On the groundTripSplit Buddy
Three things in here say private
An expense, an itinerary leg and a plan can each be locked down, and the three have nothing to do with each other. One is your money, one is your whereabouts, one is whether anybody can find it.
You buy something at a pharmacy that you would rather not read out to four adults over dinner. You log it, you mark it private, and it goes away. Then two days later you notice one of your itinerary legs also says private, and a plan you made is asking who can see it, and now you’re not sure what you’ve hidden from whom.
They’re three separate questions that happen to have borrowed the same word.
An expense marked “Just mine” is about money. Nobody else on the trip can see it — not the organizer, nobody — and it enters no shared total and no split. It doesn’t even ask who paid, because the answer can only be you. It still counts toward your own trip cost and your own budget, which is the point of it. Yours, not vanished.
A leg marked private is about where you are. It decides whether the rest of the trip sees that you’ll be in Lecce for two nights. That’s all it does. No leg of yours has ever moved a dollar in anybody’s direction — legs decide which days you can log against and what your budget spreads over, and that’s the end of their involvement.
A plan’s setting is about being found. The question it asks is whether the rest of the trip can find this one, and it’s the only one of the three that’s about discovery rather than concealment. People who aren’t coming can see there’s a cooking class on Thursday and what it costs a head. They can’t see your total and they can’t see who dropped out.
Money, whereabouts, findability. Set one and you have not set the others.
There’s a card tied to my handle with somebody’s full name and home address on it, readable by anyone in the airport who leans over. Meanwhile, upstairs, four adults are working out who’s allowed to know about a cooking class. I don’t want to tell anybody how to live.