Before you goTripSplit Buddy
Your travel day doesn't need a dinner budget
Your daily figure spreads what's left across the days you have left. That works fine until one of those days is fourteen hours on two planes.
Tuesday is fourteen hours long and none of it is a holiday. Two flights, and a layover in the lounge your credit card lets you into, where the food is free and so is the coffee and you will still somehow leave having spent money. Your budget, meanwhile, has divided what’s left by the days you have left and cheerfully handed Tuesday two hundred and forty-five dollars, which you are not going to spend at thirty thousand feet.
First, the thing worth knowing about that daily figure: it looks after itself. Have an expensive Monday and a cheap Wednesday and you don’t need to do anything about it — the number simply recalculates from what’s left over the days still to come. Nobody has to balance anything, and going over on one day is not a mark against you.
What it can’t do is know which days aren’t really days. So you tell it. Take Tuesday out of the average and give it its own figure — thirty dollars, or zero if you can get through both flights without buying wine on either of them. That amount is set aside, and everything Tuesday would otherwise have been handed goes back into the pot and spreads across the days you’re actually somewhere.
Worth keeping straight, because it’s easy to reach for the wrong one: a fixed day sets what a day is allowed. A planned expense records what something costs. If you already know the house is two thousand dollars, that’s a plan — it belongs in the trip’s numbers, and your budget holds your share of it back on its own. Fixing a day at two thousand tells the app something different and rather less useful.
Last thing. Fix a day that falls outside the dates you’re actually away and it isn’t thrown out — it’s listed on its own, marked as outside your dates and not counted, with a Remove beside it. Usually it means a date moved after you set it.
Nobody added a checked bag when they booked, so they paid double for me at the desk and then left me out on a cart on the tarmac. In the rain. Thirty dollars, that Tuesday was down for. Karma was the laundry they had to do when they got there. They must have forgotten my zipper is original.