Ivy says:
I have been using online banking to help me with my budgeting for years now. My bank now offers something called “My Portfolio” where I can see how much money I have been spending in certain categories. I know I could do this in Quicken or MS Money, but I’ve been remiss and haven’t. Conveniently, my bank auto-sorts things and all you have to do is go through and make sure anything hasn’t been mis-categorized.
So, I set up “My Portfolio” and found that I have been spending WAY too much money on going out to eat. Way. Too. Much. This is a good thing to know, however. I’ve been wondering why I’ve been so broke lately- now I know!
Once you know where you are spending too much money, it is easy to make cutbacks in that area. This is why it’s so important to track where all your money is going. I used to be meticulous about that, but haven’t, ever since we started making more money. The old axiom of “the more you make, the more you spend” is true, if you stop paying attention to where every dime goes because you have more dimes.
So, the lesson today, kids, is pay attention to where your money goes, whether you use your bank’s online budgeter, or another program, or if you’re old school and budget on paper. It will save you tons in the long run, and you don’t have to be one of the “more you make, the more you spend” people.
We use Quicken for our personal finances and it helps greatly to be able to see what you spend “too much” on…we even have a booze and luxuries category, oh yes we do. 😉
Any way, I love love to eat out but it does add up. I am trying to only eat out for lunch once a week. That way it’s more of a “treat.”
We used MS Money for awhile to see where our money was going and realized we were spending at least $150 a month on eating out! Yikes! It helped us so much to see exactly what we were spending on unnecessary things.
I was going to use MS Money, but it said something about downloading things to my computer and all that mumbo jumbo. I’m concerned about them having access to my statements. Is anyone else concerned about this? I’ve been wanting to get this started for the past 2 weeks because I think we could have a lot more money left over every month if we had a budget and knew where the money was going.