tracking spending

 Yeah, the title of this post is "tracking spending". The truth is, I only "kind of" do it.

You can find articles all over the web saying that you will probably spend less if you use cash instead of credit or debit cards. Yeah, I don't do that; I use debit or credit for almost everything except snacks on rides.

I don't have budgets for specific items, or even categories. But there are two things I do that, I think, help.

First, I have a list of my monthly bills. The Excellent Wife (TEW) and have a complicated financial system of her money/my money/our money, and I know exactly what is supposed to come out of my money every month (including the contribution I make to the "our money" fund). So when it's time to pay the monthly bills, I open up that list and grind 'em out.

The other thing is that I track all my finances (spending, savings, credit cards) in Gnucash.

Some time ago, I was asked by a friend which financial software I used, and when I said Gnucash, the next question was whether it did anything automatically. It might, but I don't know; I enter every transaction by hand. Salary, interest, checks, charges, debits, transfers... ALL of 'em. I THINK this might have a similar effect to paying in cash; I pay a little bit of attention to every transaction, and I see what it's doing to my overall budget.

If I used a program that did everything automatically, I think I'd fall into the too-comfortable semi-ignorance that might be what leads people to overspend on credit cards. Instead, I have a comfortable savings (separate from my retirement savings*), and I think the repetitive data entry has something to do with it.

(I started using Gnucash because it ran on my Linux computer, and its free. But it also runs on Windows... so I keep my data file in my web storage, and update from whatever computer I have open at the time. I always have a computer open; I've not made the transition to everything-on-the-smartphone yet.)

*And I keep the retirement accounts on a spreadsheet that I update every day that the markets are open. I know that wouldn't work for most people; the daily ups-and-downs would be irritating and/or alarming. But it's impressive to me to see how, while the amounts did not increase much for the first decade I tracked, it's gone up dramatically in the most recent years. Even including the years of the Trump Slump (see 2018-19), seeing the spreadsheet is a motivator to keep dumping money into the retirement accounts.