Transfer Balance Cards Low Fixed

Back to the Stone Age: Low-tech expense tracking

This post comes from April Dykman at partner blog Get Rich Slowly .

As many of you know, before I was a Get Rich Slowly staff writer, I was a GRS reader and active commenter. I'd say the bulk of my early personal-finance education came from that website, and it's most definitely the resource I credit for spurring me to get serious about paying off debt and saving money.

We're definitely good, but the JD has written on a back to basics, the more I started thinking that my reasoning was just a cop-out. It's always a few steps ahead of me, I think.

I do not need to account for every penny, but I want a general idea of what we do. It is too easy to dismiss spending because we do relatively well with our savings, or because we give up a lot of extras like cable TV and eat regularly.

Also, it's less fun to spend money when I don't track it. I believe that money is a tool, and that some of it should be saved for the future and some of it should be enjoyed now. But when I'm not exactly sure how much "fun money" we've been spending, it's harder to enjoy spending it.

Last week, for example, I made a couple of purchases and felt a little buyer's remorse, but only because I worried that I was forgetting about other expenses. If I'd known we allotted, say, $200 to freely spend, and I was within that limit, I wouldn't have given the purchase a second thought. I could have just enjoyed it.

Past tracking attempts

I tried Mint , but some accounts wouldn't update, and there were major glitches that threw off my numbers in a big way. For example, my "personal items" category, which is under $50 each month, mysteriously showed more than $400, but when I tried to view the itemized expenses, the system would time out. When I added it up by hand, it was nowhere near $400. I contacted customer service, but after weeks of waiting, there was no fix and no help, so I quit using Mint. I tried again several months later, but one of my accounts updated so rarely that, again, it wasn't worthwhile.