How to actually track your travel days

Travel days are the single most common thing nomads get wrong at tax time. Not because the math is hard — because they didn't write anything down.

Every residency framework, tax exclusion, and visa rule eventually comes back to the same question: where were you, and for how long? If you can answer that with confidence, half your annual tax anxiety disappears.

Why days matter more than you think

Almost every meaningful tax line depends on day counts:

• FEIE (US) requires 330 full days abroad in a rolling 12-month window.
• Most European countries use the 183-day rule to trigger tax residency.
• Non-dom regimes (Portugal, Cyprus, Malta) have their own day-based tests.
• Visa compliance — Schengen's 90/180 in particular — is a day-counting problem.

You cannot reconstruct a year of movement from memory. We've watched clients try. It always ends the same way: a Sunday afternoon staring at old boarding passes, guessing.

The lightweight system

Our clients use a three-part setup. Total time to maintain: about two minutes a week.

1. One source of truth

Pick one place. A single spreadsheet, a Notion table, or one of the dedicated apps. Doesn't matter which — matters that there's only one.

Columns we recommend:

• Date of entry
• Country
• City (optional but useful)
• Date of exit
• Purpose (work / holiday / transit)

That's it. Resist the urge to track more. Complexity kills consistency.

2. A weekly two-minute ritual

Every Sunday, open the log and update it. If you moved, add the row. If you didn't, mark the week as "still in X." Two minutes, done.

The ritual matters more than the tool. A perfect app you check twice a year is worse than a scruffy spreadsheet you touch every Sunday.

3. Passive evidence in the background

Even the best log fails occasionally. Back it up with things that record themselves:

• Keep boarding passes in a single email folder (a rule that auto-files anything from an airline is ideal).
• Let your phone quietly record location history — you don't have to look at it, but it's there if a tax authority ever asks.
• Snap a photo of every passport stamp when you get one.

You don't need to weaponize this data. You just need it to exist.

The mistakes we see

Counting arrival day and departure day the same way

Different regimes count "days present" differently. Some count any part of a day as a full day. Some exclude transit. Some count only midnight-to-midnight. When you log, note the whole days abroad and the partial ones separately — the math depends on the regime you're testing against, not on how the days feel.

Ignoring transit

A layover in a Schengen airport can count as a Schengen day depending on how you exit. A stopover in the US can wreck a 330-day count. Log every border crossing, including the ones that felt like nothing.

Trusting the app that didn't move with you

If you switch phones and lose location history, or your tracking app changes ownership and dumps old data, you're back to guessing. Once a quarter, export your log to a plain CSV and email it to yourself. Redundancy costs nothing.

What to do at year-end

Once a year, run three totals from your log:

1. Days in each country (for residency tests).
2. Days outside the US, if you're a US citizen (for FEIE).
3. Rolling Schengen days (if you use the zone as a transit region).

Those three numbers are what your future accountant or coach will actually ask for. Everything else is nice to have.

The point of all this

Day-tracking sounds like a chore because it's framed like one. It isn't. It's the thing that lets you say, in April: I know where I was, I have proof, and I'm not guessing. That single sentence removes more nomad tax stress than any deduction ever will.

Educational coaching — not licensed legal, tax, or financial advice. Always confirm with a licensed professional in your jurisdiction.