Appreciate the insight, but still hard to fathom..."all" of your spend is from one single account? ATM withdrawals? Checks? Credit Card payments, etc?
You don't move "any" money from one account to another?
Your food budget is actually higher than ours ($350/mo). But our car expenses alone are > $10K and that's for two mid-range Chrysler products..Property taxes are near $10K..
It'd be great to hear from those tracking "every" penny in Quicken what their real expenses are. I spend a few hours a week tracking, so it's hard for me to comprehend a scenario where there's "one" account that pays everything as we have many accounts that money moves from/between..
That all said, guess it depends on what part of the country you live in also..but you can't live "middle class" where we live ("average" neighborhood in a MCOL area) for south of $90K/yr and that's being super anal about every single dollar spent including clipping coupons and eating leftovers several nights a week..I suspect many that live near/around us are probably 20-50% higher than we spend..
I don't understand why you can't fathom that I can look at one account, add up all the debits related to all online bill pay transactions, and the super rare check, and determine our annual spending. No hours of tracking expenses each month needed. I don't track categories. I compute the amount spent each year for the prior year in less than a half hour, and input it into my spreadsheet for forecasting purposes.
We use one checking account for all bill paying, using online bill pay. We use cash back credit cards for everything that doesn't involve a surcharge. Regular in-store shopping, occasional online shopping, utility bills, insurance, etc. The credit card bills then get paid in full via online bill pay. Cash mainly gathers dust in my wallet. No discount for using cash, so why would I?
I keep ATM cards valid by using them as a debit card before the expiration date, so they keep issuing new ones. Not even necessary every year. I set a calendar reminder for this. No regular ATM withdrawals needed.
We paid cash for our house in 1996, so we have no mortgage payment. My $38K figure from last year does include car payments for one vehicle.
We have multiple accounts (2 checking, 2 brokerage, 2 Roth IRAs, 2 HSAs, 1 401k) and do move money between them, but those aren't expenses. It's done for investment purposes. Roth IRA contributions. Surplus money not needed to cover bills is regularly transferred from checking to brokerage. Money is transferred from an HSA to checking as reimbursement for medical expenses that were originally paid via credit card. Those transfers are no more "income" as an "expense", and I'm familiar with double-entry accounting (former accounting student and accounting clerk).
My husband is still employed and makes over 6 times what he made when we first married, yet we wisely don't spend 6 times as much. Last year's spending was about half of his net pay, 35% if you count the value of 401k/HSA contributions that we don't have unrestricted access to at this time.
I've given up searching for and clipping most coupons as a major waste of my time that's much better spent in making sure I'm regularly investing surplus money. Much more profitable and efficient. But I do love leftovers and cook most meals from scratch.
