Before you goTripSplit Buddy
Your travel day doesn't need a dinner budget
A daily budget divides your money evenly across your trip, which assumes every day is the same. You can pull individual days out of that sum and give them their own figure.
There’s a day in every trip that isn’t really part of it. You’re up at four in the morning. You stand in a queue, and then in a second queue that only exists because of the first one. I get put on a scale in front of everybody, which is something that happens to me and does not happen to you. Then a belt, a chute, a hold, and a man at the far end who throws.
I could go on. I won’t.
What I want to talk about is what money does on that day.
It doesn’t behave. You spend eleven dollars all day, or you spend ninety because the bag was four pounds over and the coffee was airport coffee. Either way it looks nothing like a Tuesday in Rome. And if you’ve set yourself a private budget, the app has been quietly dividing your money by the days you’ll be away — and that day is one of them, sitting in the average, pulling every other day down with it.
You can take it out. It’s called fixing a day, and it’s three levels down on the Budget card.
What it does to the sums
Give a day its own figure and that money is reserved. It’s set aside before anything else, and the rest of your budget spreads across the days you haven’t fixed. So a travel day held at $30 stops dragging your Rome days down, and the $30 is still there waiting when the day arrives.
The pacing chart follows it. The planned line bends where your fixed days are rather than running straight across, which is a truer picture of a trip — nobody spends in a straight line.
It works the other way round too
Fixed doesn’t mean big. A day at somebody’s parents’ house where you’ll spend nothing can be fixed at nothing, and the money it would otherwise have been allocated goes to the days you’ll actually use it. Same mechanism, opposite direction.
Some of the best trips I’ve been on had three days like that in the middle, where I sat in a corner and was not moved.
Days that fall outside your trip
If you fix a day that isn’t inside any of your legs, it isn’t quietly binned. It’s named and held apart so you can see that it’s stranded, rather than wondering where a number went.
I spend travel days in a hold with no idea what’s going on, and I’ve made peace with that. What I object to is landing somewhere and finding we’ve already spent Thursday’s money getting there.