What my 2020 spreadsheet told meseven trips, 294 rows, one surprise

March 2019 to May 2020. Seven countries, 150 days away, ₱619,281 total.

• Singapore, 14 days, ₱90,240
• Seoul, 5 days, ₱21,017
• Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, 8 days, ₱69,542
• Bali, 6 days, ₱19,514
• Sydney and Melbourne, 13 days, ₱64,346
• Dubai, 19 days, ₱150,014
• The UK, 85 days, ₱204,608

That last one was supposed to be a short visit. Then March 2020 happened and it became a lockdown.

A six-year-old spreadsheet is never clean. Before anything could be charted, this had to be sorted out:

• 13 rows in the Kansai tab had the day and month swapped. 10 June was typed as 6 October.
• 51 rows in Bali and the UK had no date at all. They stayed in, marked undated, rather than quietly disappearing.
• Cash I exchanged and never itemized became its own line instead of vanishing into the total.
• Refunds counted as zero, and the credit card tab, which was a statement and not a trip, was left out.

Every fix is listed on the dashboard. That matters more than the charts. If you cannot see what was changed, you cannot trust the number at the top.

46% of everything, ₱286,733, went to gear and tech. Not flights. Not hotels. Cameras, lenses, lights, a phone.

My own sheet had a cell labelled Total Camera: ₱135,689. An a6400 and a Sigma 16mm bought in Dubai in March 2020, then a Sony 10-18, a gimbal, a Rode mic and a wall of Hue lights during the UK lockdown.

I thought I was tracking trips. I was actually tracking the month I accidentally bought a studio.

Strip out the shopping and the trips themselves were cheap. ₱1,831 a day across all seven.

• Stays came to ₱17,300 across 150 days, under 3% of everything. Hostels, split Airbnbs, and people who took me in.
• Bali ran ₱3,252 a day, all in.
• Seoul was street food and a Tmoney card, ₱4,203 a day.

One note in the Kansai tab still gets me: grateful for the free accommodation, breakfast and dinner, from Ninang and Yamane. People are the best budget line there is.

Three leaks, all of them still common in 2026:

• ₱36,284 in cash I exchanged and never itemized. Money I genuinely cannot account for.
• A hotel room Google priced at ₱1,692 that cost me ₱1,902 through a booking site. About 12%, gone to currency conversion.
• Four credit cards across four countries, each foreign swipe quietly adding a few percent.

My own note in the Australia tab reads: BEST FOREX, FIND A FRIEND. The next row says the opposite happened. Today a multi-currency card does the friend's job, and you decline every offer to pay in your home currency.

I ate at 7-Eleven to save ₱200, then bought a Kindle Oasis for ₱16,549. During lockdown alone there was about ₱25,000 of smart lighting, ₱16,000 of Echos and streaming sticks, and two sets of AirPods.

Some of it became the kit I still work with. Some of it was being stuck indoors with Amazon open. The sheet does not let me pretend otherwise.

Three reasons I keep it open:

• It is a floor, not a budget. The per-day numbers are the least a similar trip would cost today. Add a buffer for six years of price rises and you have a planning baseline.
• It holds the origin story. The gear line is the moment the travel budget turned into a business budget. I could not see that in 2020.
• The structure still works. Currency, rate, card used, who owes whom, and a notes column. That is the shape every travel budget needs.

I am turning the whole process into a free Claude skill called Ledger. You drop in a spreadsheet or a bank export, it cleans the mess, sorts the spending, builds the dashboard, and then tells you the truth about it.

It runs inside your own Claude. Your numbers never leave your machine. When it is ready I will share it here first.

You probably have one. A budget you abandoned, a tracker from a trip, a folder of bank exports you never looked at twice.

It is not just a record of what you spent. It is a record of who you were becoming, written in numbers, before you had the words for it.

Mine said: she is about to start filming.