How I Survived 3 Weeks in Portugal & Spain on $1,400 — With No Spreadsheets

"I'll figure out the budget when I get back." I said this before every trip. Every trip, I regretted it. This time, I tried something different — and it changed how I travel entirely.

I'm not a particularly organized person. I've lost boarding passes, misplaced hotel confirmations, and once spent a full evening in Faro trying to calculate what I'd spent that week across three different currencies using nothing but my banking app and a bad memory. The number I landed on was wrong, by the way. I found out when I got home.

So when I started planning three weeks through Lisbon, Porto, Seville, and Granada — with a hard ceiling of $1,400 for everything after flights — I knew I needed a system that could survive contact with actual travel. Not a spreadsheet I'd stop updating by day three. Something that worked the way I actually travel: fast, occasionally chaotic, and always moving.

The trip at a glance

Lisbon — 7 nights
Porto — 4 nights
Seville — 5 nights
Granada — 4 nights
Total — 20 nights

Total Spent: $1,320
Daily Average: $63/day
Under Budget: $80

Setting up the trip before I left

I created a single trip in MyTripList with a base budget of $1,400 in USD, then split it mentally into buckets: $420 accommodation, $350 food, $280 transport, $200 activities, $150 buffer. I didn't assign these as hard limits — just reference points. The app would tell me in real time whether I was drifting.

I logged my Lisbon Airbnb, my Porto hostel, and both Spanish bookings before departure. Four confirmation numbers, zero paper. Everything was in one place, accessible offline — which mattered more than I expected once I was on the ground.

Lisbon: where I nearly blew the whole thing

Lisbon is beautiful and, if you're not paying attention, surprisingly easy to overspend in. The first three days I was running on excitement and not logging anything. Classic mistake.

By day four I opened the app to check in and felt that specific kind of dread — the kind where you're scared to look at the number. The food total was already at $94. For four days, with four more still ahead in the city, that was a problem.

"Seeing the donut chart broken down by category was the moment everything clicked. I wasn't overspending on Lisbon — I was overspending specifically on restaurants. The fix was obvious once I could see it."

The next three days I switched to market lunches and one sit-down dinner every other evening. I came out of Lisbon having spent $198 on food across 7 days — right on pace. Without the category breakdown I wouldn't have caught it in time to course-correct. I'd have just felt vaguely anxious and hoped for the best.

Porto: four nights, under $200 total

Porto is one of the most underrated cities in Europe for budget travelers. The hostel I found near Miragaia cost €28/night, the wine is absurdly cheap, and most of the city's best views are completely free.

I logged every expense in euros. The app converted automatically to USD at the live rate — something that sounds minor until you're in day two of a country and you realize you genuinely have no idea what things are costing in real terms. Knowing that a €3.50 pastel de nata was $3.78 at that week's rate sounds unnecessary. But it keeps you tethered to your actual budget in a way that spending in a foreign currency simply doesn't.

Porto total: $187, including accommodation, food, transport, and a boat tour I almost skipped because I thought I couldn't afford it. (The app said I could. I trusted it. It was right.)

Spain: where the exchange rate actually helped

Crossing into Spain brought a pleasant surprise — my accommodation costs dropped even further, and Seville's tapas culture meant my food spend stayed low without any effort. You eat well, you eat often, and the bill is rarely what you expect it to be.

By the time I reached Granada I had $340 left for my final four nights with a budget that had originally allocated $280 for the whole Spain leg. The buffer I'd built in Lisbon and Porto gave me room to do the Alhambra ticket ($18), a guided flamenco evening, and a day trip to the Sierra Nevada without any anxiety. I checked the app before each one. Each time, it confirmed I was fine. That confidence is worth something.

What I'd do differently next time

• Set category alerts from day one. I manually checked the app. Next time I'll configure notifications so the app tells me when a category hits 75% of pace — before it becomes an issue.
• Log transport separately by mode. I mixed taxis, trains, and buses into one "transport" bucket and lost visibility on which was eating the most. Breaking it out would have been useful in Portugal especially.
• Invite one travel contact as a read-only mate. Not for collaboration — just so someone back home could see my itinerary in real time without me having to send location updates. A safety habit I'll adopt going forward.

The honest verdict

I came home $80 under budget. That alone would have felt like a win. But the more meaningful thing is that I never felt the low-grade financial anxiety that had followed me through every previous trip. I didn't do mental math at dinner. I didn't avoid checking my banking app because I was scared of the number. I knew, at any point, exactly where I stood.

That's what a good travel budget tool actually gives you — not just the data, but the freedom to stop thinking about money so you can start thinking about the trip.