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.