7 Trainer Recommended Weekly Spend Tracking Techniques
Tracking your weekly spending is an essential part of sticking with your Financial Plan! Just like diet and exercise, there are a million different ways to go about it. With each method, you will see great success stories and great failures. There is no right or wrong way to do it, but you do the work to experiment and find the right system that works and is sustainable for you.
3 Common Barriers to Spend Tracking
Lack of Clarity
It’s difficult to understand how to control your spending when you don’t have a clear idea of what money is available to be spent and what has already been accounted for in fixed expenses. Instead of doing the mental math, it’s easy to just resort to using a credit card to avoid ove-drafting and “dealing with it later.”
Making Trade-Offs
Perhaps you don’t want to track your spending because if you knew you were going to go over budget, you wouldn’t want to actually stop and consider another option. If your weekly spending goal is $200 and on Friday, you realize you only have $5 left to spend before your week starts over, would you actually cancel your dinner plans or forego buying something??
Time
With so many things demanding your attention, it can be difficult to make time to track your spending, especially if you don’t feel confident about your performance. But you spend 40 hours per week working hard for your money—you should spend 20–30 mins per week tracking where it goes.
7 Trainer Recommended Methods
No Budget, Budget
Set your automatic savings transfers each month or pay period, then spend whatever is left over. This method is best for people who don’t like the minutiae of tracking every expense but want to make sure they’re achieving their savings goals and not letting too much cash sit in their checking account. If you can maintain your automatic transfers and not overdraft your checking account or carry credit card balances, then congratulations, you don’t have to micromanage your expenses!
Two Checking Accounts
Designate your current checking account for your fixed expenses and bills and open a second one just for spending. Each week, set an automatic transfer for your weekly spending number from your fixed checking account to your variable checking account and only use that debit card for spending.
User-Friendly Mobile Banking
If you’re willing to switch all of your banking to a new bank whose app has advanced budget tracking features, you have options. With Ally Bank, you can set up “Spending Buckets” to budget your account balance and assign transactions to those buckets. Qube Money bills itself as the modern cash envelope budgeting system, but rather than cash, you can an app on your phone to select a Qube budget to spend from on your Qube debit card before making a purchase.
Variable Spending Credit Card
For those who are more advanced and have a proven track record for paying off credit card balances every month, you can dedicate one credit card to track all of your variable expenses. This is similar to the two checking account system but instead of a second checking account/debit card, you use a credit card. To maximize rewards, you can choose a travel rewards card like the Capital One Venture or Chase Sapphire Preferred. Alternatively, cashback cards like AmEx Blue Cash, BOA Cash Rewards, Discover It, and Chase Freedom give rewards for popular variable spending categories like dining, gas, and groceries.
Hand Tracking
For tactile learners, sometimes handwriting every variable expense is the best way to track your spending in real time. You can do this by tracking it in a journal or envelope.
App Tracking
At the Financial Gym, we are aggressively low-tech because we don’t think the best personal finance app has been invented yet. All of them have their downsides and most of all, they all require too much of your time to categorize minutiae that doesn’t translate into a change in behavior. That said, there is one app that we have come to like and it’s Daily Budget. This app has the capability to track your entire budget, but for simplicity’s sake, we recommend only using it for your variable expenses. You do this by setting your Monthly Income as your weekly spend number times four. It calculates a daily number you can spend and it deducts as you enter in your expenses. If you have money left over that day, it carries over to the next. If you overspent that day, it deducts from the next day to make up for it.
Cash Detox (aka All Cash Diet)
Going on a cash diet, even temporarily, is a really great way to reorient your spending and physically see how money leaves your wallet.
Check out our B.F.F. approved budgeting tools!
Ready to take your finances to the next level?
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