Everyone likes to talk about traveling, but no one likes to talk about budgeting and numbers…right?
WRONG! I’m Marissa and I’m a CPA (accountant) who loves anything to do with numbers and math. And that especially includes creating a realistic travel budget that will get you excited for your trip, instead of dreading coming back home to a negative balance in your savings account.
This blog post will cover my 6 step process for figuring out and creating a travel budget for each of your trips – and how to actually stick to it!
To download my FREE travel budget template, drop your email below and I’ll send it straight to your inbox 💌
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First things first, I set a budget for my entire year dedicated just to travel. This helps me really prioritize the trips that matter most to me, and make sure I can afford everywhere I want to go.
When I do this step, I also pencil in where I want to go, and the dates or months for each trip.
For example, this year I knew I really wanted to go to Amsterdam in the spring to see the tulip gardens. When I made the travel budget, I didn’t have exact dates for when I was going to go, but having this general idea helped me estimate what the trip would cost.
It’s totally okay if you aren’t sure when OR where you want to go! You can totally tailor the travel budget however you want.
If you know you want to take two big trips, one in the summer and one in the winter, write that down! If you know you want to visit Thailand, but aren’t sure when you want to go, write that down!
Here’s the travel schedule I drafted last winter:
Seeing it all written out visually will help you determine too if your travel plans are realistic, or if maybe you need to push a couple trips to the following year. Or, best case, maybe you can do even more trips this year!
Once you start to know where you want to go, you can also keep an eye out for any flight deals. Which brings us to our next step.
2. Estimate how much flights will cost
Once I have written down all of the trips I want to go on, I estimate how much flights will cost for each trip. In this blog post, I’m going to use my Thailand trip as an example and walk through each of the steps for that trip.
I estimate flight prices by using Google’s Explore feature. Here you can see I input my parameters, a 2-week trip in October to anywhere in Thailand flying out of Los Angeles.
You can get even more specific with filters, like if you want a nonstop flight or a total flight duration under 20 hours, for example.
Based on my knowledge of researching similar flights to Thailand previously, I know that around the $700-800 range is a really great price for a roundtrip flight.
However, if flight prices are looking higher than I’d like, I also use this to see if there’s a month or two where flights are MUCH lower than usual.
I do this by searching in Google Flights, then going into the date section. Google has this really great feature where you can scroll through all travel dates and it will color the cheapest flights in this green color:
You can see there are some really great deals in August for under $700, which is amazing! If my trip is flexible, I will usually change my plans to travel a different month.
For purposes of my travel budget, I like to overestimate my costs a bit so I save up more than I will need. So, I will budget $800 for flights for my Thailand trip.
3. Estimate how much lodging will cost
Next, i do the same thing for hotels by using Google Maps to search for hotels in the place I want to visit. This gives me a sense of how much the average nightly cost is during that time frame.
I make sure to include filters like a minimum 4.5 guest rating, a fitness center, and free cancellation. Here are the results I got for Bangkok in October:
Scrolling through the options quickly, I see that a hotel with my search parameters will cost me about $100 per night, on average. I will take that average cost and multiply it by the number of nights I’m planning to go.
For my Thailand example, I’m going to use 10 nights for my calculation in my travel budget:
Now, if this number is way more or less than you were expecting, you can play around with the search parameters to get more precise results.
For example, if you want to stay in a hostel, you can filter for that and that should cost you much less – closer to $30 / night. Alternatively, if you want to ball out since the dollar goes a lot farther in Thailand, you could up your budget to $200 / night and stay in some super luxurious hotels or Airbnbs.
You can also come back to this step once you have an idea of all of your costs to see what you can cut out, or what you can splurge on.
4. Budget for food, activities and transit
My budget for food usually ranges from $20-$100 a day, depending on where I am headed.
For a place like Thailand in Southeast Asia, this number will be on the lower end. For most European cities, this number will be higher since the dollar doesn’t go as far there.
If you want to get really precise about it, you can find a few restaurants in the city you want to visit, scan their menu for what you’d order and calculate your costs that way.
For this trip, I’m going to estimate $15 /meal, or $45 / day, and add that to my travel budget.
Moving onto activities. My budget for activities usually ranges from $25-$100 a day, depending on where i’m going.
Again, I would think through a few things you’d like to do on your trip and search up what that will cost.
When I solo travel, I like to do more tours and excursions, and usually end up spending a bit more on activities so that I can be out meeting people and doing things with other people.
For my Thailand trip, I would love to check out temples and visit the floating markets. I haven’t thought too much about my entire itinerary, but also know that activities will cost me less in Bangkok.
The average cost to visit temples is around 100 – 200 baht, or $3-6. Therefore, I will budget $25 / day for all of my activities, since I know some days will be more costly than others.
Lastly, transit. This includes everything from airport taxis, to car rentals, to metro fares, to daily Uber rides, etc.
I suggest going through your itinerary and thinking about what you plan to do each day, and what kind of transit you’ll be needing.
For my Thailand trip, I googled “average taxi cost in bangkok.” Google told me that short trips usually cost around 50 baht, whereas longer trips might be around 200 – 300 baht.
I estimate that I’ll need to take at least 2 airport rides (one there, and one back), and then maybe 1-2 short rides each day. This would total about 1,200 baht, or $4 / day.
5. Repeat this for each of your destinations
Going through this process for each of the trips will give me a sense of the best time to travel to each place, and how many trips I can actually afford this year.
Here is my entire travel budget filled out for the year:
You can see that the total is quite high, and personally is more than I am comfortable spending in one year on travel. Therefore, I will start to go through the travel budget and see either where I can save money, or where I can push a trip to the following year.
Once I have a sense of everywhere I want to go, I can watch flight prices for the best time to book using things like Google Flights or Thrifty Traveler.
Google Flights lets you set alerts for when flight prices drop for a specific search. This is great if you have certain dates you need to travel somewhere, like for a wedding. Here’s an email alert I got recently for some Mallorca flights this summer:
Email subscription services like Thrifty Traveler (you can use code MLE for $10 off your premium subscription!) or Going will notify you when great flight deals pop up.
You usually have a few days to book these deals, so these services are great if you have the flexibility in your schedule to hop on flight deals!
6. Keep track of your actual spending
Lastly, as i start booking things for each of my trips, I keep track of what i’m spending to see how it compares to my travel budget and adjust accordingly.
Like I said before, I usually like to over-budget so that I can save money and splurge on more experiences once i’m there!
Here’s what my travel budget is currently looking like, after having gone on a few of these trips already this year:
As you can see, I was waaay over budgeting for a lot of these big trips, so have some extra spending room for my trips later this year!
If you want to download this exact template I use for my travel budget, drop your email below and I’ll send it straight to your inbox (it’s free!)💌
Let me know if this is helpful and if you want me to go into more detail on any of the steps in the comments below! And be sure to follow me on Instagram for more travel content.
mariss
