Dave:

Thanks so much for the comments. One way around your concern would be to take the entire year’s travel expenses and spread them out by month. That’s probably the most understandable method. What I do instead is amortize the expense to get to a given location over the length of our stay. So if we’re 88 days someplace, I divide the travel expense across those 88 days and spread it out per month based on days spent/location.

That seems reasonable to me, lets me stay current on budgeting, and reflects the fact that while it might be expensive to get from Chicago to Marrakech, it truly is cheaper to get from Marrakech to Tunis. That calculus informs our decisions as to where to go next, so it seems fair to track it that way.

Ultimately, I track expenses so I can prove to my wife that we can afford our lifestyle. That and slightly more than the normal allotment of OCD.

Let me know if you have any questions. Obviously, happy to be transparent.

I prefer to record travel costs separately as otherwise it becomes misleading when comparing the costs of different locations. It would obviously be massively less expensive to travel from Cadiz to Morocco than from Bangkok to Morocco, but I assume you would record both as Morocco costs.