Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Tracking Expenses Manually (inspired by frugaldad’s blog)

A while back, I attempted to write down all expenses on a daily basis for 1 week. I believe I did spoke to my husband about it and he agreed to do that. It was an eye opened for both of us. I believe I’ve used excel to track that.

After reading frugaldad’s blog, I attempt to do it one more time. However, this time, we’ll log our expenses manually and we’ll do it for 1 month (my husband agree to do it for a month). I am excited that he agrees to do it. It’s not easy convincing one’s spouse and I’m sure some of you know what I am talking about.

My first response was trying to get 13 columns columnar paper from Staples or ebay because it’s a lot neater to track anything that way. I would keep double entry on the ledger. After reading some of the comments in frugaldad’s blog, I decided to just use spiral notebook which I have many on hand which I purchased them last year or the year before (before school year started). It was very cheap to get those spiral notebooks. It might be 10-20 cents each for 70 pages. I will have a 4 columns on each pager, they will be 1) date 2) description 3) expense category 1 4) expense category 2. I have about 8-9 categories of expenses and will take 3 pages both back and front. At the end of the month, I will tally up at the end of the page. And I will do this for all the months (if my husband decided to do this all the way through the year till 6/30/2011). We’ll sit down and look at the numbers each month and discuss it.

I’m excited! And I can’t wait to start officially on July 1st.

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