Every blown vacation budget fails the same way. You plan flights and hotels carefully, then eating, taxis, tickets, and souvenirs quietly eat the rest, and you find out at the airport restaurant on the way home.
A spreadsheet fixes this in about ten minutes of setup. I built a simple one after our family trip ran 30 percent over, and we have stayed on budget every trip since. Copy it below and adjust it to your trip.
Get the template
[COPY THE TEMPLATE HERE – paste Google Sheet link]
Click the link, then File > Make a copy in Google Sheets, or download it as an .xlsx if you prefer Excel. The formulas work in both.
What the template tracks
The sheet has five tabs:
- Summary shows total budget, total spent, and remaining, plus a per-day allowance that updates as you log expenses.
- Pre-trip holds flights, lodging, insurance, and anything else you book before leaving.
- Daily log is where every purchase goes while traveling. Date, category, amount, one-line note. That is it.
- Categories auto-totals spending by type so you can see food versus transport versus fun.
- Settings holds your currency and a conversion rate if you are traveling abroad, so you can log purchases in local currency and the summary stays in dollars.
How to fill it in before you leave
Start with the fixed stuff. Flights and lodging usually take 50 to 65 percent of a typical leisure trip budget. Whatever remains gets divided across your days on the ground.
Here is a worked example for a $2,000, seven-day trip for one person:
| Category | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Flight | $550 | booked 6 weeks out |
| Lodging | $700 | 6 nights |
| Food | $315 | $45/day |
| Local transport | $105 | $15/day |
| Activities | $210 | 2 paid attractions |
| Buffer | $120 | 6 percent of total |
That leaves $45 a day for everything that is not already booked. Some days you spend $20, some days $80, and the running total keeps you honest either way.
What things cost at your destination
Guessing is why budgets fail. A $45/day food number is comfortable in Portugal and laughably tight in Zurich.
When I plan a new destination, I look up the country’s profile on TravelSafe. Each country page pulls current safety information alongside practical details, so I can sanity-check both the daily cost expectations and whether anything about the destination needs planning around before I lock the budget.
Three habits that make the template work
Log expenses nightly. It takes ninety seconds at the hotel and memory-based logging dies by day three.
Decide your buffer rule before the trip. Mine is that buffer money only covers surprises, not upgrades. Without a rule, the buffer becomes a slush fund by day two.
Check the Summary tab mid-morning, not mid-trip. Catching an overspend on day 2 gives you four days to correct. Discovering it on the flight home is just accounting.
Common questions
How much should I budget per day? For mid-range travel, roughly $100 to $200 per person per day in Western Europe, $50 to $100 in most of Latin America and Southeast Asia, and $150+ in places like Switzerland, Norway, or Japan on the higher end. Your own research beats these averages every time.
Does this work for family trips? Yes. Duplicate the Daily log tab per person or just log shared expenses once and track who paid in the note column.
Excel instead of Sheets? Download the file as .xlsx. Formulas used are SUM, SUMIF, and division. Nothing exotic breaks.
Ten minutes of setup, ninety seconds a night. That is the entire system, and it has saved us hundreds of dollars per trip since we started using it.