How do you track your monthly/annual expenses?

[Anonymous]

I have a spreadsheet. I list all our known/fixed/reoccuring expenses like taxes, streaming, subscriptions, insurance, average utility costs from the previous year, and an estimated amount for car and home maintenance, etc. We deduct that amount from our take home pay, which is net of automatic savings to 529, brokerage, etc. What we have left is what we have left for the month. The remaining expenses I track from credit card statements and I put into 4 categories...groceries, gas, food/entertainment, and everything else. If we have anything left, I put that into a "vacation" fund. This is all done manually in excel.

[Anonymous]

Still a notebook, but because it's only me one cheap kid. I have the notebooks from 2002. I just went through some of them to see where I spent my money. I even remember the day I spent some of it and the movie we saw. There are notes there beyond just money. I can see how I felt about spending it and what the prices were. Lots of mistakes were made and I try to do better.
I know very well where my money goes after so many years of tracking.

[Anonymous]

Also just use a plain old spreadsheet on Google Sheets. Well, maybe not plain as it links to things like stock prices and related data, has tabs for spending every month (where I download credit card transactions into the sheet), an overall networth tab where I keep track of literally all our assets, fsafeds spending, etc. It is a lot of work so I've made it more streamlined over the years. But I feel like tracking every penny has led to us saving more. Bank of America's my financial picture does a lot of this too.

[Anonymous]

The Bank of America app has a decent spending category breakdown for credit cards that I use

[Anonymous]

I went from Excel to Minted to Rocket Money (app).

[Anonymous]

For 20+ years, Quicken.

[Anonymous]

I use YNAB. It’s a popular budgeting tool. There is an annual subscription, I think around $100, but it’s pretty awesome. It’s fun to use.

[Anonymous]

10+ YNAB user. It keep everything organized. I know exactly where my money is going. There is a bit of learning curve initially though.

[Anonymous]

YNAB

[Anonymous]

I don't. I have a portfolio tracker. If I want it to go up I cut back on spending.

[Anonymous]

I’ve used quicken for probably 20 years now. I like that I have all my historic data in one place

[Anonymous]

Another Quicken user - glad to see I am not the only one

[Anonymous]

Monarch, it's been pretty great. You can upload spreadsheets if you want or manually edit accounts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

Wow, this is EXACTLY what I do.

[Anonymous]

Keep track in my head, just a few categories home, auto, tech, insurance, food, household, miscellaneous. A little harder now that I am getting older, but will be a good indicator that my mind is starting to slip.