Dollar Duo: The Track Your Spending Challenge
Posted on September 30th, 2008 – 5:56 PMBy Kara McGuire
My Sunday column was about filtering out the financial noise and focusing on the pocketbook issues you can control at home — spending and saving, being adequately insured, being frugal and instilling that value into your children.
And on today’s Dollar Duo video (head to startribune.com and scroll through the videos…working on getting the darn thing embedded into my blog in future weeks), John and I took that concept one step further by outlining ways to track spending so that you can begin to make changes at home if need be.
John had a nifty budget device that looked like a checkbook register. I told viewers about Mint.com, which aggregates my credit and debt card information into one place and notifying me when I’m going over my budget in problem areas.
We also agreed to have a track your spending challenge, where John and I track every penny we spend for a week. We’ll compare notes in a future Dollar Duo segment.
Does anyone want to join us? I’m thinking we start next week on Monday, Oct. 6th.
Anyone have favorite budgeting tools or track your spending success tips to share?
10 Responses to "Dollar Duo: The Track Your Spending Challenge"
I’ll play, but we’re likely not to be very interesting. That’s the week that all of our beginning of the month bills become due, including both mortgages, the car payment, and all utilities that don’t go straight on the credit card (those get paid from the second paycheck of the month).
But I can tell you the easiest way I’ve found to track my expenses, which is putting everything I can on my credit card and paying it off in full each month. I can watch the online account daily to make sure we stay within the 12-1300 we are allowed to spend each month, and every 2 months or less we get a $25 amazon certificate we use to buy books or baby toys. We’ve cut our spending down to almost nothing but bills and groceries and gas to finish paying off our car loan (which will be done this month after 13 months) and after October, to set aside one full income into our savings account to hold in case one of us loses our job. Luckily, with a 10 month old, we don’t tend to go out much unless it’s things like the Como zoo or the library toddler hour on Saturdays.
I would like to join your challenge. I already track my spending on a daily basis because it is part of m regular blog posting schedule.
I use Excel to track my finances since it is so customizable.
Kara,
Have you passed this info on to your management?
I believe they have recently decided not to pay some creditors.
What kind of a message do you think this sends to children?
I believe it sends the message that, “F it, someone else will pick up the tab. Of course, according to the brilliant Mr. Harte, you’re (the strib) still making money.
What do you think is is that causes people to be so incredibly blind?
I just signed up for Mint.com
I’m starting a new job with new spending restrictions…this is a great time to get this right!
[…] with crashing markets (worried Cribsheeters can click here for Kara McGuire’s tips on budgeting in these perilous times), my own newspaper’s […]
I am downloading all my info now. After 15 months of my husband being out of work due to a back injury. I need all the help I can get!
Looks like a cool idea! My question is what’s the catch (or is there really not one??)-why is it free when it seems similar to quicken, etc.? While it looks much better than my current budgeting software http://www.snowmintcs.com/products/budgetwin/index.php I’m not sure I’m ready to switch, even though it looks like it would save me a lot of time!
Kara,
I’m getting married in a month and a half which is expensive in itself. I feel as if I have no extra cash, so this Mint tool is a great idea! It will be wonderful to see where all my money is going!
I’ll join in. I use Money, which is a bit of a bear sometimes but has everything I need in one place. I’ll have to go and update all the accounts at the end of the week, but then when I do I’ll easily be able to do a report of all spending from this week.
I do like the idea of Mint sending me an e-mail when I’m getting close to busting the budget, but I get so much spam in my inbox nowadays it’s a chore just to clip it down anyway.
I’ve been tracking my spending for a couple years. I keep all my receipts and then log them in a notebook in different categories (food, housewares, etc). At the end of the month I tally everything up and put it into a spreadsheet. The goal is to obviously make more money than you spend. I don’t understand how people can go along and not know where they’re at financially. Although it’s not a nice chore, it gives me piece of mind.
