A few days ago I picked up the book Pocket Your Dollars by Carrie Rocha. Its about dealing with the attitudes behind saving money. It was a really quick read and kind of opened my eyes to a few things.
First – she kept talking about “leaks” in her budget.
I struggle with having a budget. I know that if I did create a budget, I’d probably be able to pay my debt off so much faster, but alas… I just haven’t found a budget strategy that works very well for me (any advice?)
For the rest of the year, I’m going to be keeping track of where my money goes. In Pocket Your Dollars, Carrie mentioned how when people want to lose weight they often have to write down every single thing they eat. It forces them to be really honest with themselves. It also takes away the justification of the spending, because it’s just the number and category you’re looking at, not the story or the feeling or the emotion.
And I’m going to be real here and post what I find out about where my money goes from today – December 31st. Probably a lot of it goes to coffee, just being real.
What about you – where does the bulk of your money go? Do you spend it or save it, are you an impulsive or emotional shopper, or are you fairly disciplined in how you spend your money? I dare you to take note of it for the next week or two and let me know what you discover!
I saw that you marked that book as read on Goodreads and decided I definitely want to read it!
i finished it! i’ll give it to you the next time we hang out 🙂
I totally struggled with this too until I got YNAB software. I’m not being paid to promote them I just LOVE them! It really helped to visually see where my money went
what is YNAB? i feel like maybe you’ve told me before but i forgot haha.
It’s a budget + virtual “envelopes” a la Dave Ramsey style. Totally changed my life!!! They have a 35 day free trial
i’m sure most of mine is wasted on coffee too….. but it’s SO GOOD! help me break the addiction!!
we should totally figure out a way to combat this. have you tried doing a cash only for coffee stuff??
lol believe it or not… i did! until my bank decided to only be open certain hours and i can’t ever make it there to get cash out!!!! BUT i may be switching banks soon so i should go back to the cash thing!! i knew you’d help lol
Budgets are SOOO difficult! (Which is why Devin and I merely track our “fun money” and live by the highly nuanced and very complex motto of DONT SPEND MONEY…) If you find a system that works, let me know 🙂
i actually really love your fun money idea! do you only spend that fun money and then allocate the other stuff elsewhere?
By “other stuff” I’m assuming you mean other things we have to spend money on…and we don’t really keep track XP we just pay the bills, try not to eat out, and if we have something we want we record it under the fun money category. 😛
Girlfriend yes, I struggle with remembering where all of our money goes, so I made a master excel sheet with all of our expenses and the budget and it has helped tremendously. We’re saving more than I thought we would. Although one thing I know our money is wasted on is coffeee….bad I know.
liz @ sundays with sophie
high five for using excel to track your money/budget! 🙂
i do everything in excel!
i can’t figure out how to use excel hahah
i’m bad with the coffee spending, too!!
maybe i need to get on the excel train. my problem is that i don’t have a LOT of bills/expenses, so i always feel like i have way more money than i actually do, and i’m careless with it and then i’m like… what the crap, where is my money?
you know what helped us too? we started dating 20% of our paychecks and putting that into savings and that makes us think we have less money to start with.
Coffee. For sure. And eating out I think. I kind of work on a budget too (but you already know that) 🙂
whole 30 will help with the eating out thing, but your grocery bill will freaking skyrocket!!!!! so it’ll balance out.
i wonder if it’s worth it to buy an espresso/milk foamer and make your own espresso drinks? because brewed coffee with creamer doesn’t always cut it. thoughts?
Stephanie I love your budget posts. I’ve always shared my clothing spending with budgeting bloggers every month and just recently started sharing our trip budgets. You’ve inspired me to share more of our budgeting process bc we do track everything and know exactly where our money goes. I could tell you exactly how much I spent on toilet paper 2 years ago. Ha! My Husband is in finance so that doesn’t hurt us. Btw I am 100% an impulse shopper so I know it can be hard
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