Our Travel Budget, Explained

People sometimes ask how I manage our budget while we live on the road full-time, which surprises me, because I don’t think of myself as a budgeting guru—I just really hate financial chaos. But after nearly three years of “living liquid,” I’ve built a system that keeps us solvent, sane, and aware of what this life actually costs. Most of the time, anyway.

 

And yes, it involves Quicken. And yes, I enjoy it.

 

I use Quicken to automatically import transactions from our cards and bank accounts (always through a VPN because public Wi-Fi can’t be trusted) and track every expense. From there, everything we spend gets sorted into three buckets, because full-time travel only works if we know which costs are fixed, which are tied to the roaming lifestyle, and which are optional.

 

The first bucket is made up of the mandatory monthly expenses we’d owe no matter where we lived, like taxes, insurance, debt payments, cell service, and the subscriptions we swear we’ll cancel someday but never do.

 

The second bucket includes all the variable expenses tied directly to life on the road—which I group in Quicken as “P4,” short for Phase Four, the fourth major chapter of our lives (Portland, Denver, Seattle, and now this roaming world tour). These P4 costs include our virtual mailbox; the storage unit and its insurance; travel gear (mostly new suitcases because Geoff loves a new bag); roaming fees; Airbnb rent; relocation planes, trains, and automobiles, or anything else that helps us move from one place to another; visas and passport renewals; and medical expenses. These amounts may change, but none are optional. When I look at Quicken's charts, this category consistently accounts for roughly  37–43 percent of our spending—higher when we’re in the States or anywhere Geoff can sniff out a $32 cocktail.

 

The third bucket is what we call “fun money”—restaurants, coffee shops, museums, liquor, excursions, books, clothes, and the only souvenir Geoff is allowed to collect, stickers (“And jewelry,” I hear him shout from the other room). This is the bucket that shapes what our daily life feels like, and the part that flexes the most depending on where we are and how indulgent we feel.

 

Food & Dining gets special attention within that bucket because it's the category most likely to go rogue. I track alcohol, coffee shops, groceries, and restaurants, because these are choices—not obligations—and when spending goes off the rails, it's almost always Food & Dining behind the wheel.

 

Some expenses behave badly in a monthly system. Airbnb is the worst offender. They often charge us months before we arrive, and if a giant Airbnb charge pops up in August for a stay that actually runs through October and November, Quicken’s charts lie to me. And I don’t accept lying from charts.

 

So I built a system called "Rent Shift," and yes, I'm very proud of it. When Airbnb bills us early, I enter an equal credit in a Rent Shift account to cancel it from the wrong month. Then, on the actual dates of the stay, I allocate the real amounts back through Rent Shift, so the charts reflect what the stay actually cost each month. If a stay stretches across two or more months, I split it accordingly. A five-week stay in Puebla in the fall, for example, will be divided into the October and November portions, so future me can compare one location to another without getting misled by the billing schedule.

 

I use the same approach for other “lumpy” expenses—car rentals, excursions, anything that hits all at once but belongs across time. None of those have names as satisfying as Rent Shift, but the principle is the same.

 

Groceries are their own special problem. We don’t buy food consistently throughout a stay. Week one in a new Airbnb is always expensive—we’re stocking a kitchen from scratch. Week four is the opposite—we’re trying to eat down the fridge, so we don’t leave behind three kinds of mustard. If groceries lived inside the weekly fun-money budget, the first week anywhere would feel bleak and monastic, while the last week would turn Geoff into Mr. Burns, rubbing his hands together whispering maniacally, “We’re rich, I tell you…RICH!”

 

And then there’s the annual Costco run when we visit home—a year’s worth of vitamins and toiletries that are technically groceries but absolutely not weekly groceries.

 

So I averaged our grocery spending across our entire time on the road and now allocate it evenly—about $850 a month, which Quicken tells me is roughly $215 a week. It smooths out the spikes and protects both of us from emotional breakdowns.

 

Once those buckets are defined, the monthly budgeting becomes a ritual. I start with our income—pensions, Social Security, and planned withdrawals from retirement accounts. From that, I subtract the fixed Bucket One expenses; then the P4 allocations for the month (rent, storage, roaming, medical, relocation, the whole circus); then the predicted-but-not-monthly costs I spread evenly across the year, like our relocation fund, medical allocations, the rental car for visits home, and CPA fees. And finally, I subtract the grocery allocation.

 

Whatever survives that gauntlet becomes our monthly fun-money budget. Right now, that works out to about $410 per week, or roughly $59 per day. We track that part through the Weekly app. Overspend one week and the following week shrinks—and Geoff whines. Underspend one week, and the following week expands—and Geoff takes all the credit. At month-end, a positive balance moves into savings, though a negative balance drags down the following month. The system corrects itself—often brutally.

 

When we first started traveling full-time, we didn’t budget at all. We assumed things would “balance out.” They did not. We overspent—often spectacularly. It took nearly two years to understand our real relocation and medical costs. But once we figured them out, the ship steadied.

 

This system isn’t glamorous or romantic, but it lets us live this life without panicking every time a plane ticket or dentist visit rolls around. And once Geoff’s Social Security kicks in, our fun-money budget will double—something I freely admit I’m excited about.

 

If this helps anyone avoid the mistakes we made early on, all the better. And if not—well, at least Geoff can no longer say I’ve been hoarding all this information in my head.