How do you track your finances?

tiddles

I track all credit card and bank account transactions in a notebook, and write up monthly budgets and daily spending in pencil in my Paperblanks page-a-day diary, which also contains all sorts of to-do lists and notes - I love this way of tracking our finances and life stuff, and it works well for us!

dreaming

A notebook and pen is just a spreadsheet by another name, in my opinion.

Organgrinder

dreaming said:

A notebook and pen is just a spreadsheet by another name, in my opinion.

If I tried to use a notebook to do what my spreadsheet does I think even one update would take a week!

Well not quite!

The recent change to interest rates for example!

That said, everything currently seems on track still.

dreaming

Organgrinder said:

dreaming said:

A notebook and pen is just a spreadsheet by another name, in my opinion.

If I tried to use a notebook to do what my spreadsheet does I think even one update would take a week!

Well not quite!

The recent change to interest rates for example!

That said, everything currently seems on track still.

Well, to be honest I do use fairly extensive spreadsheets with multi links and formulae because I have several accounts to track, although I am in the process of winding some of them down. I commented mainly because I have seen some comments (on here and other platforms as well as in RL) which seem to judge spreadsheets as something either exotic and/or cheating in some way when it comes to budgetting. I was just pointing out that notebook and pen uses the same method of recording income/expenditure etc. as a simple spreadsheet and works perfectly well if that is one's preference. As you rightly say, you can do a great deal more and more easily with a spreadsheet.

Ordinary_Yet_Unique

One very simple spreadsheet and a notebook, 

ouraggie

I tried various spreadsheets but i now just use those A6 sized  cards that are sold as exam revision cards. Tesco has them for £1 usually. Each account, bond, ISA etc that i open has its own card. If anything is withdrawn from or added to any of these I write on the card to update it. eg

Date.                          In/out           Balance.       

  06.03.25                   +£25            £326.75
28.04.25.                    + £100.        £426.75
30.06.25.                     + int.           £442.52

I write the current interest rate at the top of the card in pencil, so i can update if it changes, unless it is fixed. If I close that account, the bond matures, or whatever, I just move the card to the back of the card pile to “archive” it. I currently have about 9 active cards on the go.

I don't monitor my current account on a card. On the 1st of every month i either add or remove money to make the balance £1,000. I then ignore it till next month.  I have an alert set up to warn me if the balance goes below £200. I get a text every week with my last 5 transactions (but  i use mostly cash). 

I have another card which lists in date order any key dates eg
30.07.25   Barclays ISA matures.
26.10.25   Interest rate on XYZ account reduces to 1.3%
01.03.26.  withdraw  £3,000 from SIPP

Old fashioned but it works for me.
I have just bought a pack of pink cards and from now on i am going to use pink for any tax free things, and white for taxable. Aiming to become completely pink!

Datchet

We are fortunate in that we have savings, ISA’s and pension pots and other financial products, but these require quite a lot of management, as I still working although ‘tapering’ days post 60. Added complication is 2 boys at Uni so have to keep going for 2/3 years. I use a big manual input excel spreadsheet on PC and a simpler iPhone numbers sheet for current available cash. The PC is updated say fortnightly and phone sheet almost daily. Both really simple and allow maximising higher interest savings ( and contingencies!)

Organgrinder

I clearly need to update my answer to....

Badly.

My trusty spreadsheet had it's update this morning. 

And in one of my ISAs was an additional £2,000 that I'd added last month but hadn't updated the balance.

If only I made that sort of "mistake" more regularly!

Savvy_Sue

Organgrinder said:

I clearly need to update my answer to....

Badly.

My trusty spreadsheet had it's update this morning. 

And in one of my ISAs was an additional £2,000 that I'd added last month but hadn't updated the balance.

If only I made that sort of "mistake" more regularly!

So glad it's not just me ...

Alnat1

Badly = me?. I have no spreadsheet. I don't have pension pots, spending pots, multiple savings accounts. I don't need to keep recalculating and jiggling money around. I just spend on what I fancy, when I feel like it.

From reading these threads it appears to me the more money you have, the more time you spend doing "maths" and the more you worry that you won't have enough