DH says everybody keeps track of their finances by logging receipts

[shewhowines]

After another long night of DH huffing and puffing "doing the finances", we had the age old discussion of him saying he needs to, because that is the only way and most people do it like that (his mum does), and me saying 90% of people don't do it his way.

He makes me keep every receipt and he logs every single item we buy, on a complicated spreadsheet. He uses this to forecast our expenses so that he can transfer money if necessary. Can I just add, he is not controlling as to what I spend. It's just if I spend it, or get money out, I must keep the receipt. The system obviously works, but it is sooo time consuming. I wouldn't mind, but then I have to put up with him moaning.

I say that most people work retrospectively. They scan through their credit card bill to make sure there are no errors, and correlate this with their bank statement. Money can be transferred if necessary, at that point.

I am right aren't I? Nobody keeps their receipts and meticulously logs every bloody transaction.

We don't "log receipts" or balance chequebooks, or any if that stuff.

I manage the finances in our house. I don't see the point of permanently meticulously tracking every single transaction, complete waste of time IMHO. What does he do with the information generated?

It can be a useful exercise for a few weeks if you are in debt and need to set up a budget, or if you should have enough money, but never seem to, as it might help you work out where all the money is going and how regular spending on little things add up.

We're lucky that our incomings exceed our outgoings but DP is self employed and his income is very unpredictable and uneven over the year. It can also take weeks or months even to be paid for work done.

All our income goes into a joint account and the regular bills go out. We also get a lump of cash each in a separate account to spend as we like. This is not accounted for at all.

We try not to touch the joint account for day to day spending and use cashback credit cards instead, which are always paid back in full every month. I generally leave a bit spare to cover Aldi shopping or unexpected DDs.

I use a bank account tracker (AceMoney) merely as a cash flow tracker, to ensure that there is enough money in the account to cover the next months DDs - I manually adjust the amount on my pay day so that it is correct, depending on how much the credit card bills are, but I don't enter every single transaction, it only enters the recurring bills automatically.

I am currently considering ditching this and moving to a simple spreadsheet, but one thing I am a bit anal about is avoiding bank charges as they are a complete waste of money and I want to preserve our good credit record as we might want to borrow money for a house extension one day.

With DPs earnings we save a lot of it for his tax and annual expenses such as holidays, and also just general savings, partly because the interest rate on our mortgage is very low (less than 1%) and I am aware that it might go back up again one day and also bills/food etc are increasing much faster than my static income (although DP has just got a long term contract, which is a big positive). The rest just tops up the current account.

Seems odd to me.

I get the checking of cc & bank statements.

But I don't exactly see how what you have spent will necessarily be a predictor of what you will spend.

Unless you really are creatures of habit!

So I said rather a lot, but I forgot to say that with receipts we keep receipts for 'big' items, where we might need to claim on a guarantee in a shoebox that contains the receipt for every electrical item etc we have bought in the last 20 years. Is a big nightmare finding the correct receipt when needed.

I log into our internet banking once or twice a week to check for suspicious transactions and make sure we're not threatening credit limits (we both have an Aquacard which gives 3% cashback on all spending but the credit limits are quite low so normal spending sometimes gets close to this especially just before the bill is due to be paid).

Oddly, even though I look after the finances and DP general ignores them, he is quite anal about completing cheque stubs and always comments that this is the one thing I do not do . However, I think for the last 5 or 10 years we have used about one cheque per year or less each.

Well, when I gave up work a million years ago and the dc were tiny or even still one dc, I used to put all the receipts in a little box in the kitchen and note the cost on a sheet of paper in the box and at the end of the month dh used to write me a cheque for what I had spent.

Seemed entirely reasonable to me and he never ever questioned anything I had spent --possibly because I'm the last of the big spenders .

Never had a row about money or been short of money here. My DH keeps a little notebook and writes down everything he spends from a packet of gum or a coffee to business expenses and the occasional bigger expense like a car or a house about which he will not necessarily consult.

I couldn't care less what other people think and for those saying get a better job so you don't have to do this have no idea really, it takes a couple of hours a month whilst I am sat watching tv to sort out the money. It means we can afford to do more than most and also save more as we are aware of what we have coming in and out. We are both higher earners I suppose so wouldn't go out and get a higher paid job.

I would draw the line at logging receipts, I copy it from the online statements into the spreadsheet and the rest is done using formulae so most of it is automatic.

My dh does this - we keep receipts, write down what we spend, splitting it between the different bits of the budget (food, allowances, clothing, car etc), and he has used this to enable us to save the money we need to pay our share of the boys' maintenance costs at university, and to ensure we will be able to carry on affording this.

If your dh is happy to do this, and all you have to do is save the receipts, I cannot see it is a bad thing.

of course what you spend helps you predict what you may spend in the future, how do you think accountants of multi million pound companies produce financial forecasts.

On a small scale, I know based on my last 12 months spend on food what my average monthly spend will roughly be, obviously more at times such as xmas so I budget more for then.

I have never done this but do look through credit card bills and bank statements etc. Sounds like a faff.

I just download our bank statements into a spreadsheet and tot everything up. I used to tick off receipts but now I don't have time. I check anything that looks odd with Mrs Toad, and I'm pretty sure I've never been fleeced.

Just before the start of each pay period, I run up a budget listing forthcoming expenses and allocating an amount for savings. This, not keeping receipts, is what keeps our costs down.

I do balance the accounts though, ie, reconcile income and expenses to the sum of our account balances.

I have quite a few different accounts which are used for different things - car related money (insurance/tax/servicing), holiday and travel funds so by tracking the spending, I can see how much I can either dump into the holiday fund as next years is a fair bit or how much is freed up for days out/ meals out / treats for DTs.

Logging receipts for a week or a month is not a bad idea to get a really good idea of your spending patterns, where money can be saved, what is being frittered etc but it's not at all necessary all the time.

It is a good idea to have a list of all direct debits and other necessary spending so you have an idea of how much budget you have each week for non-essentials.

I find my bank statements will generally be sufficient for that, although I sometimes keep supermarket receipts to separate out food items from household supplies and luxuries like wine which we can never afford these days

I periodically (about weekly) go into our online joint account, note down the status quo and subtract all the other outgoings (incl regular savings) that are due before the end of the month, and divide what's left by the number of days left in the month to see how much we have over (as an average per day) for shopping, ad hoc savings etc. That gives me a very good idea of whether (say) I can afford an organic veg delivery or whether we'd better go to Aldi instead. We have a cast-iron rule that we Do Not Go Overdrawn, and we've never broken it yet, although very, very occasionally we have to transfer a small amount from our accessible savings account (we also have long-term savings accounts for us and the dc that we never touch). Likewise, we pay our credit card bill off by direct debit every month - it's usually not that big. We are fairly comfortable atm but we kept this system going when things were a lot tighter, which was not that long ago.

No, I don't do that, but I make almost no cash purchases. (I have a budgeted amount for "cash" and that is just assumed to be spent.) I have a set amount for bills - gas, groceries etc and savings and they're all paid out automatically every month. Then the remainder is first allocated to forseeable expenses - birthdays, travel costs etc, then the rest is what I have to dispose of. It comes out roughly the same each month so I have a credit card set to that limit and we spend on that, up to its limit, and pay it off at the end of each month. I do take out a small proportion in cash (like, £10/w), as said, and the rest is available for whatever we want or need. DH does not use cash at all, so pretty much everything is clearly listed on our bank accounts and card statements. It's not necessary to duplicate.

For the business I make no cash purchases so literally everything goes through the business account and then I just import the data into our accounts. Takes like 5 mins a month, tops.

I didn't used to do this, and lived way beyond my means. I've started logging everything - it has been enlightening!

The easiest thing to do is to use cash as little as possible. If you pay for everything by debit card, it will be itemised on your bank statement, which you should be able to either download or cut and paste from your online account.
Keep pasting each new statement below the existing. You will soon have several months worth of income and expenses. It's easy to then sort the information in any way you want.

We scan receipts for large items, it makes it easier to find them again. It's come in useful when something has gone wrong. Even when something is out of warranty at least we have a record for a potential insurance. Being very anal we also take a photo of said item as further proof. We've had our shed broken into before!

To te even more anal we put a copy of the entire file onto cloud storage, just in case our disk gets stolen or destroyed

I use YNAB. It's really easy, we can both update it from our phones and it's helping us keep our heads above water.

We have a spending account each so those don't need to be tracked. And all grocery shopping is through another account. So all I track is the outflows to those accounts each month, which cuts down on the amount of transactions to monitor.

It's the first time I've found software easy enough to stick with :)

Fab way of seeing where your money goes but no, I don't know anyone who does this. I spend online a lot so it would be impossible to track

Are you married to Adrian mole?

I don't know anyone who does this- it sounds exhausting!
We have a 'loose' monthly budget, e.g £-400 for food, £x mortgage, £x spends, etc. For anything bought which isn't household, the receipt is stuffed in an envelope and kept till bank statement appears, checked off, then binned.

Tell your DH to look at Home Accountz. It's software for your laptop, and there's an integrated phone app too. I keep track of all our savings/investments and our monthly spending on it. (though I am a few months behind at the moment!)

I do it retrospectively, but you could use it to do it ahead as well - it has an inbuilt budget/forecasting feature and you can produce any number of customised reports. You can set up regular transactions for anything that's a regular payment, so you don't have to manually enter it every time. I bet your DH would love it!

We have quite a complicated financial set up, and I would not feel like I had any sort of handle on it without this. It is rather satisfying to look and at a glance see exactly what you own/owe and what your spending pattern is. It lets me see where it is worth trying to save money and where it isn't (start with the biggest spend items, basically).

We pay for everything by credit card so our statement shows what we've spent it on.