Tracking Finances

I use Excel as well 🙂
But I do it a bit different than you, maybe just preferance or maybe because I only began late last year; Looks something like this.

Last month expenses: $$$
Rent/mortgage: $$
Food: $$ (Groceries, Eating out)
Alcohol: $$ (I track seperate to keep myself in line, its not a necessity)
Phone: $$ (Although its always the same, sometimes I go over :x)
Transportation: $$(Gas, Car insurance,Transit, Taxis, etc)
Entertainment: $$ (Things I spend on myself or others that I could go without..I can’t save everything)
Personal: $$
Business Expenses: $$
Total: $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ 🙁

Same goes for my Income. I track it all seperate (f/t job, business, tips, income tax refunds…maybe I shouldn’t count them, but I am getting them in return for work I did right?)

Than at the end of the month, I add in my total income, total expenses, total saved, savings %, net increase, yearly net increase, investment accounts.

Of course I pay off credit card in full every month, and never pay interest. I use CC for 99% of my spendings, cash for emergencies. Doing all this takes about 10-20mins a month (I do it halfway through month and at the end).
If anyone thinks 10, or even 20 minutes a month, is a lot of time to spend in order to keep track of 100% of my Finances is (no offense) crazy.

I can see how much I saved each month, how much I spent each month on every catagory. And since I use CC for everything, I can track back 18months of every item if I really want.

What do you think?

As I was coming up on retirement and knew I needed a good handle on my expenses (and knew I probably needed to curb my spending) I just started tracking again this last October, 2009. I was tracking manually at first, but I felt I was missing too many little purchases as my totals weren’t quite matching up to my bank.

Part of the reason I was doing it manually was the desire to use cash vs. credit cards (my cc got cloned last summer). But I missed the convenience of cc’s too much.

Here’s my most recent April post of how I summarize and what my categories are:
http://www.singlemomrichmom.com/2010/05/april-2010-tracking-update-and-thoughts.html

This month, I imported my bank transactions into an excel file and formatted them into a pivot table that shows the category, totals etc. Some time this month I’m going to do an online tutorial of how to do this for anyone that’s interested.

I’ve been tracking my expenses off and on since I was stony broke as a single parent in university back in my 20’s. If I spent $.10 on a cup of hot water (didn’t have enough to buy a cup of coffee), I wrote it down. But back then, $.10 was probably 1% of my budget for “eating out” for the month. 🙂

Doing the exercise, even if periodically, say one month per quarter, is a great learning exercise. Even better is going the extra step in YMOYL and assessing how your expenses reflect your values and changing them with the knowledge you acquire. (For example, I learned that I’m not going to be spending a whole lot of money on travel this year in retirement because I don’t really value it.) This level of consciousness is necessary to live a happier life I think, retired or not.

Hi everyone, excel seems quite popular. I now use excel exclusively. I track all of my savings and expenses on a bi-weekly basis to coincide with my pay periods. I track investments monthly and my net worth quarterly. One nice feature I like is linking cells within multiple excel tabs. It was a fair bit of work to set it up at first and extra time for fine tuning but I now have a system that’s been running smoothly for years.

I have been using Excel for quite a while now and find it is probably the easiest way to track my expenses. It is easy to create, and easy to track. What I do every few months is pull all my spreadsheets together and examine the monthly differences and see what I could possibly do to decrease my spending and save more.

Excel is the way to go. We combine both fixed expenses and variable expenses and subtract this from our income to monitor cashflow in our budget. My wife and I review our cashflow regularly (at least every other week) to see where we’re spending (or saving) our money. We use credit cards for almost every expense, so it’s easy to see where our money is going.

Our expense sheet is broken down into categories, a few of our fixed costs are:
-mortgage payments
-property taxes
-Rogers bill
-Enbridge bill
-Hydro bill
-home and auto insurance payments
-RRSP contributions
-fixed contributions to savings

A few of our variable expenses are:
-groceries
-alcohol
-cell phones
-entertainment
-gas/transportation
-clothes/personal

Anything left over is devoted to mortgage pay downs or general savings. Seems to work pretty well for us! Excel is a great way to track your net worth as well, using your liabilities against your investments.

I’ve been using Excel to track my expenses since 1998. Absolutely love it!

I’ve got over 25 individual categories. You can never have enough of them though and so several times a year I’ll get a phone call from the Honeybee when I’m at work where she asks something like “Hey, Len, is that $200 wall hanging we bought considered ‘Home Improvement’ or should I put it under something like ‘Entertainment?’ ”

Of course, my rule of thumb is “when in doubt, file it under ‘Other’!” 🙂

All the best,

Len
Len Penzo dot Com