How to Track Your Expenses

Do you find keeping track of your expenses challenging? If yes, you are not alone.

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Financial stability is the ultimate goal of any individual, couple, or family. Tracking your expenses is an excellent way to determine where your money goes, how you spend it, and what problems you experience every month. 

It enables you to understand the reasons you are in debt, why and how you got there, and develop a strategy to overcome financial challenges. Here are a few ways to track your expenses. Read on! 

Identify Spending Habits 

Most people fail to realize how much money they spend every month. However, when they document everything daily, weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly, they can streamline their finances by identifying their spending habits. 

In addition, you will come to know how small purchases prevent you from saving money. So, tracking your expenses can help you optimize your finances before you experience complications, including hefty debts. We recommend:

• Avoid lying to yourself and keep tracking your expenses 

• Always create specific, measurable, and realistic goals 

• Allocation what you can without losing focus on your goals 

• Create a reasonable budget and stick to it 

• Track your expenses every week, bi-monthly, or monthly 

• Make yourself accountable by sharing your financial information with your husband/wife 

• Seek out engagement and support and use your budget to achieve your goals, such as buying a house, saving for retirement, or paying for your son’s college

• Adjust the projected costs or categories after reaching a goal and create new objectives from time to time 

Analyze Your Transactions 

Noting down your transactions is an excellent and reliable way to track your finances/expenses. You don’t need to spend money on an expensive smartphone app or buy accounting software. You can use a regular notebook or pen and paper to write your transactions. 

You can use free software like Microsoft Excel to analyze specific ledges and monthly expenses. Remember, not all transactions are the same. So, it would help if you categorized them to streamline the process. For instance, these categories may include:

• Monthly bills 

• Shopping expenses 

• Groceries 

• Credit card debt repayment 

• Loans 

• Mortgage 

• Car insurance

• Etc. 

Activate Bank Notifications and SMS

Activating your bank notifications or SMS is an excellent way to track your expenses. For example, you are in a shopping mall to buy clothes for Christmas, and you pay via debit card. In that case, you may lose track of your expenses if you haven’t activated bank SMS. 

So, this is a reliable way to track your expenses in real time. Not only does this help you have a record of your transactions, but you can also analyze the historical data and generate insights to make informed decisions in the future. 

Although your bank may charge you a few dollars for SMS alerts, subscribing to this feature/service is essential to tracking your transactions 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Finally, it helps you keep track of your ATM, POS, and in-branch transactions.