It's very important, whenever you're doing, whatever you're trying to budget, whenever you're trying to keep track of your money to find out where your money's going. Because if you don't write it down, you don't pay attention to it, then you have no idea where it's going.
When we used to have checkbooks (for those of us that remember checkbooks) you had to write it down. Now, with online banking, and everything, and debit cards, we don't write it down, we just pay, and don't even think a second about it.
So some tips or some things that would be good for you to use:
My husband and I both use the “Every Dollar App,” which is a “zero based budget.” So and again, I've explained that before on the on the zero based, $0 budget is that your income minus your expenses equals zero. So that means every dollar has a job to do.
We've talked about budgeting before, so I won't get into that. But you can track your expenses through that. You can download your expenses from your bank into that, you can just manually enter those into your budget app, and you can also use Quicken which I use Quicken as well, to kind of just keep track of the daily transactions – is what I do with Quicken, I don't I don't really use it to build pay or anything like that. I just kind of have it to keep tally, keep records so that I can easily do reports and stuff at the end of the year when I get ready for taxes. And that's for my my personal stuff, not my business stuff, but the other thing you can do is you could just use pen and paper, that's pretty simple.
So you would just, you know, track your expense, date, name of the expense, and then the amount of the expense. So that way you can keep track of what you're buying because when you're spending with a debit card, especially, you just hand it over and you don't think about it.
So spending cash, actually, when you hand cash to the cashier, it actually hurts you a little bit because you're like, “Oh, that money. Do I really need everything that's in that cart?” So that's another way to do that.
Or you can use Excel, Numbers or Google Sheet and any of those, they all are the same but just different programs, [or different. What would that be? Different software, I guess.] So but until you get the hang of it, you know your spending habits, you should track it every day. And and then maybe only do it once or twice a week. That way, you can understand what you're doing, you can see where you could cut back. That's the same thing whenever you're doing your budgets, they work hand in hand together.
