THE RETIREMENT BUDGET LINE NOBODY WANTS TO TALK ABOUT
Honest numbers include the costs that don't fit a category.
Most retirement travel budgets have the same lines. Housing. Food. Transportation. Insurance. Flights. Those are the numbers that go in a spreadsheet and make sense when you look at them later.
There is another number that does not have a clean name.
It is the spending that does not attach to any of those lines. A lost deposit. A change fee. A booking you are still paying for because the cancellation window closed before the plan changed.
Our OFII appointment is a good example. OFII is the French immigration office, and when the appointment date arrives, you go. Ours came up while we were booked into an Airbnb in Strasbourg. The appointment was in Lyon. The Airbnb was outside the cancellation window, so that cost was already committed. We covered the Lyon hotel night with Capital One Quicksilver cash back and restructured our rail pass routing to keep the transportation we had already planned. The Strasbourg booking stood regardless. We paid for both.
The timing was something we could not have controlled when we booked. The cost was real either way, and it belongs in the budget the same as any other line does.
Before we started traveling full time, we assumed the math would mostly be about managing the big categories. It is. Housing matters. Food matters. Transportation matters. What we did not anticipate was how consistently the uncategorized costs accumulate alongside them. Every new stay comes with a new building, new appliances, new grocery stores, new transit system, and a new set of logistics that have to be worked out on arrival. You can research a place for weeks and still walk into something that costs money once you get there.
We budget for this now. A real number, set aside for the costs that do not fit any other line on the spreadsheet.
A fee that did not surface until later. A booking that could not be moved when the plan changed. Those are part of what this lifestyle costs. Tracking them honestly is what keeps the budget functional when the month does not go exactly as planned.
Every train ticket, every coffee, every point used — all of it got counted across three cities.
Scott & Liza
