Keeping Track of Your Expenses

Any financial expert will tell you it is essential to make a budget if you want to have control of your personal finances. I too believe a budget is crucial. But for it to work once you have created it, you need to do one more thing. You need to follow up afterwards and therefore you need to track how you spend your money.Keeping track of the expenses is what most people find boring and where they quickly lose the desire to use the budget. Canada Goose jackets This is why it is important to anticipate this problem and make sure you have a viable system to track your expenses. You have to consider this at the same time as you construct your budget, as it might influence how your budget is structured.The most important thing to consider regarding the follow-up is how you will be tracking your expenses. Keeping track of the income is usually relatively easy as there is often only one deposit of your salary every month. Bookkeeping - Keep Track of Where Your Money is Going! Bookkeeping is basically the practice of systematical and methodical recording of financial accounts and business transactions of a unit. Important function of bookkeeping is to show the amounts and causes of the losses and profits over a given time period. Keeping Track of Your Income & Expenses Earning money is one thing, spending it is another, but learning how to manage it is something completely different. The simple truth is that whilst most people are good spenders, very few of us know how to save or manage the money we have. Keeping Track of Your Web Site Passwords Until recently, I didn't have a very good strategy for keeping track of my various Web site passwords and logins. I review a series of methods that supposedly can improve on this situation, including OpenID, and MyOneLogin, and their strengths and weaknesses. Keeping Track of the Changes to Your Mortgage Rate The latest regulations to hit the mortgage and real estate world are based on past, negative behaviors or unscrupulous lenders who would strong arm buyers into paying higher mortgage rates late in a transaction as there wasn't time for a borrower to change their mind about a program or deal with rate increases. Based on HERA (The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008) there are new disclosure requirements that will hopefully reduce the negative experiences that many borrowers have had when dealing with these 'bait and switch' lenders.The tricky part is the expenses. Once you have collected all the information about your expenses, you need to compare them to your budget. If you haven't set up a system that works for you it can be a very slow, tedious process.There are several different ways to keep track of your expenses and you should pick one that works for you. The first method I will mention is simply to keep all your receipts from all your purchases and then at the end of the month you calculate how much is in each category. This can be a very tiresome way to do it. You will need to spend several hours at the end of the month figuring out if you are within budget. The good thing is that this will keep your records consistently updated and you can use this information when you revise your budget.Another way to do it is to read all your expenses from your online statements. If you use a card to pay for all your expenses you can simply copy your online statement into an Excel file when you log onto your online bank account. All you have to do then is classify each post. Of course this requires being able to use a card for all your expenses, and still recording the few cash payments you might make. This way you have all your expenses documented and can easily compare them to the budget. This is my personal choice for keeping track of my expenses.The last and very popular way is the envelope system. With this system you take one envelope for each category of expenses you have and at the beginning of the month you put the amount of cash in the budget for that category into the envelope. Every time you want to purchase something it has to be from the envelope representing the category of the purchase you are making. After the purchase, you could put the receipt into the envelope so you can keep better track. With this method you never overspend and can constantly see how much is left for the month. The disadvantage is that you have to keep a lot of cash in the envelopes.Whichever of the methods you choose, remember that it has to fit your life-style. Otherwise you will fall into the same trap many people do, that makes them give up on following their budget.