Carnival of Personal Finance

I submitted my last post to the Carnival of Personal Finance this week. Check it out!!

Expense tracking: keeping it simple

I've always known that tracking your spending and having some kind of budget is a key part of getting your financial house in order. However, I was never actually successful in doing so, and certainly not successful in getting Spender involved with the idea.

At one point, I tried Microsoft Money, but eventually realized I could build a better system by myself in Excel, one that would do exactly what I wanted it to do (and I will admit I spent a lot more energy making the the spreadsheet more and more sophisticated rather than actually keep on top of my spending). I kept the spreadsheet on my laptop, and would occasionally tell Spender "let's do our finances tonight." I would copy and paste most of the transactions from both of our accounts, and ask him what else he'd spent money on. We might do this for a few weeks in a row, but it never lasted more than a month. And while we would occasionally discuss what we should budget each month for different categories, we never got to the point of comparing actual spending to the budget.

But now, despite an early kink, we have a new system is up and running, and this time I'm pretty optimistic. I created a Google spreadsheet with a place to enter the every expense, listing the amount spent along with the date, place and category:




One feature of Google spreadsheets is the ability to easily create a form that enters data into your file. We can just go to a website to enter the info.

There is a second page which sums the spending within each category and compares it to our budget for the month.

Now, I know I shouldn't get too excited after just one week, because budgeting and expense tracking only works if you can follow through for the long term. However, I think we have a few really good things going for us with this system:

1) Both Spender and I can access it at anytime (at least long as we have our computers). We can both add any spending we do, and we can both keep an eye on how close we are to our budgets.

2) It's simple. We are starting by tracking disposable income and current spending. It will track our income (in Euros) and our daily spending and that's all. Our student loans are currently being paid out of our US savings accounts, but I'm not going to try to incorporate that into this sheet. Simple is better. However, it is still flexible enough for us to be able to add anything we thing will be useful.

3) I actually really like the idea of entering expenses manually, because it makes you think about your purchases more than if you just download them from the bank. The Google form makes this super easy, and I don't think it will take more than a few minutes a day (or an hour a week) to keep up.

I'm looking forward to continuing to make this a system that works for both of us.

Not on the same speadsheet

Spender here. Wait?! What? Spender is going to post to this blog?! I truly loathe disappointing Saver and I want to make every effort I can to save money and contribute to our financial stability and success. Perhaps contributing to this blog will help me stay focused on my fiscal well being. I read a story about the therapy of writing and why blogging is healthy. Maybe that's what I need. A place to sort out these issues.

Keeping track of how much we're spending each day hasn't been a very smooth process for me yet. Surprisingly, I know every penny I've spent this week, however, when I went to input it into the spreadsheet system Saver setup I ran into trouble. I know she made it into a simpler system but it still doesn't make sense to me with the multiple spreadsheets and categories and stuff. It might have helped if we had discussed exactly how to use this tool before she left but I thought it would be straight forward. Well straight forward in my mind is something completely different in hers. I definitely understand the concept behind it but nothing makes sense to me in the way it's laid out. In the mean time, I'm using a calendar and recording my purchases details for each day. That should keep me on track until we are on the same page.

Milestones

I'm in Belgium this week, at a week-long Dutch language course. (Half of Belgium speaks Flemmish, which is just a dialect of the Dutch they speak in the Netherlands).

June 1st (yesterday), was Spender's and my five year anniversary. We now know each other better than we've ever known anyone else, though there are still occasionally surprises. We're still complete opposites in almost every way, but now are differences are much more likely to make us crack up laughing than cause a fight.

I still am working on the the balance of where to accept that we'll always be worlds apart (i.e., Spender loves to go out and hang out with friends all night, I like to go to bed around 10:30) and where try to bring us closer together. To be clear, I know Spender is not going to change much of anything just because I want him to. But by setting a good example and being supportive and showing him the benefits of certain lifestyle choices (not to mention working out the math of paying only minimum payments) I do think Spender may eventually become Not-such-a-Spender or even A-little-bit-of-a-Saver. (In Dutch that would be Saverje).

Not related to our anniversary, we decided we would have a new focus on having a budget and saving money. Going forward, we are tracking every penny. We set up a spreadsheet on google docs to keep track of spending and budgeting. I had made a fairly fancy-schmancy one in excel, but that could only live on my laptop. Instead, I've now made a much simpler version that lives online in google spreadsheets. This was Spender can not only update it with his spending every night, he can also see the status of the budget whenever he wants. If I can figure out a way to make sure it stays anonymous, I'll even post it for everyone to see.