It seems that the overwhelmation has overflowed into many areas of my life!
For us, the hardest part is the day to day tracking. Drives me nuts! We tried using cash for awhile, but that got complicated - maybe because neither my husband or I are solely responsible for any one category. So that meant two sets of envelopes. And then we tried tracking receipts, but I started drowning in them.
Literally.
I'm not kidding.
Then we tried excel sheets with a crazy number of budget lines for this and that, which worked great for a long time...but it got cumbersome. And now I just don't know. Is it because I'm the creative type? What do accountants do with their personal finances?
I miss knowing what is where. I have an inordinate fear of ending up living in a cardboard box (silly I know) so the 'not knowing for sure' in the day to day really wears on me, I think.
Any ideas? Do you keep track of your day to day spending? How? Do you have a budget? And how to make time for this?
We use Quicken. It really helps. Blair and I set up an in depth category budget, and then inputted it into Quicken. There's an app for your phone, so you can input receipts as you buy. Makes it easier so you don't have to do ALL receipts when you get home. Plus, you can see the status of all your categories while you are out and about, even if your spouse has made purchases. It's awesome! Good luck!
ReplyDeleteMint.com is supposed to work the same way, and for the most part it does. But I haven't figured out how to set it so it assumes you've already got something saved towards a particular category so it thinks everything started at zero with our first month. So while we'd been saving up for things like the car insurance payment when it came due, it was more than our monthly amount and it kept telling me we were over budget! I'll look into Quicken. Thanks Sarah!
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