Fixed costs first
A trip budget has two halves. The fixed half is everything you can price exactly today: flights or fuel, lodging, a rental car, insurance, visas, and any tickets or tours booked ahead. Look these up and write down real figures, with taxes and fees included. For most trips, transport and lodging together come to well over half the total, so that is where an hour of comparison earns the most. A cheaper neighborhood, a shoulder-season date or a flight one day earlier moves the total more than any amount of skipped coffee.
The daily number
Everything else becomes a single figure per day: food, local transit, admissions and incidentals. Build it from the destination, because daily costs vary several times over between an expensive northern European capital and a small city in Southeast Asia. Look up four local prices, namely an ordinary restaurant dinner, a quick lunch, a day's transit pass and a typical museum ticket. Add them up, round the sum up, and multiply by the number of days. Decide in advance which one category you intend to splurge on and keep the others plain, since trying to economize on everything usually fails by the third day.
Costs that hide
- Checked bag and seat fees apply in each direction and can add a hundred dollars to a cheap fare.
- Resort fees, cleaning fees and local tourist taxes are often left out of the advertised nightly rate.
- Airport transfers at both ends, along with parking at your home airport, belong in the budget.
- Foreign transaction fees of about three percent and ATM charges apply unless your cards waive them.
- Phone data, tips, laundry and pet boarding or a house sitter at home are easy to forget.
- Gear bought before the trip, from luggage to hiking boots, counts as trip spending.
Add the two halves together, then add ten to fifteen percent as a buffer.
Saving and tracking
Divide the total by the number of months until departure and move that sum automatically into a separate savings account each payday. Put the bookings on a card for the protections if you like, and pay the statement in full from that account. On the road, write down the day's spending every evening, which takes two minutes. When a day runs over, the next one gets a supermarket picnic and a free museum.
Tip Make lunch your main restaurant meal. In much of the world the same kitchen serves a set lunch for far less than it charges for dinner.
