Simplify the Separation of Travel and Home Expenses With Splitwise
I am currently on a 10 day trip with two of my friends. We started in Vegas and are slowly making our way to Denver, Colorado, stopping at national parks along the way.
It’s very funny. There are also many shared hotel rooms and Airbnbs, meal sharing and gas purchases. Since we share most of these costs, the 95 we have can be an accounting nightmare. Instead, we use a free app called Splitwise to keep track of it all, and it’s awesome.
At Splitwise, I created a “group” for our trip, consisting of me, my friend Sarah and my friend Claire. This app is great for things like group travel, but it can also be useful in any situation where you are sharing multiple expenses with a group of people.
Since we had expenses, we added them to the app along with information on how to split them. For example, last night I paid $ 180 for the Airbnb rental with my credit card and told the app to split it equally into thirds. Sarah paid for our breakfast and split the bill for what we all ate as there were some big differences on that score.
Costs can be split in almost any way. They can be divided equally, as a percentage, or by a certain amount. You can also have the app split everything equally, but then adjust it so that one person can get a few extra dollars.
Optionally, you can add photos of receipts to individual expenses. While not necessary for our trip as we are all here and see how much things cost, I see this feature useful in a roommate situation where you are sharing household items like toilet paper or food and want to know how much an individual person costs. The actual value of the item.
The beauty of the app is that it pays attention to how much each person is spending and then shows you how much you collectively owe other people or how much they owe you. So Sarah might owe me $ 60 for Airbnb, but I owe her $ 15 for breakfast. The app performs these calculations and subtracts the cost of breakfast from Airbnb’s cost.
After all your expenses have been met, the Checkout button allows you to tell the application that money has been exchanged for hands to balance the situation.
It was great for us because we all know exactly how much money we owe each other and there is no stress in someone always picking up food or hotels and maybe finally screwing up. All of this information is right in front of you all the time, which means you don’t have to talk about money while you travel, and you can focus on having fun instead.