Three tools I use for budgeting our six month world travels

Balazuc, a medieval village in the South of France

It has been a while since my last post. After finishing my role with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in late September, I have started a 6 month journey around the world with my wife Agnes and our two children, Esmee and Noe. So far, we have spent time in Singapore, Switzerland, France, Portugal and Spain. Now we have settled in Quebec, Canada and started our 3 month house exchange in this winter wonderland. Being New Zealanders, we are looking forward to having a white Christmas and New Year.

Ayamonte, Spain and Vila Real de Santo António, Portugal across the river

Good budgeting is important for travelling for such a long time. Dealing with different currencies and exchange rates can be confusing. Being a FME nerd, I have set up FME workflows to budget ahead, use APIs to get the real exchange rates, and PowerBI to visualise spendings. This is how I have done it.

WISE

I use Wise Travel Card for all my overseas spendings. It is the cheapest travel card I have found so far. It uses the mid-market exchange rate (the one you find on Google). The banks on the other hand often add a mark up plus a currency conversation fee which makes them way more expensive.

The most exciting part for me is that you can create a custom token using the Wise API. I was able to do HTTP Calls to extract all transaction and exchange rates and do my budgeting in NZD.

Once you create an account with Wise, you can go to the Settings and create an API key:

FME

It is very straightforward to extract transactions using the HTTPCaller in FME:

Once I extract the statement from Wise, I use another HTTP Call to get the real time exchange rate to NZD for each transaction:

Then I use a AttributeManager to calculate the transactions to NZD and assign a category:

I have a SQL database running in Docker Desktop. This is where I store all the transactions.

PowerBI

To visualize my transactions, analyse my spendings and budget for the coming months, I imported the database to PowerBI and created several visuals:

Here you go. Here are the tools I use to plan our six month world travels. Having been an analyst for almost 20 years, I love creating graphs, charts to analyse my spendings and budget for our six month world travels. FME is an excellent tool to automate transaction import from Wise to PowerBI.

If you are planning to travel overseas, I highly recommend the Wise travel card. It has saved me at least 4% in every single transaction. That is a lot when you add up all the spendings in the entire trip. Click on the link HERE to receive a fee free transfer of up to $900.