Track all expenses for a month.

“I ran a simple experiment this past month where I tracked every single expense, especially the small, forgettable ones ($2–$10 range). What surprised me wasn’t the total (which added up), but how it changed my behavior in real time. After about a week, I started naturally cutting back without forcing it, just because I knew I’d have to log it.”

“I track every dollar and have a system that takes just minutes a day and a few more at the end of the month. I use Quicken Desktop for transacation management. I set up all my categories (50+) in Quicken then link my CC and bank accounts to do automatic transaction downloads. Then each morning I do the download and categorize the few transactions that there normally are. It takes a couple minutes. Then I have a custom report by category that lists the transactions and category total amounts in categoy alphabetic order. You can set different date ranges like MTD, YTD, last month, etc. At the end of the month I print this report for the month. THen I have a spreadsheet with rows for categories and columns for months. I fill it out for the entire year with projections. At the end of each month I take the Quicken report and enter in the monthly category totals. The categories in the spreadsheet are in the same order as the report so entering them is really fast. Then I update all of the future months projections if needed for any reason. I track every dollar and spend less than an hour and a half a month to maintain it all and the information is always at my fingertips.”