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Project Management Basics: Budgeting
#projectmanagement #tourism #travel #motivation #budget
There is no way I was born just to pay bills and die.
September – the “back to school” season for some, and “back to adventures” season for others. Most have used up the summer to unwind, forget about the hustle of daily life, and collect energy for new chores and obligations. If you’re reading my blog, you are most likely not one of them. (Not that there is anything wrong with being an ordinary person though – but you’ll agree that it feels much better, more successful and utterly satisfying being out-of-the-box.)
As I mentioned in one of the rare and infrequent summer posts (don’t worry, I know nobody uses summers to binge their favorite shows, let alone reading materials), I’ll be happy to provide input into how to properly plan and organize your voyages. One of the main points included, of course, budgeting, as this is the most painful part for most humans – both the “back to school” ones and us adventurers. We live in a world where most people do not want to realize that there is money for everyone – or that it multiplies when circulating. This is most likely the root cause of the scarcity of money in the world, a lack of ideas to begin with. And this is what causes most people to save on their travels by not traveling. Let’s now correct that!
Budget templates can be found anywhere on the Internet. In fact, I will be preparing a set of my own in near future, to share with the world. I promise they will be pretty and inspiring. And anyone can tell you the simplest way to make a budget is to list out all the travel requirements, multiply their prices with their respective quantity, and sum the totals. And yes, this is definitely not the wrong approach, this is Budgeting 101.
However, if you want to have nicely set budgeting templates for your travels, you will want to make sure not to run out of money, as well as to cover as many costs as possible. This would mean include all the souvenirs, all the junk food, street vendors’ merchandise, and anything that may come to mind. Be wary though, as each time you go traveling, you’ll me on a limited amount of money – and you should act accordingly.
We can absolutely use a basic budgeting template, in which we list out all the expenses in the rows, while in the columns we set the expense names, unit prices quantities and totals. These can easily be created in Excel or any other sheet of choice. You can even write it by hand, if you prefer. These are some of the expenses you will have almost unconditionally, whenever and wherever you travel to:
- Transportation (plane, train, bus etc.),
- Accommodation,
- Breakfast,
- Lunch,
- Dinner,
- One snack per day,
- Beverage,
- Café,
- Souvenirs,
- Local/public transportation,
- Going out.
All of these pretty much go without saying, and you can feel free to incorporate them into your budget. It’s also important to make calculations. For example, “souvenirs” is not a good statement per se. If you want to know just how much you can spend on souvenirs, you’ll want to calculate how many people you’d want to buy gifts for, in which form, how much money on average each gift will cost, will it require additional (read: charged extra) packaging, etc. What you can also do to bypass this rough calculation is to set a budget for each of the articles, but only if you can control yourself to only spend within the budget.
What most people don’t know, is that unpredicted costs are crucial. And yet, no one knows how to predict them (who knew!). Recently, I had a travel where a friend and I had to cash out extra two train tickets and book a completely new hotel, despite the one we had already paid for. Normally, no one can expect this, but these things happen. Planes are delayed constantly, seemingly for no reason (other than improper governance). When utilizing multiple means of transport, it’s not uncommon to have one delayed, causing the loss of the following one, and thus running late to the hotel – or even having to spend an unplanned night in a town in between your start and end destination.
In critical situations, understand that options can be extreme. I’m not saying sleep on the street if the cheapest ho(s)tel is over $100 per night, but I am saying to revisit and rebalance your budget along the way. Rather, feel free skipping an expensive dinner the following night, to relieve your wallet of unplanned pain. Even if it means having to skip buying magnets for your friends – just remember they’d be happier without a magnet than hearing about you sleeping on the street or missing your favorite attraction.
Sharing these tips live, I remember hearing a frequent question – where do we even make the money to travel? How is it that you have so much money to travel all the time?!
The truth is simple – I don’t. In order to have the money, firstly we all need to earn more than what we need to survive. And I won’t lie to you – with one of my past jobs, I was earning only enough to pay rent, bills, and hope to be able to eat all 30/31 days of the month. Calling that period uneasy would make it an enormous understatement. In those conditions, of course, there was no speech of me traveling anywhere else but to work. And guess what – I was not traveling anywhere (outside of those boundaries).
However, as soon as you’re earning more than you require for bare survival, we can talk about paying yourself first, saving up a fixed percentage each month and prioritizing your spendings. However, this is a story for a different blog post, and a more advanced lesson in budgeting.
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[…] starting, I’d like to thank everyone for their interest in budgeting and saving money for travels. It’s important to stay on top of everything and pursue our […]
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