Terrible at tracking my money!

Anthorn

Mr_Curious wrote: »

Hi Guys,


I'm fortunate to know that I earn more than I spend. However I am terrible at keeping track of my spending. Do you guys have any hot tips to give me clarity on where my pennies are ending up? I have tried keeping a spending diary but I am terrible at remembering to put every purchase in which is far from ideal.


I have thought about opening an account with 'Starling Bank' and shifting a sum of money into it each month but that leads on to what would be a reasonable amount for a single guy for food/entertainment/clothes/everyday spending? (excluding direct debits/household bills etc)


Any advice or insight welcome.


Thank you,

Mr_C :beer:

I don't see the point of tracking all spending: When I have set aside money to pay all my bills and set aside money for savings including a rainy day fund and set aside money for shopping and everyday expenses I can spend what's left and I don't really care what I spend it on.

Since all my bills and savings are the same every month they are easy to sort out with Direct Debits and Standing Orders and money can be set aside for those in savings pots or jam jars out of which DDs and SOs are paid.

Starling Bank provides savings pots which they call goals as part of its current account but money will need to be manually moved out to your current account to pay DDs and SOs. The Change Account similarly offers wallets which are time-locked so you cannot withdraw the money - good if you want to be stricter with yourself. But fees are payable for The Change Account. It could also be done with several savings accounts but in that case you would have to move money into your current account in good time to pay the DDs and SOs. A local Credit Union might offer a jam-jar account and arrange to pay your bills by SO.

Lastly you might like to consider a budgeting account. Try searching these very MSE Forums.

getmore4less

Tracking is part of being in control.

As is a budget(plan) of how you want to spend your money.

The finer/more categories you track the better you can tune your spending and identify waste and poor value.

It is very easy when you have plenty to just spend without planning or thinking.

My goal with the budget/tracking was to identify my lowest spend footprint, how much could I live on just spending on needs, cutting out all the wants.

Another thing you can identify is your contract based debt, eg a 12 month phone contract is a debt as it is committed money which still needs paying if the income currently paying it stops.

Normalising everything to annual spend is very helpful in identifying relative value.

Mr_Curious

I think that the thing for me is being in control. Identifying value is also very useful.


I must admit that I like the idea of a spreadsheet that tracks account balances once a month. That way I will know if savings have increased by X% or indeed if I am spending beyond my means it is clear to see!


Thanks for your input,


Mr_C

ruperts

I used to track spending as I spent by logging on my phone and then transferring to a spreadsheet later. But I found that quite onerous and it usually ended up inaccurate.

Now I try to do all of my spending on a card and then I download and run through the statement at the end of each month, assigning each entry to a category and logging the category totals onto a spreadsheet.

Things like mortgage, bills, petrol etc are easy to identify and categorise. Day to day spending is a bit more tricky since I could have bought various things from somewhere like say Asda, which i would like to be able to split into separate categories but which shows as a single entry on my statement (if there is a bank reading who wants my business then develop a way to itemise these entries in my statement and I’m yours). My solution is to try and separate out single things I’ve bought that cost over £20, which I can usually remember buying, and the rest goes into a miscellaneous day to day category which includes food, toiletries and so on. Also if say I’ve been on holiday I’ll just take a view on how much of that day to day spending was because I was on holiday and put that into the holiday category, not worrying if it’s not penny perfect. This only takes 20 minutes each month and does the job for me. I’ve got nearly ten years of this data now (life well spent ) so can see if I’m spending more or less than usual, and use the past data to make pretty accurate forecasts of how much I will spend in the future.

Linton

I find it very easy to track my expenditure:


Almost every payment above about £10 goes on my debit card. Each week my bank transactions are downloaded into MS Money which automatically categorises most of them into food, petrol, subscriptions etc according to the payees name. Perhaps 10% require manual assignment which is not a major task. MSMoney provides a wide range of report options to show expenditure over time.


I assume there is other software that can do something similar.

beyond92

Mr_Curious wrote: »

Hi Guys,


I'm fortunate to know that I earn more than I spend. However I am terrible at keeping track of my spending. Do you guys have any hot tips to give me clarity on where my pennies are ending up? I have tried keeping a spending diary but I am terrible at remembering to put every purchase in which is far from ideal.


I have thought about opening an account with 'Starling Bank' and shifting a sum of money into it each month but that leads on to what would be a reasonable amount for a single guy for food/entertainment/clothes/everyday spending? (excluding direct debits/household bills etc)


Any advice or insight welcome.


Thank you,


Mr_C :beer:

I just recently started one and it's helping this month.

I did a Word doc and put my monthly wage, post-tax at the top.

I then listed out my regular payments and the amount of disposable income I have following that and divide it into 4, giving me my rough weekly spend.

At the end of each day I've then listed down what I've spent and dated it, then totalled up. Also totalled up how much I've spent each week to see if it correlates with my target weekly spend.

Just good to see at the end of the day what you've actually spent (as you often feel like it's less) and also brings home how much you are spending on rubbish.

At the end of the month, I break it down into categories to see if I'm spending too much on food for instance. That's then helped me to stop spending daily on my lunch and batch prepare food or bring in a box of cereal to the office and use that every morning instead of buying.

getmore4less

Mr_Curious wrote: »

I think that the thing for me is being in control. Identifying value is also very useful.


I must admit that I like the idea of a spreadsheet that tracks account balances once a month. That way I will know if savings have increased by X% or indeed if I am spending beyond my means it is clear to see!


Thanks for your input,


Mr_C

Get a copy of MsMoney and give it a try.

It models real life very well and has all the budgeting forecasting and reporting built in.

Can also cope with long term investments and assets like cars which change value.

Real life is where your money is(accounts, cash) and the category it is allocated to when you no longer have it.

You can do things like run your utilities as accounts tracking the debit/credit status.

Set up some basic stuff to get an idea how it works then keep that for trying things but start a new file from scratch for real data.

If you want you can start from say a year ago and build up some history.

One thing it does well is split transactions where a single payment from an account is for multiple categories.