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A couple of days ago I created a budget for my California trip. For our trip around the world last year I created a huge book in Excel with many spreadsheets. Yes, I know I'm a dork, but this is why I study business. I thought it could be useful for others to see how I did it.
The EASY way:
- First, what we did was to do some research and find out what other people had used on such a trip. We read about trips in travel magazines and read blogs and found a range of NOK 100,000 - 150,000 for 6 months.
- Then, we subtracted our savings and found the amount we needed to save.
- Then we divided this sum on the number of months before our trip to see if it was bearable. The monthly saving was a guideline and in the end we managed to save more than this in many of the months.
| You need money in Las Vegas |
The THOROUGH way:
Prepaid expenses:
First calculate all the costs that you are going to pay in advance. Airline tickets, travel insurance, visa and vaccines to mention some. Travel equipment such as a backpack/suitcase, adaptor, first aid kit, travel towels etc.. Other prepaid expenses such as hotel/hostel, courses, trips, activities, excursions or other travel arrangements such as diving class, bungee jumping, Spanish class, prepaid bus trip/ferry/boat, car rental etc..
| Planning our pre-paid road trip in California 2010 |
Daily expenses:
This will depend greatly on your prepaid expenses. Some people like to have as little planned as possible others like to have only a few details left. Kilroy, a Norwegian travel agency, gave as these ranges to use as daily budgets. Kilroy said this should cover hostel, daily transport, food and drinks and small souvenirs. In our experience the Asia budget is a little too high and the Australian is too low.
Asia: NOK 150 - 250
Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islands: NOK 300-400
USA, Canada, the Caribbean: NOK 400-600
Middle and South-America: NOK 200-300
To get a rough estimation we multiplied the number of days in a continent with the highest and lowest value to get a HIGH and LOW budget. (In the end we did not want to worry about money everyday and since we started planning a long time in advance we were able to save enough money to go with the HIGH budget) Of course these estimations were not very accurate. We knew that we would be budgeting more than necessary since we were staying with friends some places and also trying
Couchsurfing.
Shopping:
I decided that whatever I managed to save above the prepaid and daily expenses was going into a "shopping budget". Throughout the trip I kept a close eye on what was shopping so I transferred from the "shopping account" to replace the amount used.
Crash fund:
I also had my crash-fund that I was NOT going to use, which consisted of holiday pay I would receive when I got home from the trip. In the end we came home with NOK 1000 and my crash fund was untouched, talk about accurate budgeting :P
Hope you found this useful! BTW, If you want to know how thorough I went with the spreadsheets you can contact me :)
Do you create budgets for your trips?
