Tracking Your Spending sounds a lot like budgeting...
And people hate budgeting.
I think I get why.
Think about what budgeting must’ve been like in the ol’ days.. I would hate it too.
Looking at bank statements (or even CHECKBOOKS) then labeling and categorizing all of the transactions on excel, adding them up, and tracking trends over time???
No thank you.
Luckily we aren’t in that era.
Tracking your spending is dead simple with nearly any money app.
And once you track spending, it will actually help you spend more on what you love.
How? Let’s find out.
When you know where your money’s going, you can shape your spending around what matters most to you.
Sadly, most never get to that point.
When I talk to people about budgeting, the biggest hurdle is they “just don’t want to know how bad it is”
I get that argument, I really do.
But when you really dig into it, it’s a dumb argument (sorry 🙂).
Your money is still being spent.
Without tracking, you can’t see where it’s going.
And if you don’t see that, you lose the chance to spend it on what actually matters to you.
Ramit Sethi has a great philosophy on this: Spend extravagantly on what you love and cut ruthlessly in the areas you don’t.
For example, do you love shopping?
Look at all of your monthly spending that isn’t a need. Every single dollar separate from your needs, could be going to shopping if you wanted.
Do you see any spending areas that you don’t really care for? Maybe you can cut those a bit next month and increase your shopping budget.
Here’s how this exact exercise recently played out for me..
I like spending money on guitars. I had the same one for 15 years growing up, so now that we have income, I love the idea of buying new ones.
Over the last 6 months, work has been a bit ~insane~. So to save time, I started buying lunch at work.
It started with just a meal / week but quickly grew to all 3 weekdays I was in the office.
I knew it wasn’t cheap but at the time, I thought the convenience was worth it.
Last month, I did a check-in on my Copilot Money app.
MY GOODNESS I SPENT A LOT ON FOOD.
At the rate I was spending, I was going to buy a new guitar’s worth of work lunches by the end of 2025.
Could we “afford” to buy lunches? Sure.
Would I rather take that same amount of money into Fuller's Guitars here in Houston at the end of the year? YES.
I’m back to bringing my lunch.
What is your guitar shopping?
What is your work lunch?
Could some re-allocating help you? You won’t know until you start tracking.
This week: List out your non-essential spending.
Then go to each category and ask yourself, do I LOVE spending my money on this?
The answer will be yes for most of them, but I bet you find a few where the answer is “not really”.
Cut those.
Some categories to think about:
- Everyday
- Food
- Dinners Out
- Coffee Shops
- Food Delivery
- Buying Lunch at Work
- Social/Entertainment
- Hobbies
- Concerts
- Vacations
- Streaming
- Bars/Happy Hours
- Sports (Tickets, Fantasy Football Leagues)
- Personal
- Clothes
- Amazon Orders
- Gym Membership
Tracking Spending exposes “nice to have” areas and allows you to reallocate money towards things you “love to have”.
The best part about all of this is it’s fast.
It will take you minutes and you can do it on your phone.
When you connect to apps like Copilot, Monarch, YNAB, etc. they will make a retroactive budget for you showing you the last few months of your real spending.
Then it’s just a matter of deciding if anything needs to change.
Good luck and have fun!
