Frugal Families

The easiest thing I have found, is just entering receipts into a simple excel-spreadsheet.  I have one heading for groceries/household, one for misc., gas, eating out, and a few others.

All I do is put down the date, the name of the store, and the amount.  then at the end of the month, it's very easy to create a total.

Myebay75, I track my expenses the same way except I list the food in one column and the household and pets in another column. I don't enter the store name, only for my misc spending.

I recently entered and categorized all my bank statements (I'm unemployed and have nothing better to do) for the past year and discover that we spend a huge amount of money monthly for gas and oil change supplies. It is really making me consider if living so far away from DH's job is a wise thing to do.

Since the economy has been so bad and we are not spring chickens (more like heffers in the fall) I have been really considering what changes we should make to ensure that our "golden years" really are golden. I don't want to eat dog food for dinner...... have you seen the price of gourmet dog food? My little sweetie likes the Ceasars brand but only gets it once in a full moon. I don't want to fight him for it in the future and the price of tuna is outrageous, so good thing I don't have a cat!!!

It is wise to think about the future with today's money. Once it's gone, it's gone.

dh bought a NEAT receipt scanner thing at Sam's Club for $100 or so and basically I just send the receipts thru the scanner and it stores a copy of the receipt and puts things in catorgies

this has been a blessing since dh wants to keep every receipt he ever gets so now the NEAT scanner program stores a copy of the receipt so the the paper one gets thrown away It also store business cards and a bunch of other things

Becky

When I was doing it manually I found a combo of a handwritten notebook so I could get things down quickly) and then entering into an excel spreadsheet worked the best, but I didn't always keep up with it. I finally gave up;-) and use mint.com. I still have to go in and split and re-categorize some things, but it saves a ton of time, I don't have to keep up with receipts unless it's something I want to split, and I really appreciate the quick analysis.

Of course it doesn't work as well if you use a lot of cash, but since we use a paid-off-every-month credit card for 99% of our spending (it could also track debit card use easily) it works very well for us.