Before you can really get a grip on where your money is going, you have to track it. For a while, I would just check online banking or head over to Mint. The problem though is that all this automation wasn’t helping me understand my spending habits. I would log in about once a week or so and look at my transactions and say “Oh, yeah, I spent $30 on fast food last week. I wish that was lower. Oh well. Maybe I’ll do better next week.”
Because I wasn’t the one actually writing down the expense, it felt like I wasn’t spending money.
Now, I’ve decided to use an Excel spreadsheet to track every cent I spend. I’ll still keep my Mint account for the awesome graphs and pie charts, but I need to be more hands on with my money. The follow screenshot is a picture of the spreadsheet I’m using. It’s dead simple and only took me about 5 minutes to set up. You can download it here.
My plan is to go through my receipts every few days and update the spreadsheet. Realistically, I can probably do this everyday because I don’t typically have a lot of transactions in any given month. Just by typing in the numbers myself, I felt like I was running my finances versus my finances running me.
While I like Excel, it’s not definitely not the only option you have to track all your expenses manually. Other options include:
- A trusty checkbook. Simply record every transaction as you make it.
- A spending journal. Just get a journal (lined if that makes it easier for you) and instead of writing your deepest feelings, write all of your expenses.
- Plain old paper. Step 1: Grab a blank sheet of paper. Step 2: Write down the crap you buy Step 3: There is no step 3, sorry.
I hope that I can get a much better insight into my spending activities with this method than by just using Mint or online banking. Eventually, I’d like to just not worry about every single expense, but I’m not quite there.
