Travel spending

The financial portion is more about having a quick reference I go back to than anything else, but it’s also to help provide some context for those interested in traveling and seeing how someone else spent. You may spend more or less at every location. We each have our own ways of doing things, but this is mine. So, you’ll find the breakdown of all my travel spending below for every country.

The breakdown is generally as follows, though things get more complicated the further you get from places that accept credit cards. For example in places in Mexico, cash is king, so keeping tabs on things is more difficult. In Toronto, credit cards rule, so that is much easier to track. I actually use Splitwise, which is a smartphone app, which is incredibly easy to use and super helpful. Any time i spend money I enter it in the app. You can create groups which you can associate with specific cities and it has categories as well, so you can see the breakdown of where your spending went. It has its limitations, like not being able to create new categories (at least I haven’t found the option), but all in all it’s great and fast. It’s technically designed to allow people to share and split expenses. For example if a group of friends goes on a trip together or a restaurant. Each can enter how much they paid and the app calculates how much each person owes the other. It’s a great tool for my purposes as travelling with V required exactly that, and since she left I’ve used it just for myself.

So, this is how each city or country will be broken down in terms of financials. Most of the time it’ll be by country, like Mexico, rather than each city within Mexico, but on some occasions, if for example I’ve only stayed in one city in that country or if it’s a huge country like the US and I’ve only stayed in 2 cities, I might classify things by the city name. In either case, they’ll all look like this:

City name here:  $Travel spending total here
Length and date of stay here

Food & Drink & Ent: $Pretty obvious
Travel Investment: $Money spent on the things required, like SIM cards or other tech, this amount decreases massively after Florida since by then I had everything I needed
Bank fees: $You can never escape these but these are ATM fees and the fees I pay to keep my accounts open, etc.
Gifts: $Self-explanatory
Cash: $Obvious
Accommodations: $Places to stay, like AirBnB and other rent, etc.
Other transportation: $This is for transport within a country, city, etc. Does not include Air Travel.
Travel to: $This is the cost of going from one country to another, includes air travel or other.