Do you track your expenses? This can be a lot of work. It is important to do however. You do have several options available to you, when it comes to tracking your expenses. One reason that you should track your spending is that it is difficult to find where you are overspending, if you are not aware of where the money is going. Here are several options available to you:
1) You can keep a written ledger of all your expenses. “Rich on Any Income” has a great program that you can do this on. It fits directly into your checkbook and as you deduct the amount from your checking account balance you quickly flip to the ledger and deduct it from the correct category.
2) You can do this by using Quicken or Microsoft Money. The key is to stay up to date with this. You would need to sit down every day or two and enter in the money that you have spent. This can be time consuming, but the graphs do a good job of letting you know problem areas, and ways that you ca adjust your budget.
3) You can use the envelope system. You can save the receipts the first month or two so that you can see exactly where the money was spent. After you become use to the program, you may not need to track as closely, since you know to stop when the money comes out. I would definitely keep the receipts for awhile because you may need to figure out why you are overspending this category.
4) You can subscribe to an online envelope budgeting program. This is nice because you can access the program both at home and at work, and it may be easier to keep it updated, when you have a little bit of extra free time.
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