Posted by Kromey at 6:33pm Oct 13 '09(or so I'm told at least) is to track your spending for a few months, just to see where it's all going. Categorize each expenditure so that you can see what buckets you have now and how big they are. As you do this, you'll become more aware of your finances and will just naturally start to trim some of the unnecessary expenses.
Once you have a decent understanding of where your money is going, sit down and figure out if that's where you want it to go. (For the purposes of this exercise, "need" is considered "absolutely positively want".) For example, you may have your Rent bucket, your Utilities buckets, Groceries/Food, Entertainment, and Misc. buckets. Then, you analyze those buckets: Maybe you notice that your Groceries/Food bucket is too big due to eating out too much, so you start eating in more which leads to savings. Maybe you notice that you're spending too much of your paychecks on entertainment, and you decide to impose some limits on yourself, which leads to savings.
This is the kind of track I want to get on, which is why I started the thread asking about personal finance software. So far, I'm liking Quicken Online, which is free and can automatically pull in all my bank and credit accounts. The only gripe I have so far is that the "goals" are strictly single-category goals, meaning I can't combine Dining (i.e. eating out) and Groceries without categorizing both as Dining & Groceries, which means I lose the ability to zero-in and see that e.g. 70% is going into eating out.
Once you have a decent understanding of where your money is going, sit down and figure out if that's where you want it to go. (For the purposes of this exercise, "need" is considered "absolutely positively want".) For example, you may have your Rent bucket, your Utilities buckets, Groceries/Food, Entertainment, and Misc. buckets. Then, you analyze those buckets: Maybe you notice that your Groceries/Food bucket is too big due to eating out too much, so you start eating in more which leads to savings. Maybe you notice that you're spending too much of your paychecks on entertainment, and you decide to impose some limits on yourself, which leads to savings.
This is the kind of track I want to get on, which is why I started the thread asking about personal finance software. So far, I'm liking Quicken Online, which is free and can automatically pull in all my bank and credit accounts. The only gripe I have so far is that the "goals" are strictly single-category goals, meaning I can't combine Dining (i.e. eating out) and Groceries without categorizing both as Dining & Groceries, which means I lose the ability to zero-in and see that e.g. 70% is going into eating out.
Best way to get started - Kromey