Spending Scrutiny

Something I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time now is tracking every penny I spend.

I already use a program to track my banking transactions (Moneydance for Mac), and have done for years, but I can be a bit non-specific about spending, for example, listing hundreds of pounds worth of “cash withdrawals” over the course of a year. I have no idea where all that cash goes.

And my categories have fallen into habit rather than specificity – I tend to put a lot of things under “child costs:other” and “groceries” simply because I can’t be bothered to tailor the categories now I’ve been using it in a particular way for so long.


I’m going to start afresh tomorrow, and record every single penny. Daily.

Every. Single. Penny.

This will help with the goals of paying off my credit card debt and in saving for when babe no.3 arrives. It will also help us in the long run, as DH and I agreed the other day that we are almost certainly going to start feeling the squeeze in our current house once babe no.3 is running around as a toddler. I know this is a couple of years down the line, but during at least one of those years I will be bringing in hardly anything and we are already unsure how exactly we would ever be able to afford to buy something bigger than we already own.

I need a revised selection of categories, and I need to add a cash account that records literally the cash in my purse.

Lots to do.

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