I know people get weird when it comes to talking about money, but when I was planning this trip, that fact made my life difficult. While I could piece together the cost of certain things (train tickets, hostels, etc.) I really had no idea how much people were spending on an average basis on a trip like mine. That was frustrating, to say the least, when it came to trying to budget this. It didn’t help that travel guru Rick Steves deemed the $50/day Europe trip a thing of the past. Now, he could have been factoring in airfare… I have no idea. But it still drove me nuts.
Because I’m mildly obsessive and a geek to boot, I’ve been tracking our trip expenses in a spreadsheet (cash expenditures) and an expenses app on my phone (bank withdrawals.) Because I CLEARLY need to get a life, I decided to dump all of them into a spreadsheet for your viewing pleasure. I’m holding nothing back here — this is what we’ve spent, and on what we’ve spent it, for this trip to date. The only things that aren’t included in this budget are our plane tickets ($630/person for San Francisco to Dublin and Dublin to Dubrovnik — we don’t have return tickets yet) and our rail passes ($700/person, which are good for 10 days of travel in 5 countries.) I didn’t include these because I paid for them ahead of time, so it wasn’t an amount that I needed to keep an eye on during our trip.) I’m actually already thinking the rail passes may have been a mistake, because there aren’t really that many long-haul train trips we’re taking that would need, say, a full day of travel… but live and learn, I guess. Ugh.
Essentially, our budget is $50/person/day (or $100/day total.) That includes meals, lodging, transportation other than what was mentioned above, and any sightseeing we want to do. We’re trying to keep it under budget right now because we know Germany and Belgium will be expensive — there will be no $15/night hostels! (Er, at least probably not ones we really want to go near…)
With regards to the “dining” and “food” categories, “dining” is anything we bought that was prepared (from a restaurant/cafe/whatever) and “food” is anything we bought to prepare ourselves (from a grocery store, mini mart, etc.) Picky, I know… but I wanted to make that distinction so I could see just how much we waste eating out. I do this with my regular budget at home too.
I was going to make a lovely pie chart of how much we’ve spent in each category, but Google Docs decided not to play nice with the =SUMIF function, and after 45 minutes fighting with it, I decided it’s not worth it. It’s 3:40 AM and I have to be up for church by 8:15. I need to get some sleep.
So yeah, here’s that spreadsheet, up to date as of the last Euro we spent yesterday. I’ll try to update it every 2-3 days. Feel free to ask any questions you might have — I’m more than happy to answer them. Bedtime now. :thud: