Tracking your Expenses
Tracking your expenses is the ideal way to see where you are spending your money. Working to pay off your debt, this is an essential part of seeing where the money trail ends up.
This is where you will start keeping track of all your receipts and writing down what you are spending. Use a notepad or setup a spreadsheet, use an app. Just as long as it is something that you will use regularly
Understand your spending habits
Getting to understand your spending habits can highlight any problem areas you need to target.
See our expenses and income worksheet to help you get started. Typically over the course of a month, you can get a good idea of your spending. You can also review your past bank/credit card statements and review a bit more in-depth that way.
Tracking Monthly Expenses Template
For our PDF income and expenses worksheet, we tried to cover all the main areas. You may need to make some modifications based on your personal situation. Another option to help with your tracking is to categorize your spending based on the stores that you frequent. This can still be a viable way to see how/where you are spending your money. The main goal here is to be able to properly track your spending.
The main sections from our PDF are:
- Fixed Monthly Expenses – ‘same amount’ of expenses you see each month.
- Variable Monthly Expenses – average monthly cost of expenses that differ from month to month.
- Infrequent Expenses – average monthly costs of items that typically only occur once or twice a year.
Start tracking your expenses now! Devise a system that will work for you, track the proper categories so you can know where your money is going so you can work towards getting back on budget.
