to, city or tourist taxes charged at checkout, deposits, left luggage, transfers you assumed were included.
- Getting home. Departure taxes, an airport meal at airport prices, the taxi you take because you are exhausted, and the first supermarket shop back into an empty fridge.
- The month after. The bills that kept arriving while you were away, and the one you paid for in instalments and had stopped counting.
Give the one-offs their own line before you book anything. Estimated badly, they still beat being left out, because a wrong number gets corrected and a missing one does not.
Save for it as a committed cost
A trip is one of the few large expenses with a known date, which makes it the easiest thing in a budget to save for properly. Divide the total by the months until you go, and put that figure in the committed block of your monthly budget alongside rent and insurance, not in whatever is left over at the end.
Money treated as a leftover does not accumulate. Money treated as a bill does.
The planner
Print this page, or copy it into a notebook. One sheet per trip.
Trip: ____________________ Dates: ____________ Days: ______
| Getting there | Estimated | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| Flights or fuel | ||
| Bags and seats | ||
| Transfers and parking | ||
| Subtotal |
| Sleeping | Estimated | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| Accommodation | ||
| Taxes and fees | ||
| Subtotal |
| One-offs | Estimated | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| Insurance | ||
| Visas and entry fees | ||
| Roaming or SIM | ||
| Gear and luggage | ||
| Pet or house sitting | ||
| Subtotal |
| Total trip budget | |
| Less the three subtotals above | |
| Left for daily spend | |
| Daily spend allowance (divide by days) |
| Day | Food | Transport | Doing things | Other | Day total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | |||||
| 2 | |||||
| 3 | |||||
| 4 | |||||
| 5 | |||||
| 6 | |||||
| 7 | |||||
| Running total |
One minute a day, at the end of the day
Fill the day row before bed, not the next morning and definitely not at the end of the week. A day you reconstruct three days later is a guess, and the whole point of the daily figure is that it is still accurate enough to change tomorrow.
If a day runs over, take it off the remaining days rather than the whole trip. Six days at a slightly smaller number is survivable. Finding out on day nine that there is nothing left is not.
Cash is where travel budgets disappear
Travelling is the most cash-heavy thing most people do all year: markets, taxis, tips, small cafes, the places that are the reason you went. None of it appears in a banking app, which shows one large withdrawal and then silence.
So whatever you track with, the rule is the same. A withdrawal is not a transaction, it is a refill. What matters is where the notes went afterwards, and if that is not recorded somewhere then the daily number is fiction after the first day.
When paper stops being enough
Paper is genuinely good on a trip, because a notebook needs no signal and no battery. What wears thin is the running total, especially split across several people and several categories at the end of a long day.
That is the part Wallety handles, and I should say plainly that I build it. It tracks cash in its own wallet alongside cards, so market spending is not invisible. It splits one payment across categories, which is what a single restaurant bill covering dinner and the taxi home actually is. It sets a budget per category with a daily pace, so you can see whether today is on track rather than adding it up. And it holds a savings goal, which is the part that runs before the trip rather than during it. Everything stays on the phone, with no account and no bank login.
One thing to check for yourself before you rely on it abroad: whether it handles the currencies you need in the way you want. Test that at home, with a few real transactions, rather than discovering it on day one of a trip. That advice holds for any budgeting app, mine included.
Related
The monthly method this borrows from, with its own printable, is a month to month budget planner that survives past week two. If you would rather build the arithmetic yourself, how to create a budget planner in Excel does it with formulas, and how to choose a budget planner app covers the software options including who mine is wrong for.