Simplified way to track Monthly Expenses

If you had asked me years ago how much I spend on groceries per month, I wouldn’t be able to give you an estimate. Finances bored me and numbers overwhelmed me. 

It was right around the time that I was planning on quitting my full time job to become a stay at home mom that I decided to sit and take a hard look at the way we were organizing our finances. Personally, if I were to pick a system to follow every month it would have to be super simple for me to want to maintain it.

Don’t confuse this with budgeting. That’s just something that doesn’t really work in our household. Neither of us spend frivolously. The idea was to just keep track of the money coming in and out so that we can have a snapshot of how our monthly spending per category looks like.

Tracking each and every dollar you spend per month sounds more complicated than it is.  What really simplified this process was using Mint’s web-based personal financial management service. It’s free to use and It connects with your bank accounts and credit cards, consolidates all your transactions, and categorizes them. You can even personalize the categories. We rarely use cash in our household, so for the odd times we do, I manually track it to enter at the end of the month.

I plug in the numbers from Mint to an excel sheet I created. I’ve modified this template a few times over the years, but I’ve finally found one that really works for us. 

Now more than ever, it’s important to keep an eye on your spending. This snapshot will allow you to see where you can make adjustments if needed, or simply follow it on a monthly basis.

Click the image if you’d like to download this template. Feel free to modify to fit your own lifestyle.

Digital Photo Organization: My Monthly Routine

If I were to ask you how many photos you have on your camera reel, what would be your answer? Truthfully?

Now excluding photos you’ve taken with your cell phone camera, how many are screenshots? what about duplicates or blurry photos? And let’s not forget what happens when a child takes your phone and you find this?

I’ve always been pretty good at backing up my photos and keeping them organized, but I became pretty strict about it after losing a few months worth of my first born’s baby videos. It’s been 8 years since then but I still get sad thinking about it. Never again.

So let’s dive in.

• Connect your phone to your laptop and copy everything off.

• Create folders. I usually create a folder for each year, and then use subfolders for each month. If there was an event or trip where I took more pictures than usual, a new subfolder would be created.

Yearly view

Monthly subfolders

• Every month I then empty out my phone. It may take longer if you haven’t been doing this regularly. I go through each picture, deleting screenshots, duplicates, and those images not worth saving. If this is the first time you’re organizing your photos, I’d recommend starting from today’s pictures and get into a monthly habit moving forward otherwise it may be too overwhelming.

• Copy the pictures in their correct folder.

• I prefer the layout of google drive, but you can also use google photos as a cloud backup. I also have an external hard drive where I make a second backup.

• Delete off your phone.

Bonus points if you’re already going through each image, save your favourites in a separate folder. If you’re like me and you make yearly photobooks, half your work in choosing images will already be done.