How Do You Control Expenses Day to Day?
This is the part of the budget that I’m horrible at. I mean, I stink.
On my Excel Budget Template that I use month in and month out, there is a place to enter receipts. I enter in receipts as we get them, or when Randy gets home from work…okay, I do it most of the time. Once in a while at the very least.
Fine, you got me. Last month I entered in three receipts. Total. For the month.
Tracking receipts is boring and I hate it. I’m finding that my obsession with keeping the budget updated just doesn’t seem to extend to receipt entering. Which is sad, because I know I need to do it. When I don’t do it? I feel like I have been lazy. (and beat myself up over it)
Bill tracking is easy, when a bill comes in I change the text in that row on the spreadsheet to a light gray instead of black, so I know it’s there but it doesn’t draw my eye because it’s gone for the month. It also makes it a lot easier to copy to the new month’s budget because you just highlight all the cells that are light gray and make them black again and save the sheet as next month’s budget. Deleting causes problems I’m not prepared to deal with.
So how do you keep track of your expenses down to the day? I’m not good at micro-managing so this is something where I keep failing. We have the month set up for spend on eating out, personal spend, groceries, and gas – do you just keep going and make sure you don’t go over? Is it that simple? It seems like there should be something….more…to the whole thing.
Oh! I’m getting a new computer! We have been scouring the web as well as those fab home shopping networks to find a great deal. (You would be surprised at some of the deals on those shopping channels, seriously.) What we completely forgot about was Black Friday.
I know, most people live for Black Friday – not us – we rarely go shopping at 3am. But this year we found a great deal on a computer with 6gigs of RAM. Yes. Six. I’m a ram-whore so that means a lot to me. It also has an AMD processor which isn’t Intel – it’s faster. (AMD is faster according to my computer-building geek-a-licious friends, your mileage may vary.) It also comes with a completely unnecessary 21.5″ monitor and a much needed Canon photo printer.
Public Service Announcement: I hate Lexmark printers. At least the one I have. It has been a drag and nothing but trouble since day one.
So I’ll have a new computer to play with this weekend. I’m really excited. Then I get the new landline on the first of December.
It’s like I keep telling everyone who will listen, with all the changes coming up for our family (work raise, eligibility for 401(k), tax return, Christmas bonus, potential client opportunities for both of us, and more marketing for my freelance work) I wish I could wake up and have it just be February 1st, 2009. Sure I’d miss my 6th anniversary (1/1/09) but it would be worth it to wake up in February and just know where everything is for the rest of 2009.
Talk about a fairy tale for the new melinnium *grin* Sleeping Economist. Do you think Disney would be interested?
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Yep – I’m a Joiner!
Entering receipts is boring but I believe important. We sit down together once a week and spend about one hour entering receipts and paying bills. It’s not fun but it keeps us in check. Also this system makes sure we never pay any bills late and we always know how much money we have/owe. If we do a rare large purchase such as buying 4 new tires we will enter that in right away. We use Quicken but it’s the same concept as excel spreadsheets. The quicken reports make me happy.
I think doing it together is a great thing. It makes us both take ownership for our financial situation.