How do you track your monthly/annual expenses?

[Anonymous]

I used to use an excel spreadsheet and track manually, but life has gotten way more complicated and I’m looking for another solution. Just looking through bills and monthly credit card statements may not work because DH has work travel, we have separate airbnb expenses, and other things.

I honestly have no idea how much we are spending on day to day living. How do you track?

[Anonymous]

Monarch money - it's an app

[Anonymous]

We are still doing it manually since most (all) apps require you give it/them access to your accounts so they can track your spending. With all the challenges of security, we really don't want to give another entity access to any of our accounts.

If someone has a non-connected app I am curious. I agree it has becomes tedious to do it manually.

[Anonymous]

We have a spreadsheet. Nearly all of our expenses are on credit cards so those are easy to track. The rest we enter in manually.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have a spreadsheet. Nearly all of our expenses are on credit cards so those are easy to track. The rest we enter in manually.

I am a PP who also does it manually. This is exactly what we have. A spreadsheet.

We start with our monthly take home pay minus the standard amount "we pay ourselves" each month that goes directly into Joint Brokerage. We then keep track of our fixed monthly expenses, the fixed yearly expenses that we prorated, and the variable expenses. We update every weekend, then true up at the end of the month. Whatever is left over we also put into our Joint Brokerage account.

[Anonymous]

I download a CSV from the bank and credit card accounts, upload it into Google sheet, and apply some formulas. The credit card csv has a column for "Category", so I just update the categories to fit what I want.

I've been doing this for 2 years now. The formulas are all there so now all I have to do is download the csv and change a few categories.

[Anonymous]

excel

[Anonymous]

I don't.
When I wanted to see how much we did spend in past 2 years I added up sll our checks and cash withdrawals from all bank accounts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Monarch money - it's an app

Same. I’m very happy with it. I used to use Personal Capital but they stopped working with my main bank so I made the switch and it works very well.

[Anonymous]

I started using Quicken after MSmoney was discontinued.

[Anonymous]

I don't. Realizing this is probably my good fortune and privilege at this point in my life and career.

[Anonymous]

My credit card app has a function that breaks this down and creates graphs, and it mostly works because I pay for almost everything on it but my mortgage and that doesn't change.

But I've found this to be pretty useless because I need the experience of logging it myself and thinking about it, more than I need the information. If that makes sense. So I am wanting to start tracking it manually.

[Anonymous]

Personal Capital

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Personal Capital

Now called Empower.

[Anonymous]

I use empower/personal capital.