Tracking Spending & Grocery Budgets
I have started tracking my daily spending using the Simple Savings Diary. It’s a feature of the site offered to paid members that I only discovered recently.
While it doesn’t offer me quite as much detail as my old tracking system did, I’m finding it a simple way of keeping some kind of record. I get sent an email reminder each day as well which helps prompt me to keep it up to date. It’s so much simpler to enter figures if you’re doing it on a daily basis rather than allowing them to accumulate.
The other thing I like about it is that it has a section where you can make some reflections on the days spending and consider what the next day will bring. This is something that I’ve never really done in the past. I’ve budgetted and tracked but not necessarily reflected a lot on my spending habits.
It’ll be interesting to see if this has an impact after a while (and whether or not I stick with this system). It’s working well for me at the moment though.
Grocery Budget Update
As a follow up from my recent musings regarding our grocery budget, I have made a decision on what I’m going to do. I was thinking weekly, but something Kate said in her comment reminded me that I’ve always based my figures on monthly in the past.
So I’ve decided to budget $600 per month which is around $138 per week (so pretty much a middle ground between $130 and $150) . I’m using cash as a way of tracking it so it’ll be interesting to see what we actually spend after a few months of not tracking at all.
If I feel up to it, I’ll start working on bringing it down from there but for now I’m trying to accept the fact that I haven’t got the energy to focus too heavily on minimising the grocery spending.
Similar Posts:
- Weekly Grocery Spending
- Grocery Challenge - End of February Update
- Grocery Budget Blues
- In Shock
- Time for a New Budget
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Not sure what I said but glad I could help….
I totally hear you on accepting that right now there are other more important focuses for your energy… I’ve just recently quit beating myself up over not using cloth nappies. I hate the expensive of disposables but I just wasn’t keeping up with the laundry and it was just all getting out of hand and really bothering me.. so I am working on letting it go…… let it gooooooooooooooooooo
I totally agree with Kate….dont beat yourself up over the spending….. you need to rest up before the big holiday and like I said before, its been a huge time for you recently… so if you need to take a break from blogging, do so… we will miss you of course!
L
I didn’t really track my spending in the past until last month (when I took part in the month long spending tracking challenge run by Mrs Micah). I realise now just how useful it is to know exactly where my money is going
I ended up going with just a simple spreadsheet on my computer (that way I knew I’d update it regularly), but I can see how the Simple Savings method has some advantages. In the end it doesn’t matter how you do it, just as long as you do it 
(I like the idea of the reflection note - I might start doing that in the spreadsheet, since I can just add another column).
I’m sure you’ll get it back on track soon.
I have to start getting ours back on track again too