Which currency should I make my home currency?

Use the one you think in when deciding whether something is expensive — usually the currency you are paid in, not the one you spend most often. Every other currency converts into it, so the number you see on your budget should be a number your instincts already understand.

Do I become a tax resident just by moving somewhere?

Usually not by moving alone. Most countries decide residency on a day count over a tax year, often around 183 days, sometimes combined with other ties such as a home or family. Our guide on the 183-day rule covers how the common version works and where it does not apply.

Can Stang handle money I still have back home?

Yes, as one of your secondary currencies. Spending in it converts into your home currency like anything else, so rent or a loan you still pay in your old country shows up in the same monthly picture rather than in a separate app.

Does Stang work if I stop moving around?

Yes. Nothing in it assumes travel. If you settle permanently and end up back on one currency, it just becomes an ordinary budget tracker with an unused feature or two.

Stang for expats

Moving abroad is not a long holiday, and almost every budgeting app is built as though it were. That mismatch is small at first and then quietly becomes the reason you stop logging anything.

This page is about the specific things that break for expats. We make Stang, so check anything that matters against the pricing page.

The trip model does not fit your life

Most travel expense apps organise everything around a trip: a start date, an end date, a budget, and a summary when you get home. That is a good model for two weeks in Portugal. It is a bad model for living somewhere.

There is no end date. There is no going home at the end, because you are home. If you open a “trip” when you move, it never closes, and every feature built around closing it stops meaning anything. You are left using the least useful part of an app designed for somebody else.

What an expat needs instead is boring and continuous: a monthly view that keeps working indefinitely, in more than one currency, without being told when the trip starts.

Two currencies, permanently

The financial signature of being an expat is that money lives in two places at once.

You are paid in one currency. You spend daily in another. And there is usually a third category that nobody warns you about: the things you still pay for back home — a loan, a family phone bill, a subscription that never migrated, a property. None of that is travel spending. All of it is yours.

Stang treats this as the default rather than a special case: one home currency plus as many others as you spend in, converted at live rates, on the free plan. Your home currency should be the one you actually think in — usually what you are paid in — and everything else converts into it so the monthly number means something to you.

Budgets and per-category limits run monthly, with an alert at 80% of the budget. All free.

The day count you did not know you needed

Most people move abroad without thinking about tax residency, and then discover it at the worst moment — often in the second year, when someone asks how many days they spent somewhere and they have no way to answer.

Residency usually turns on a day count over a tax year, commonly around 183 days, though the number and the year both vary and some countries use an entirely different test. Our guide on the 183-day rule covers how the common version works, and counting days for tax residency covers the mechanics — what counts as a day, which tax year to count against, and why reconstructing a count after the fact rarely holds up.

Stays is Stang’s answer to the practical half of that: a running day count per country derived from where your expenses happen, with no GPS and no check-ins. If you bought lunch somewhere, you were there. It requires Pro and is currently iPhone-only.

Where Stang is the wrong choice

If you split costs with a partner or flatmates, Stang has no bill splitting at all. Use Splitwise for that; plenty of people run both.
If you are on Android and the day count is the reason you came, Stays is not there yet. The web app covers the rest.
If you have settled into a single currency and country, an ordinary local budgeting app will serve you just as well.

Getting started sensibly

Set your home currency to what you are paid in, add the currency you actually spend in as a secondary, and log for one full month before judging anything. The first month is the one that tells you where the money really goes — most people are wrong about their own spending until they see it converted into one number.

CSV export is free on every plan, so nothing you log is trapped if you later decide this is not for you.