budgeting/tracking expenses

bostonbaker

How do you ladies keep track of your budget and monthly expenses?  I had a spreadsheet for myself set up that I've been using for years, but I'm trying to combine it with my husband's now and it is so overwhelming.  Any advice is appreciated

MrsC968

Our "budget" is in excel. It isn't really a budget thing where we need to make sure we stay under a certain amount of spending or anything. I started to get an idea of what we were spending so I could transfer an appropraite amount into savings each month.

We don't go out or eat out a ton, so we really don't have to watch our spending to a T. When we food shop I always make sure to bring a list (and have meals planned for the things were buying) so we don't end up with a bunch of crap we can't make meals out of. Also, we try to get household goods at Target where they are less expensive. 

Is your current one in excel? I would copy and paste his budget into the same file next to yours. Then match up the sam categories to one column is your amount and the next column is his. This will help for easy comparison and you could have a total amount in the 3rd column. GL!

bostonbaker

Yeah mine is in Excel but it's pretty crude.  He doesn't track his expenses at all other than to look at his bank and credit card statements every month.  We are like you and don't spend excessively so it's not like we risk bouncing checks or going into debt.  We want to get a better idea of what we can afford to save and spend. 

I'm having the most trouble trying to figure out how to put things into categories.  I want to be able to enter every transaction that we make, then add it up and put it into a summary page by category.  But then it's like do I group grocery shopping and dinners out into "food" or do I split them and put grocery shopping into "household expenses" and dinners out into "entertainment"?  And then should I enter in each of our retirement accounts and group them together, or keep them separated into 401(k) vs IRA?  Et cetera.  I am driving myself nuts.

smal18

I keep a combined excel sheet. I tried it with the really specific categories and I was killing myself. So now I'm trying more broad categories. I made a little box to keep next to the computer for receipts and I go into our accounts online to enter the debits onto the spreadsheet. It's a little new for us, so I'm not sure how it will go in the long run, but I'm hopeful. We've basically put ourselves on a spending freeze for the month with the exception of a couple of dinner plans we have.

Our savings I keep seperate from the budget (there's a line item for automatic savings but that's it). I don't track the retirement stuff...maybe I should start.

MrsC968

bostonbaker:

I'm having the most trouble trying to figure out how to put things into categories.  I want to be able to enter every transaction that we make, then add it up and put it into a summary page by category.

If you want a program that is very meticulous with categories, try mint.com. You enter your bank info and it generates a category for each vendor (I think; never used it personally).

bostonbaker:

But then it's like do I group grocery shopping and dinners out into "food" or do I split them and put grocery shopping into "household expenses" and dinners out into "entertainment"?  And then should I enter in each of our retirement accounts and group them together, or keep them separated into 401(k) vs IRA?

It depends on what you really want to know about your spending. If you're goal is to see how much you spend on raw food versus going out to eat, then you'll want to two categories. You could do raw food/household expenses, dinners out, and other entertainment (movies, concerts, activities with friends). It's up to you. I only track our spending at the grocery store. I don't really add in what we spend at Target nor when we go out to eat. But again, I just wanted a general idea.

As far as the 401K and IRA go, we only each have a 401K with work so that gets taken out of our paycheck before we get it. Again, it just depends on what you want to know. If you don't care about the specific amounts going into the 401K versus the IRS, just lump them into one.

Bride0603

I use microsoft money because it's much easier to import information from my accounts (banking, credit cards, 401K, etc.) than manually entering it. You still have to keep track of what you spend your cash withdrawals on unless you just want to lump it into a "cash withrdrawals" category. I haven't really been able to balance my accounts that well in MM but it's fine for tracking my budget. I have a system that works for me anyway.

bostonbaker

DH hates the idea of giving a program all of the passwords to our online accounts, so unfortunately that is not an option.  It would be way easier! 

christar2000

mint.com

it is awesome!

Rock-n-Voll

If you want to check out other spreadsheet options, check out the bio of MrsZubterfuge--she's got a million of them.

We don't track our expenses very closely because we're like you and MrsC, not big spenders.  I probably should get a better handle on it just so I have the knowledge, but frankly it's low on the priority list as I generally know we're not overspending and our savings account goes up each month.

samandmary

We use quicken and it works great. There is a ton of features that help for budgeting and doing reports with any kind of parameter you want. My DH also doesn't like have the program storing our passwords, so you can it so you input them each time or you can reconcile with banks, credit cards with your monthly statements manually.  HTH!