FUEGO
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2007
- Messages
- 7,746
I'm curious about how much we spend and what we are spending on. As a result I have decided to attempt to track expenses for the next year, starting 4/1/2010 through 3/31/2011.
My goal is to keep this task as simple, quick, and efficient as possible while yielding expense data that is sufficiently categorized and accurate to tell me where the money is going. DW is involved, so it must be incredibly quick and easy to comply with the data requirements or her cash spending will simply not be recorded in a category other than "cash".
I am going to run the basic plan for expense tracking by her (to get buy-in from stakeholders) and demonstrate that 95% of the work will be done by me, and 5% will be her letting me know where the money that drips from the bottomless hole in her purse actually goes. Keeping track of every penny is not very important, but keeping track of every $5 or $10 is important over the course of a year.
A few questions/notes to myself from my not-quite-fully-developed plan:
Cash – how to account? When withdrawn or when spent or hybrid?
Credit cards – copy/paste/categorize from online statements at the end of each month (ie at the time the checking account is reconciled, enter previous month’s CC transactions). Based on transaction date. Don’t include cost of walmart gift cards – these are booked when ultimate goods purchased
Check/ETF – copy/paste from checkbook register spreadsheet
Gift cards – record manually in spreadsheet at time of purchase of ultimate goods
Categories of spending:
House-Mortgage
House - repairs/maintenance (incl. appliances/repairs)
House - insurance/taxes
Utilities-Gas/Electric
Utilities-Water/Sewer/Trash
Utilities-Cable TV
Communications - Phone/Cell Phone/Internet
Auto-maintenance/insurance/taxes/license/regis.
Auto-gas
Medical/Dental
Clothing
Groceries/Household (Walmart, Target, Grocery Store)
Student Loan Payments
Education
Childcare/Afterschool care
Dining out
Entertainment/Toys/Fun (incl. ABC store)
Vacations
Electronics
Gifts
Charity
Misc.
Cash (??)
============================================
Comments/suggestions? Too many/too few categories? I'll pre-emptively say I don't feel like setting up quicken to do the tracking since it would likely take longer to configure, download, QC, and troubleshoot vs just keeping the records in a spreadsheet in a fairly manual manner.
In regards to the grocery/household expense category, this is very lumpy and I know that. That is mainly because we spend probably 90-95% of our money in this category at walmart. And the receipts are long. And I'm too lazy to break apart the receipt into more discrete categories. The resulting data wouldn't tell me enough to justify the greatly increased data entry requirements.
My goal is to keep this task as simple, quick, and efficient as possible while yielding expense data that is sufficiently categorized and accurate to tell me where the money is going. DW is involved, so it must be incredibly quick and easy to comply with the data requirements or her cash spending will simply not be recorded in a category other than "cash".
I am going to run the basic plan for expense tracking by her (to get buy-in from stakeholders) and demonstrate that 95% of the work will be done by me, and 5% will be her letting me know where the money that drips from the bottomless hole in her purse actually goes. Keeping track of every penny is not very important, but keeping track of every $5 or $10 is important over the course of a year.
A few questions/notes to myself from my not-quite-fully-developed plan:
Cash – how to account? When withdrawn or when spent or hybrid?
Credit cards – copy/paste/categorize from online statements at the end of each month (ie at the time the checking account is reconciled, enter previous month’s CC transactions). Based on transaction date. Don’t include cost of walmart gift cards – these are booked when ultimate goods purchased
Check/ETF – copy/paste from checkbook register spreadsheet
Gift cards – record manually in spreadsheet at time of purchase of ultimate goods
Categories of spending:
House-Mortgage
House - repairs/maintenance (incl. appliances/repairs)
House - insurance/taxes
Utilities-Gas/Electric
Utilities-Water/Sewer/Trash
Utilities-Cable TV
Communications - Phone/Cell Phone/Internet
Auto-maintenance/insurance/taxes/license/regis.
Auto-gas
Medical/Dental
Clothing
Groceries/Household (Walmart, Target, Grocery Store)
Student Loan Payments
Education
Childcare/Afterschool care
Dining out
Entertainment/Toys/Fun (incl. ABC store)
Vacations
Electronics
Gifts
Charity
Misc.
Cash (??)
============================================
Comments/suggestions? Too many/too few categories? I'll pre-emptively say I don't feel like setting up quicken to do the tracking since it would likely take longer to configure, download, QC, and troubleshoot vs just keeping the records in a spreadsheet in a fairly manual manner.
In regards to the grocery/household expense category, this is very lumpy and I know that. That is mainly because we spend probably 90-95% of our money in this category at walmart. And the receipts are long. And I'm too lazy to break apart the receipt into more discrete categories. The resulting data wouldn't tell me enough to justify the greatly increased data entry requirements.