Budget

(This) idiot's guide to touring in Europe.


Our first step towards budget setting is to decide, broadly, where we're going and how long for. This is usually done around Christmas time as the excesses of that period encourage lateral thinking. Or, to put it another way, lots of alcohol fuelled decisions are made to, perhaps, be tempered as reality hits. Once we have an outline of location and duration in our head I start putting estimated daily costs for acccommodation and daily mileage into a spreadsheet. I won't go into detail about how the spreadsheet is formatted, suffice to say that all accommodation and food estimates are entered in euros, and adjusted by the spreadsheet that has parameters for exchange rate and fuel costs (OK, you can wake up now). The estimates are taken from some research on websites to understand what accommodation, fuel and ferry prices are likely to be, plus some guesswork based on experience. The figure that the spreadsheet throws out (and it has an element of contingency within it) is our starting point.

The key question is "can we afford it?". Fortunately, to date, the answer has always been that we can. By and large the figure we've come up with has been, broadly, correct for the tour. Though thats not to say that what we put into the spreadsheet was accurate for each element.

If we can't afford it? We've discussed that situation and come to the conclusion that we'd probably shorten the number of days, and economise on luxuries such as wine with the evening meal.

Having set the budget and put the funds to one side, I load up my Caxton FX card, aiming to get a decent exchange rate. This holds around 80% of the budget, and we carry the balance in cash. The Caxton FX card was chosen as a result of a Money Saving Expert recommendation a while ago, and may no longer be the best option.