Budget tracker?

VfM4meplse

Well its been 13 weeks and the effort I put into setting up a template and completing it has been very worthwhile in helping me see where ad-hoc expenditure direct from my purse has gone:

Food (home): £100.22
Household: £32.52
Excess travel costs (TfL): £39.20
Petrol: £45.50
Food / drink (out): £6.79
Entertainment: £0
Gifts: £45.23
Clothing: £17 (of which £16 was a want, not a need).
Ad-hoc charity: £12.25
Prescriptions/health costs: £39.20
Unforeseeables: £3.48

The last 3 months have been incredibly low spend, but I'm going to try to maintain the thrift for April at least.

Eta: 47/90 NSDs

hard_working_dave

What I have discovered is using Google sheets for my home budget,and Google forums for the daily expenses
Follow the easy google form maker to make a form which you input your daily expensis in.
The spreadsheet automatically updates each time you make an entry.
Lots of useful Youtube tutorials about this

Once you have your daily expense tracker set up,email it to yourself,then you have it to hand
Or use a simple cash book,keep the reciepts in the book for reference,as a backup

VfM4meplse

Just 10 days into April and I have taken my eye off the ball!

I reconciled my accounts for the month so far yesterday evening (rather than daily) and found that I have spent a great deal more than I intended to, almost as much as my monthly expenditure for each of the previous 3 months. Non-essentials such as eating and coffees out, theatre tickets are creeping back in, as well as a couple of personal treats. And only 3 NSDs so far

Which just goes to show that in my case, logging stuff daily really does add focus to a goal.

RG2015

VfM4meplse wrote: »

Which just goes to show that in my case, logging stuff daily really does add focus to a goal.

I agree!

A few years ago my wife and I embarked on a daily logging exercise purely to see where the money was going. I was astonished to see that as a result our spending decreased significantly.

My wife even said that sometimes she chose not to buy stuff just to avoid logging anything!

As an accountant responsible for the budget process for a multinational corporation I had never before considered how psychology could influence financial behaviour in this way.

TrustyOven

I use KMyMoney for about 3 years and find it quite good so far. It's free.
I think it should be available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2cGDEU2f9E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdH4H8pnJL8

https://kmymoney.org/