If, like me, you have no idea where all your money goes – I think that gremlins break in at night and steal it all personally, usually after I’ve had too many vino tintos!
I’ve started to use a tool that allows me to track what I’ve spent and where and I’ve found it quite useful. It also allows me to share the expenses with Liesl, so we can both add items to each of the categories as we spend, and then we can see an amalgamated categorised summary by month.
There are several different apps available on both the iPhone and for Android devices, have a look at the following link for a number of different options…
…each one has different features and many of them are free.
Many of these apps allow you to create your own custom categories (i.e. groceries, fuel, red wine etc.) and pretty much all of them allow you to see what you’ve spent in each category by month. I try to add everything to the tracker (even things like taking a coffee whilst out) and make it a habit of doing so, that way it’s really interesting to see how much I spend on incidentals and it really helps me budget for future expenses.
The app I use, also allows me to add reoccurring expenses which is a great time saving feature for things that you do regularly (yoga and club memberships for example), the devil lives in the detail!
The app that I personally use is called “Our Expenses: Household Budget” and you can find it in the App Store if you have an Apple phone or iPad, if you’re interested in finding out more you can see it here..
https://ourexpenses.io
…I particularly like that it’s easy to use and that both myself and my wife can independently add items via our own phones.