I attempted to ease the process by keeping running a note in my phone. I appreciated the result, but I started to dread the chore. In the past, this involved opening Microsoft Excel at the end of each month, combing through my credit card statements, racking my brain to remember small transactions from weeks ago, and then praying I didn’t miss anything important. As Raptitude explains, simply becoming aware of the numbers behind your behavior will change your priorities, and soon you’ll find yourself spending (and saving!) more efficiently. This may seem redundant, but I’ve found there’s a certain magic to putting pen to paper, or in my case, keypad to excel spreadsheet. But for good measure, I prefer to manually record my expenses in a spreadsheet too. Sure, I review my spending once a month through Personal Capital. How do I know? Because I run an entire blog that hinges on my spending patterns, and even I couldn’t muster up the willpower to consistently track my spending every month. Meaning chances are, you’re not doing it. Unfortunately, Most People Don’t Track Their SpendingĪs amazing as all those benefits are, most methods of tracking your spending are a huge pain in the ass. And when every detail of your spending is highlighted, it becomes laughably easy to spot the areas of improvement. Once you’ve shined a light on your ghost of a budget, it can no longer hide. And to understand it, you have to track it. Why? Because to improve something you have to understand it. Put simply, tracking your spending is THE easiest way I know to gain control of your finances. With the frequency and ferocity that I talk about tracking your spending, you’d expect recording your expenses for a month to be the personal financial equivalent of winning the Powerball. So of course, I’m going to talk about it again. Safe to say, the horse is sufficiently dead. And there’s even that time I linked to someone else talking about it in a recent monthly Link-O-Rama. I bring it up whenever I’m interviewed by the media. The regular readers will recognize that I mention it during pretty much every net worth update. By this point you’re probably sick of hearing me harp about the importance of tracking your spending.
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