We recently went on a road trip around parts of New Zealand’s north island. We have been to Taupo, Rotorua, East Cape and Napier. It took us 2 weeks, we drove more than 2,000 km and spent almost NZ $3,000 on the trip. Of course, being a data nerd, I made a plan of the trip in Excel and that helped us budget for this.
After getting back to home, I thought it would be fun to polish the planner workbook and share it with you all so you too can plan a fabulous road trip. So here we go.
Road trip budget & planner template
Click here to download the template.
How is it setup?
Simple. Any road trip style holiday has 4 main categories of expenses – Accommodation, Driving, Activities and Food. You can add one more category called “Other” to set budget for any miscellaneous expenses.
The template starts with budget for each of these 5 categories. Just specify the budget for each (except for food, which you can type in per day budget in the settings area.
Once you have the budgets in, also specify settings for calculating fuel expenses. Specify the MPG (or KMPL) and gas cost per gallon (or liter) and the template will calculate driving costs based on the number of miles (or KM) you plan to drive each day.
The last step is to enter daily details. For each day of your trip enter below details in the trip table:
- Date
- Where you plan to stay and how much it costs
- How much you plan to drive
- What activities you plan to take up and how much they cost
- Your actual food expenses (ie groceries, eating out, take away etc.)
- Any other expenses as you incur
The summary area shows how much of your budget is used up and a cute little thermometer chart for each category.
That is all. Enjoy your road trip.
Bonus: a simple way to extend the template
If you spend all the money on one credit (or debit) card, you can import the statement in to a new tab, categorize the expenses along the lines of Stay, Drive, Activities, Food or Other and then use SUMIFS to calculate actual values.
Like tracking things? Check out these templates
If you enjoy tracking and planning, check out these awesome templates too.
- 7 Personal finance trackers
- Grow your money mustache with this template
- Monthly planner template
- To do list template with priorities
How do you plan / track holidays?
For smaller / weekend getways, we don’t plan. We just get out and enjoy. But if we are going on a holiday / trip for more than a week, I like to plan things.
What about you? Do you plan / track your holidays? How do you do this? Please share your tips in the comments section.
