My husband and I read “Your Money or Your Life” in 2001 and it talks about lining up your expenditures with your values. Anyway it has an exercise to track every penny you spend for 3 months without changing your behavior.

Ever since we did that exercise, we have been tracking every penny! 10 years! We review our expenses/budget every 6 months and make adjustments. We plan in dreams and goals along the way.

I’d say it was the best thing we ever did for our relationship. We’ve never had a fight about money because we discuss it all the time! And now that we have kids… well money = time away from our kids so we really want to make sure our expenses line up with our ideals.

Can’t wait to see what you think at the end.

My husband and I have tried different ways to watch what we spend while not cutting out the fun in our lives. What works best for us is the envelope system. Each envelope is designed for its own reason, food, fun, savings, Christmas, and so on. We only pay with cash and once the money in that envelope is gone we do not get any more for that particular reason until next pay period.

We also treat our savings and Christmas savings as a bill. You will be amazed how saving a few extra bucks each pay period will add up to a wonderful Christmas savings at the end of the year.

One other tip that I love is rounding up! If I spend $1.50 on an item I will round it up to spending $2.00. I then put that extra $0.50 in a jar. My husband and I have funded weekend trips with the kids this way.

Good luck on your mission!

What a great mission! I did something like this last year for about 6 months. I tracked all our receipts, payments, anything at all and was surprised to learn how much we actually spent on food! One month it was $700! Now that’s only organic, free range, wild, and sustainably farmed so it puts the cost in perspective – still it’s a lot. I decided that perhaps I shouldn’t buy so much goat cheese in a week and perhaps I should finish left overs before heading out to the co-op with a wad of cash. Actually, I started paying for more things with cash because it seemed to mean more than buying something with a debit card. Good luck with it this month!

I’m going to say YAY for self awareness!

If you are truly curious, and are comfortable with the ways of teh internets….mint.com will tell you ALL of that information, and keep track of it for you. Much less effort to track on your part, and paying attention to it certainly makes you go ‘oh god, I really do spend that much on coffee and bon bons…every.month.’

Here’s to learning! :)

@Nicole

I also pretty much never use cash, which helps limit small impulse buys. (Plus all of our credit cards are rewards cards, so as long as we pay them off every month, we get free money!) I also like that if I lose a receipt (or my husband neglects to give one to me…) I can track almost all of our spending online. Also works as a backup to my spreadsheet.

I am really glad to see that someone else does this. I have a lot of really bright friends that are afraid of credit cards and never use them… But if you can be disciplined with your money there are just so many upsides. (another bonus… if your wallet gets stolen, you can cancel your credit card, and usually get fraudulent charges reduced… if your wallet is full of cash, you’re never seein’ it again!)

Ah…my husband kinda already does this. He has his Excel spreadsheet. He does the bills every month and fills in all the numbers. He has pie charts, line graphs, everything’s color coded. It’s pretty crazy. So he generally knows where the money’s going…however, there’s always the small, unexpected, things that add up and we’re left at the end of the month thinking, “Hmmmm….we thought we were on track. What happened?”
I’ll accept this challenge but only after I’ve discussed it with him. After all, he’s the one with the income and bank account. I mean, I have my own account…I’m just not employed anymore. We gotta work together on the money thing, ya know? :D

Thanks, lady! So glad you’re back. I missed ya. :)

Man. You guys all beat me to it. I was also going to say Mint.com – for any who are interested. Internet account – accessible on any Mac or PC, iPhone app, Android app, and FREE. You can track bank accounts, investments, mortgage, vehicle value, etc. etc.

And of course anything by Dave Ramsey is great. Although we are fans, we’ve never taken any of his classes or anything – we’ve just always lived by his principles (not really his principles, just commmon sense). So no debt (except the house). I think this is so important… we have a ridiculously tight budget due to a bunch of recent crap (ie we are barely getting by) and I have no idea how people with car payments, etc. deal with that extra stress. I think this is a great mission (those coffeeshop trips add up!)

oh I’m in.
I just finished my taxes and was thinking that I’d really like to keep track of everything this year. We’ve been using the credit card only method for many years and that has worked well for us.
I’ve always kept track of everything with paper charts (I don’t know why, habit I guess). So after reading all the great tips, I’m adding learning how to use modern technology to keep track of spending to my mission.

So happy your back!

I’m in! I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile. My goals are similar to yours- I want a better awareness of where my money is going, without any guilt. I just started my spreadsheet, and already I can see that I spend “too much” on coffee, but it’s one of my greatest simple pleasures, and it gets me through many days. More joy! Thanks for the inspiration. <3

This is pretty great MMM. I am really good at keeping within my budget, and I already have quite a spreadsheet for tracking my finances, but I have never REALLY analyzed where my money goes. I am going to tentatively attempt this.

Problem with mint is it does not do International banks (at least it still won’t do Mexican banks) T_T

Gosh, I wish this MMM hadn’t come on a month I happened to decide to spend on a couple of “luxury” items… I’m probably not going to like what I see at the end of the month. Oh well…

@Rea: I actually think it is healthy that you and your dear one keep separate finances. I do the same with my GF, and we do a good job. I mean, we share the money, it is just that each of us administrate a different half of it. It seemed unfair that if you worked hard and earned it, somebody else gets to decide how to spend it… So, we divided the bills and she will pay some of them, I pay the rest. If she needs extra money, she knows she only has to tell me (after all it is her money too, it comes out of the “making-GF-happy-expenses” account). ^_^

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, so this seems the perfect time to jump on board with payday being this week.

Right now, I get a set amount of grocery and spending money for me and DH in cash every two weeks, and the rest goes in the bank for bills and also a savings account. We have a fairly generous personal spending budget for ourselves which includes gas, lunches, toiletries, and then whatever else we want to spend or save for. That’s worked for us for the last ten years. But there’s so many times where it’s three days after I get my cash and I start wondering where $80 went??? So I’m going to track my personal spending money.

I’d kind of like to get a credit card with rewards and try to go that way instead of cash. However, I DO save my change. If something’s $9.01, I give them $10. Even if they ask for a penny. On the few times I use a vending machine, I always put the dollar in. Always give them $2 for a $1.39 cup of coffe. I throw it all in a old stone pickling crock in the bottom of my closet. It seems to average between $100-$150 every three months. So if I save it for a complete year, it can easily be $500 or so.

I’ll start tracking my cash, and look into some credit cards.

Good to have you back!

I am definitely in. I used to be really good at keeping track of my spending, but in the past couple of years, I have made enough money that I didn’t have to worry about it too much. My boyfriend and I really want to buy a house, so we have been talking about how much we spend and trying to keep track so that we can save as much as possible for that.

This monthly mission I am going to take head on…after my semester ends on 4/15, but I am realizing that I spend entirely too much on food! My refrigerator and freezer are almost always packed to the gills, as is my pantry. We bought a Blendtec last month, so we’ve been experimenting with that…but we’ve also found there’s a lot of foods we can easily make instead of buy thanks to it. Woo hoo we can do this!

I use YNAB (You Need a Budget) software to track my finances. It’s awesome. You enter the amount of money you have, then you budget every penny of it. You can move amounts around throughout the month if you need to. They try to get you to living month-to-month instead of paycheck to paycheck. All of my income gets designated to next months’ budget, so I don’t need to wait until payday to pay the Internet bill that just came in. I already have that money budgeted, and the money I’m using to pay it is from the money I earned last month. They have a free book you can download on their site. It’s short and worth the read, and explains their methodology. It got us from paycheck to paycheck to living month to month.