How I Like to Budget and Plan Our Trips
To use a quote from TheMaxRebo's PTR, "
And now for something completely different!" (And the Monty Python reference didn't fall on deaf ears)....
So, we leave a week from tomorrow. Getting close now. Not much else left in the planning phase. I guess we'll move into the packing phase soon.
With a 17 day trip covering lots of destinations, meals, and activities, there's a lot of planning and estimating that's gone into this trip to ensure that we don't overspend, but still get the most bang for our buck.
I don't know how everyone else plans their vacations and general budgets, but we tend to follow the "Virtual Envelope" approach (and use an appropriate software for it), where we divvy up each of my paychecks into virtual envelopes each month (groceries, entertainment, regular bills, gasoline, clothes, emergency fund, etc. and of course.. vacation!!!) And then we tend to only spend what we have already saved in that envelope. If we are running low in the entertainment envelope, we don't go out to the movie or dinner again until the next paycheck(s). And same for vacation, we know that if we put in $X a month, then we'll have $Y available at the time of vacation -- and we typically try to stay within that amount.
So for this trip, I knew how much we would have saved before we planned to leave, and I set off to see how much stuff we could comfortably cram into that amount of money.
I'm sure that's not too different from everyone else.
So... I've seen some people who get crazy with planning their vacations on spreadsheets. The thing is, if those people are crazy, then I must be absolutely and completely nuts... I tried spreadsheets in the past, and while they are certainly helpful, I wanted something even better.
Relying on my background as a web applications developer, I decided to create a web-based application to build and track my vacation budget, as well as other various details. I never thought that I'd share this with anyone, but I've got the vacation on my mind, and not much else to do, so I figured I might as well share it
The idea is that I you enter a start and end date for the vacation, and then you can enter planned expenses for each day in the range. You can go as detailed as you want, either just put a total that you want to spend for the day in a single entry, or break up the planned expenses as granular as you want (gas, lunch, dinner, snacks, souvenirs, attractions, lodging, etc.) I put in an amount that is planned for the expense, and the option to enter the actual amount too. So if you have a bunch of expenses entered across a week for a total of $1,000, and then you start putting actual expenses in, it will tell you if you are projected to bust your budget or come in below. That's really nice. Especially, if I planned to spend $X on food and half way through the trip, we are coming in below that, I will know how much the projected difference will be and we can splurge at the end of the trip. Or the opposite, if we are spending way more than we originally estimated, we can decide to drop an activity or have a cheaper meal.
That's the main part of the application, but I added a few other things like the ability to track events (say meeting a friend on a certain date/time or reservations or whatever). And then I added a spot to record memories for each day (the weather was? The funnies thing was? an interesting thing was? Etc.) I added a few other things, but I think I'll share a few screen shots now
Here's the home page with a summary of a "Sample Trip". It has a few "reports" on the home screen. S summary of the total budget, how much has been spent, how much is remaining, etc. And then a breakdown by how the expenses are budgeted, and then finally a chart showing expenses by day.
Here's an example of how entering expenses works. You pick the day, and then you can add a new expense using the form, or you can edit an existing one.
Here's what the memories section looks like. You can enter whatever you want for each day. This is just a bunch of sample junk text, it's fun to go back and read what we actually wrote on that day. It's a fun activity to do with the family after dinner, while we are driving in the car, or waiting in a line somewhere.
Event calendar is fairly self explanatory....
I've got a bunch of reports, here are couple of them...
This one shows the expenses by type and day
Here's a print out of the calendar
Here's a more detailed print out of each day
OK, so yo may think that compared to using a spreadsheet, this is overkill. You might be right. But, I don't like to bring my laptop on vacation anymore. So how the heck do I interact with all that on my phone?
Yeah, I'm that crazy... Here are some of the screens that are optimized for my phone.
So, yeah, there it is. Hopefully, I didn't bore you to death, and hopefully a couple people were at least amused
