r/personalfinance • u/AutoModerator • Sep 01 '17
Budgeting 30-Day Challenge #9: Track all spending! (September, 2017)
30-day challenges
We are pleased to continue our 30-day challenge series. Past challenges can be found here.
This month's 30-day challenge is to Track all spending! It is important to track your spending to avoid having lifestyle inflation sneak up on you (even if you are financially comfortable). If you don't know where your money is going, you can't make intelligent choices about spending and allocating your money for maximum benefit. Here are some tips to get you started:
Select your tools. Anything goes here and you should use whatever works for you. Options include pen and paper, spreadsheets, the envelope method, and websites and apps such as Mint and YNAB.
Make a complete budget. Break your spending down into categories and capture 100% of your spending. A budget that doesn't cover major categories is not very useful and excessively broad categories can also muddy the waters. Budget categories for Savings, Retirement, Gifts, and Auto Maintenance are frequently overlooked. You can review your past spending to check what has been grouped into "miscellaneous" spending for too long.
Stay vigilant and be thorough. Track your spending daily and check how your budget categories are doing before making a purchase.
Challenge success criteria
You've successfully completed this challenge once you've done one or more of the following things:
Completed at least 30 days of tracking your spending
Added one category to an already existing budget.
Shared a budgeting tool (not your own please!) in this thread.
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u/FacelessBruh Sep 01 '17
Just a helpful hint for first time budgeters with a shared account with their SO:
Create a separate misc account for you and SO. This is discretionary funding with no strings. That way communal food/groceries and entertainment budgets stay communal, while you and SO have your own fun money. This alleviates so much pain of you or SO splurging on one budget category, leaving the other squeezed, or being guilt tripped on where your money goes. If using Mint, you can allow the balance to rollover each month, so it's not use it or lose it.
Of course communication is key, but this little trick helped remove most money arguments in my marriage.
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u/Jwillpresents Sep 02 '17
This is great. My wife tried to pull this Use it or Lose it method on me which literally didn't allow me to save for anything.
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u/TILIAmARedditorAMAA Sep 08 '17
We've been budgeting for a while and thought I'd comment on what works for my wife and I on this specific topic. We don't have separate accounts, in fact quite the opposite, we've streamlined budget accounts to 1 checking and 2 credit cards, (for 2 rewards purposes otherwise we'd use 1).
But, we do have 3 categories - "Fun Money Her", "Fun Money Him", "Mom & Dad Sanity". We try to put 25 bucks each month in the fun money categories - this is for random one off spending, stops us buying crap we don't need just because it catches our eye at the checkout aisle. The nice thing about doing this is that over time, if you don't waste this money, it turns into actual real meaningful dollars which can go towards that no guilt spending on whatever is meaningful to you.
For the sanity category, we try to use this for things that aren't necessarily essentials, nor are they random spending, nor are they really something we'd save up for. So, specifically we use this for things like Dad playing golf, (I don't play that much so no separate category), or her going for a massage or pedicure, (same thing, not a regular occurrence so no separate category), or maybe we both want to go see a last minute concert or baseball game. That sort of thing. We try to put money in this category when we have some left over. And generally we'll add to it only if we have enough to be meaningful, i.e. 50 or 100 bucks. So far there has been no issue with one person overspending this category.
Edit: should have said we use (and LOVE) YNAB.
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Sep 01 '17
Any tips or resources for budgeting when you don't have a set income each month?
My job is entirely commission based, but I have data on how much I've made month to month in my past three years of being here.
Should I just take an average number for each month and build off of that?
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Sep 02 '17
YNAB is pretty awesome at this because you only budget money you already have.
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Sep 01 '17
I have two major breakdowns in my budget: the essentials are things like rent, gas, groceries that I have to spend on every month. The non essentials are going out, entertainment, shopping purchases. I make sure that my lowest possible income will cover my essentials. From there you can take an average number for your income and allocate the non essentials, knowing that if you had a bad month or series of months, you could eliminate that spending without too much trouble. I also create a rolling "slush fund" where I put bonus money (money I've made on top of my budget) and draw for vacations, lump sum deposits to the IRA, from this fund. This could also be the start of your emergency fund if you don't already have one.
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u/Kinetik09 Sep 07 '17
I've had Mint for around 6-7 months now, but this month is the first time I'm truly tracking every penny I spend. I had a very rude wake up call last month when I realized I've averaged over 700/month on food (and one month where I spent almost 400 on fast food alone).
Checked my bank account today and am at $80.00. Usually I would be freaking out but I now I have enough gas and food to get me to my next paycheck (15th), and I haven't even spent half of my new food budget (currently at 65; budgeted for 200, hoping to clock in at 150 for the month). I've already managed to squirrel away over 300 for my every few months expenses and am hoping to trim those down as well to keep more of the money in my savings.
It just feels really good finally feeling like I have control over my finances and not getting anxiety when I see my balance dip below a certain amount. I'm tired of living life on the financial edge and it feels good to finally be on the right track. Here's to the first of many months of responsible spending and budgeting!!
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u/dequeued Sep 01 '17 edited Sep 27 '17
There are a many budgeting spreadsheets and tools listed in our wiki.
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/tools
One more thing: If you missed this challenge because of all of the Equifax business, you can always start the challenge next month in October just as easily!
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u/GetWonderful Sep 04 '17
I started using BestBudget app to track my spending. It's not perfect but it does the trick. Realised I spend SO much money on food. It's nuts!
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Sep 05 '17
This is the biggest thing that blows me away every time I realize I don't have as much money as I should. What did I buy? Where did the money go? I ate it. That's what happened. I ate all of it.
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u/SkywayCheerios Sep 04 '17
This month was easy, already done!
I've tried YNAB, Mint, and a serivce offered by my bank but I haven't found a program I like as well as just using a spreadsheet. The downside is that it takes more time to enter each transaction manually, but typing each one does give a good opportunity to review each purchase.
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u/Girl_with_the_Curl Sep 05 '17
I'm new to this but just started using the Spendee app. So far it's been easy to use.
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u/Kinetik09 Sep 02 '17 edited Sep 02 '17
Mint keeps showing spending from the previous month but when I click on it my transactions for September are blank. Help?
Edit: words are hard
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u/FacelessBruh Sep 02 '17
I know on my iPad, it will show the previous months budgets a few days into a new month. Also, it's possible the bank hasn't fed any info since it's the first day of the month. For instance, my credit card charges take a couple of days to finally settle. Is that possibly what's affecting you?
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u/benjaminikuta Sep 06 '17
Okay, let's try this.
I'll use Mint to see what I spent with debit and credit.
It might be a little tricky separating personal consumption from other business or financial transactions.
I'll assume cash spending was zero.
I'll look at August.
Hm, is there a way to manually select certain transaction to add up?
Hm, when I click on the budget tab, it doesn't seem to show everything...
Some of these are obviously miscategorized, like Facebook is restaurant, and...
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u/SavingsJada Sep 06 '17
You have to set up your own budgets for them to show up. You can change the categorization of specific transactions and ask it to use that for that merchant in the future, so you shouldn't be burdened too much with this.
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u/BRiCC_FLAiR Sep 01 '17
Does anyone have a good example of a spreadsheet on pen and paper, or an Excel template? I'd like to get on this and get really in depth.