When completing long trips it is important to create a budget and stick to it. When we travel, we start by figuring out how much money we have and subtract initial expenses. Then we can use the rest of the money to determine how long to spend in each place. More expensive places, unfortunately, mean less time (and money) to spend, while cheaper places allow us to go slow.
It might sound difficult, but it is all very easy to understand once it is down in a spreadsheet! Your spreadsheet can be as simple or as complicated as necessary. On our last two trips I made a spreadsheet to outline our expenses - check them out on the tools page. They are currently Microsoft Excel worksheets, but if you prefer Google Drive, just upload them, and they should automatically convert. If you are having any trouble, let us know!
The spreadsheet also helps us split costs between the two of us when one person pays for something that we share. While that is something you need to figure out with your travel partner (if necessary), we try to always split the costs of everything equally since it is likely that we will both benefit from all purchases.
Breaking Down the Spreadsheet
I created three separate sheets, to organize our before and during the trip, and to provide an overview of who owes who what. They are each broken down below:
Budget by Country
The first sheet lists all of the countries, and creates a budget for each one. There are five different categories of expenses, each one with a sub-item for whether Daniela or I bought it.
You can add the total amount of money you have budgeted for the trip at the bottom of the sheet, and then customize how many days you will be in each country, to come up with a per-country budget. While we travel, we usually divide this up once more by the number of days, so we know how much we can spend per day, and then convert that into the local currency.
Split by Person
This sheet is only necessary for those that are traveling with multiple people, since it takes the values from the first sheet, divides them by two, and tells you how much each person owes the other. We then figure out who pays who, based on who has the largest outstanding balance.
❕ Tip: If you are traveling with more people, add more columns to this sheet, and more rows to the “Budget by Country” sheet!
Initial Expenses
The sheet lets you see what expenses you have before the start of the trip (flights, travel insurance, vaccinations) and allows you to divide them fairly. These could also be added to the top row on the first sheet, but we found it easier to move them to a separate one. Just do not forget to subtract any initial expenses from your total budget calculations so you do not end up running out of money while you are traveling!
❕ Tip: This sheet is only useful before you leave on your trip, which is why we have moved it to the end of the list - feel free to drag it around as you feel fit.
Hopefully, the templates are useful to some people, and since they are spreadsheets you can edit and customize them with fancy formulas to your heart’s content.
I have also seen some apps that will allow you to manage budgeting for travel or make it easy to split costs between friends, which might work better for some people. We prefer working with spreadsheets since we can have total control over our budgeting needs.
Let us know how you use the spreadsheets, or if you had any great changes you made to them - we might want to incorporate them for our future trips!