A trip budget, from planning at home to tracking the days away
The flight and the hotel rarely surprise anyone: they were paid before departure, at a known price. The surprise is the daily spending once you arrive, meals, local transport, entry tickets and gifts, paid in a currency that is not yours and in amounts too small to add up at the time. This article splits a trip budget in two: what you pay before you go, and what you spend day by day while you are there.
Part one: what you pay before you leave
List everything that is booked and paid in advance. It is the part you can know exactly:
- Flights or trains, both ways.
- Accommodation for every night, plus any fees charged on arrival.
- A visa and its fees, if you need one.
- Travel health insurance.
- Things you buy for the trip itself: a bag, clothes for the weather, a local SIM.
Add these into one figure. It barely moves once you have booked, so it needs no daily tracking.
Part two: the budget for the days away
Daily spending is what runs over. Build a daily limit from four lines:
- Food: three meals and drinks, at the prices of the place you are visiting, not of home.
- Getting around the city.
- Activities and entry tickets, spread over the days you plan to use them.
- A margin for small purchases and gifts.
Multiply the daily limit by the number of days, then add a reserve for what nobody can predict, a late taxi to the airport or a pharmacy visit.
A worked example
A hypothetical six-day trip from Cairo:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Flights, hotel and insurance, paid before leaving | EGP 42,000 |
| Daily limit of EGP 2,500 × 6 days | EGP 15,000 |
| Reserve | EGP 3,000 |
| Whole trip | EGP 60,000 |
The figure to watch while you are away is the daily limit, EGP 2,500. Spend EGP 3,000 one day and the remaining days carry less. The reserve is for emergencies, not for covering days that ran over.
Currency: spend in theirs, review in yours
Paying in another currency makes it hard to feel what something costs. Convert your daily limit into the local currency before you leave and remember that number. Then log each purchase in the currency you paid in, and leave the conversion to yours for the evening review. Do not try to convert every purchase in your head at the till.
A five-minute review every evening
Before bed: what did today cost, and what is left for the remaining days? That review is what turns a daily limit from a number written before the trip into a limit you actually keep.
How to do it in Masareefy
Masareefy has two separate tools that serve a trip, and each does a different job.
The first is an occasion budget. You create one for the trip with its start date, end date and the amount you set, and it shows what you spent on those days against that amount, and how much is left per day, without changing the month's budget or this week's safe-to-spend figure. If you want only purchases you pick to count, choose that when you create it. More on occasion budgets.
The second is a wallet. You create a cash wallet in the currency of the country you are visiting; a wallet's currency is fixed when it is created. You log purchases into it in the local currency, as you paid them, and the app records each one's value in your own currency at the exchange rate of the day of purchase. Moving money from your main wallet into the trip wallet is not counted as spending. See multi-currency wallets.
Creating occasion budgets and wallets is part of Premium.
Questions people ask
Do flights and the hotel belong in the daily budget?
No. Keep what you paid before leaving apart from the daily limit, or the trip looks over budget on its first day.
How big should the reserve be?
About one or two days of the daily limit. It is for what you cannot predict, not for covering days that ran over.
Should I log purchases in the local currency or mine?
In the local currency, as you paid. That is what matches the receipt; the conversion to yours happens at the review.
Set up a budget for your next trip in Masareefy, and log each purchase there as you go.
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