Why I'm Tracking Every Dollar of My Upcoming Travels

Introducing: Today Cost Me. Tracking Every Dollar of My Trip

I've spent the last five years working in marketing across a handful of fintech startups in Sydney, Australia.

Great jobs, steady pay, the whole bit. And for most of that time, especially over the past few months, I did what most people do who want to go and travel the world. I fired up Google and searched for: "Southeast Asia travel budget", or "How much does 3 months in Europe cost?" and got the same recycled advice: "You'll need to budget anywhere between $50 and $200 per day for Southeast Asia and more for Europe".

Cool. But what does that actually look like? What are you actually spending the money on? Is that hostels or hotels? Street food or restaurants? Does it include the random $12 sim card you didn't plan for?

Nobody gives you the receipt.

So... I built one

Today Cost Me is a live expense tracker. Every dollar my wife Annalise and I spend on our 9-month trip will get logged, categorised, and published here, in real time. No rounding up, no estimating. I'm not going to tell you to budget "approximately $30 per day for food," I'll give you the actual number to the cent.

The idea is relatively simple, if I'm going to track my spending anyway (and I am — I've been keeping weirdly meticulous spreadsheets of my finances since I was about 8 years old, doing jobs around the house and neighbourhood for pocket money), I might as well make it useful for anyone else planning a similar trip.

What you'll find here

• Real daily costs broken down by category: accommodation, food, transport, activities, and other miscellaneous spend.
• Country level comparisons based on what we actually spent, not what a 2019 blog post estimated before a city became popular or inflation hit prices hard in 2023.
• A trip estimator so you can plug in your own destinations and see what it might cost you (this is going to be a pretty big work in progress and will also use a bunch of publicly available data, plus my lived experiences).
• Weekly blog posts covering the honest, unfiltered reality of travel spending, complete with our daily breakdowns.

What this isn't

This isn't a "how I travel the world for $10 per day" flex. I'm not going to pretend we only eat street food when we occasionally want a proper meal at a restaurant. I'm not going to skip a cooking class in Vietnam or a dive trip in Thailand just to keep our daily average artificially low.

This is what it actually costs when two normal people (not professional travel hackers or trust fund kids), take 9 months off to see the world.

The plan

We leave Sydney in mid April, 2026. Our first stop is a few days in Hong Kong. From there, the rough route takes us through Southeast Asia, across to Europe, down through Central and South America, over to India and Sri Lanka for a friend's wedding, and finishing up with a month in Japan for snow season.

The trip is exactly 9 months, with a total budget of $80,000 AUD for both of us (~$290 per day total). As of March, 2026 this equates to around $55,000 USD or €47,500 EUR. For simplicity, all our spend will be denominated in Australian dollars, but you'll be able to set a preference when tracking our daily expenses to be able to toggle to your local currency for comparison.

I'll be posting weekly updates, country budget breakdowns, and the occasional practical guide (like which travel cards, sim cards or insurance policies are actually worth getting).

Follow along

If you're planning your own trip, check out the Trip Estimator page to get a ballpark. If you want to keep track of the real numbers as they come in, check the Spending page or follow along on Instagram where I'll be trialling some POV camera work to keep a visual track of where our budget is going.

Every dollar. Every destination. No guesswork.