Setting your budget for your trip or vacation is one thing. To then adhere to this is another thing. It is useful to keep track of your expenses so that you can see exactly what you are spending a relatively large amount of money on and thus can still save on. In this article, we share how we track our expenses while traveling the world and tips on how to get used to this quickly.
Content of this blog:
Which vacation spending app should you use?
The most useful (free) app we use to track our spending while traveling is Tripcoin. Tripcoin allows you to create a trip, keeping separate the countries you visit or the different trips you take. Travelspend is another app highly recommended by a lot of travelers.
Once you have created your trip, you can set your own budget. Then you start entering your expenses. For example, if you book accommodation for a number of nights, you can easily put this in at once: enter the full amount and then choose the first date you stay in the accommodation (at when). Then you will see “split in” at the bottom. Here you insert the number of days you will stay in the accommodation and press save. You can see that Tripcoin immediately puts in the price per night for the correct dates.
You can also assign a category to the expense so you can create a good summary afterwards. We use the following categories:
- Accommodation
- Activities
- Alcohol
- (Out) eating / drinking
- Tipping/charity
- Internet (SIM card)
- Laundry
- Toiletries
- Transportation
- Visa
Per day, you can see exactly what you spent. If you want an overview you can click on statistics at the bottom left. Here you can see a detailed breakdown of what you spent per day and also by category. On average, we spend about 40% on food and drink, 25% on accommodation, 15% on activities and 10% on transportation. The remaining 10% is visas, toiletries, SIM cards, etc.
This is a ratio that most travelers maintain and also end up at. We prefer to stay as cheaply as possible because we are also there very little. During the day we are gone all day and we just sleep there. Yet we also occasionally invest in a nice apartment when we want to work well for a few days.
Tip: Check out the handy overview of the average daily budget for each country.
How do you keep track of all your expenses while traveling?
When traveling, you often pay a lot in cash. Especially in Asia and Central and South America, you use almost only cash. So you can’t look at your bank account here at the end of the day to see exactly what you’ve spent. You will have to teach yourself to put your spending directly into Tripcoin the moment you pay. The first few days you will have to consciously think about this but after a while this will come naturally. If you don’t put your expense into Tripcoin right away, you often forget about it after a few minutes. Of course if this happens a few times it is not a disaster but when you forget to put down a quarter of your expenses it gives a distorted and not accurate picture.
Hopefully you can get away with these tips for keeping track of your spending on vacation. We have been using Tripcoin ourselves for years during our world travels and think it is the best vacation spending app.
