After Christmas hit this past time (along with all of the anti-fiscal habits it brings with it), the husband and I were feeling the devastating lightness of our wallets, and so we knew we needed to take some drastic measures in order to get back to the financial place we had been before the holidays and finals week eating-out binge. It seemed like our money was just disappearing and we weren't having any huge major expenses! What was happening to it? Where was it going? Surely somebody wasn't slowly siphoning off our hard-earned money from our bank accounts....well, somebody was, actually, and it was us! So, we decided to start tracking our spending on a chart. Being the slightly more techy one in our relationship, my husband is the one who created the excel chart. We made a commitment to go over our finances every weekend and plug in EVERY. LITTLE. AMOUNT. that we had spent that past week...doesn't matter if it was a $1 water bottle on the way to class....it got put in the chart. We categorized our spending in the following categories:
-Car Expenses (maintenance, repairs, and gas)
-Groceries (mainly food, household cleaners, anything we purchase from the supermarket)
-Eating out
-Fun money (movies, entertainment, netflix, date night, etc.)
-Fun money (movies, entertainment, netflix, date night, etc.)
-Freak costs (amazon orders, parking tickets, plane tickets. etc. Things you don't pay for on a regular basis but that come up every once in a while)
-Regular Monthly Expenses (rent, utilities, health insurance, car insurance, cell phones, internet, etc. --Groceries do not apply here because the cost varies a little every week/month)
At the end of each week, we would add up all of the costs in each category and make goals to do better the next week. In our first two months of doing this (Jan. and Feb.), we discovered that we were spending a RIDICULOUS amount of money eating out....about $125 each month on average!! So, we kicked ourselves a few times, and then made a major goal to eat out a lot less, and by March we got our eating-out spending down to $49. We eat out much less now and cook a lot more at home, and this has started to save us a LOT of money. We have also gotten better at ordering less unnecessary things on Amazon and at reducing our utility bill by being more conservative with heat, air conditioning, making sure to turn off lights, etc.
As we tracked, we were much more motivated to make changes in our daily routines that have allowed us to save about $6000 in the last five months that we would not have saved had we not been tracking our spending. You will have a VERY hard time understanding where your bad spending habits lie if you do not take the time to track your spending...and there's no good excuse not to. Mint.com can basically do it all for you automatically! So, start tracking your spending and start SAVING MONEY. Like the cute cartoon above, hop on your computer, start tracking, and watch that computer-tracking-habit help give money back to you.
What to do then with all that money you're saving? Stay tuned for the next post. :) Happy tracking!!!
