GA Pilots - How do you track your aviation budget?

Posted by jester298@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 14 comments

Like the title says, I’m wondering how you track your personal aviation expenses? As a GA pilot, I’m trying to get better about budgeting my flying, keeping track of subscriptions and annual costs, etc. and I’m curious how others handle this.

Right now I’m using a pretty complicated and failure-prone spreadsheet that is hard to get right and is a guesstimate at best. My partner would like something more accurate and I’m trying to figure out how to do this without it becoming my full time job.

Any suggestions, apps, or opinions would be incredibly helpful!

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shrunkenhead041@reddit

I like to tell parents who have kids interested in aviation that it is a great path to take. The kids will never have money for drugs.

There is a big difference between budgeting for flight training, budgeting for currency after getting certs, and aircraft ownership. You need to be more specific.

As far as actually tracking what you spend? That shouldn't be hard at all, unless you are doing creative accounting.

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jester298@reddit (OP)

I couldn’t agree more - definitely an expensive hobby. No creative accounting. I fear I’m actually making my own problems so maybe this will validate it.

I think my largest complication today is that I am currently doing flight training and flying for fun with the family (which also covers currency) and trying to cover it all under the same household budget “line item”. I do my best to break down how much I spend on administrative costs (subscriptions, insurance, memberships), training costs (mostly because these feel less recurrant and have a hypothetical end), and non-training flight time (with or without family).

I try to budget for a certain number of hours+dual+ground per week for training and a certain dollar amount of non-lesson flying, both extrapolated out to monthly costs. That lets me eyeball an approximate month of completion for my training. The logic behind dollars for family flight is because I have access to several planes that could be used but that all have different rates. Some are wet lease, some are dry, some are more expensive, etc. Dollars lets me say X hours in plane 1, Y hours in plane 2, Z hours in plane 3 and sort of allows me to budget for it regardless of plane.

We use zero-based monthly budgeting at home so all of the inherent variance makes it hard when my goal is to get pretty close to using it up every month.

Sorry that was a really long explanation. I hope the context either shows why it’s complicated or demonstrates that I’m doing something that is making my own life harder. Either way, I appreciate the feedback!

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shrunkenhead041@reddit

A wise airplane owner friend once told me his household budget sometimes includes a $63 roll of paper towels.

You are overthinking it.

Only you can decide how much flying you can afford.

I did it when I was 32. It might be tough if you start late.

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12358132134@reddit

Take your complicated and failure-prone spreadsheet, make sure you don't miss any miniscule detail. Then double it and it will be realistic. Triple it, and that should be safe enough.