Figuring out how much you are spending on what is the first step to track your spending – today I shared the suggested action I took to keep an eye on spending, then you can work up to the categorising and actual budgeting work to make a move towards figuring out your wealth!
More on the 21 day challenge here.
Transcript of Track your spending video:
welcome to day 8 of the 21 day challenge. There is a link in the description if you don’t know what that is, go and check it out.
Okay
Today we are going to take another action, and the action is around our wealth. Now wealth, across this topic of wealth across this video series is going to be more financial, and understanding your personal situation.
Now little story, always been a bit of a finance geek, but never really got into tracking and budgeting for myself. For some reason I always had a budget, but I never actually measured my actual against my budget. About 2 or 3 years ago I started doing that. OMG does it make a difference to truly understand your real position. This is the action I would suggest for you, it is a bit of a bigger one, a little jump, but you can start with a micro decision to decide to do it. Then go off and set up this, some of the banks are even offering this now, a budgetary tracking device. I recommend Wave Apps or PocketSmith – are 2 websites that will hook into your bank system and they actually self categorise a lot of stuff, and you can re-categorise things, and you can actually understand “what am I spending on groceries” “what am I spending on entertainment” “what am I spending on coffee every week” “what am I spending, etc, etc”
It is one of the main reasons I use a credit card or a debit card to pay for almost everything, because it is so easy to track this stuff down. So the action for today is – do what I did and start tracking where you are spending money. Figure it out, understand where every single cent or yours is going. You pull cash out of the bank, put it down to something – when you see that on the line on the statement – okay when I pull cash out of the bank it is for groceries as I go the market OR for drinks at the pub cause I often will go there.
That is all for this video, I hope you get a lot from this, and I will see you in the next one.
Recommendations:
- Wave Apps – great free book keeping/ categorising software that you can use for your personal life too. Highly recommend it, free and good support. Can run multiple businesses from it, or even a single person keeping an eye on where all that money went 😉
- Pocketsmith – a subscription service that does the same job, has a lot more bells and whistles that are good if you like the pictures/ graphs and the like – more powerful auto categorisation engine.
- You Bank – often your bank will have this built in, if you only use one bank for everything, then this would work – I haven’t explored this due to running a business, it makes more sense for me to use the same app for everything.
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