CREATING A BUDGET

I've had the sobering task today of setting out a budget for our trip. I'm using Google Docs to create a spreadsheet that we can check whilst we're away. I started by noting down all of our known costs so far, flights, transport, hostel reservations and then filled in the blanks with predicted expediture. Adding a daily budget for food and the odd activity/tour is easily forgotten. It is not supposed to be a precise, rigid document just an outline to assist with managing our finances and to give us the best chance of doing everything we want to. As we travel we'll subtract from our funds what we've actually spent so that we know exactly how much is left, and whether we need to tighten the purse strings if we want to do everything we intend to do.

I feel a bit subdued after dealing with this side of things but if we make all our decisions based on how they look on paper then I'm not sure we'd end up doing a great deal.