How do you keep track of money throughout the month

[Jemster]

Hi
My dh and I are not great at finances and have just 'got by' month to month up until now.
He will keep an eye on things online but I am terrible at being organised when it comes to money. Thankfully most of our bills are set up and paid by dd. It's what's left over that I find hard to budget with.
I do have a spreadsheet on excel with all our finances on but I don't look at it nearly as often as I need to to manage things properly. I was wondering if anyone uses anything on an ipad or phone as these are so much quicker than waiting for our ancient laptop to fire up!

I would be very grateful for any tips on how you manage the money you have left after all bills are paid throughout the month. At the moment me & dh just both dip in to it whenever we fancy and often the last week before payday is a struggle.

I'm another one that has an excel spreadsheet and I tally mine every Sunday (just finished!) I have columns for current account, savings, cash, and joint cash/piggy banks.

As someone else said up thread, it's devastating when you realise how much money you casually fritter away... This week I have managed to get rid of £150 on god knows what - a little bit here a little bit there. It makes you realise what happens when you visit morrisons during the day etc.

Thanks Mum4Fergus I will take a look at that. Do people keep all their receipts and check them off against banking? I always seem to have receipts coming out of my ears but only keep them if I think I might need to return something.

I do think I need to look at me & dh having a bit of our own money each as this does cause problems. I'm never sure what should come out of that though eg should it include things for dc, clothes etc? When we go out as a family at weekends would we use our 'own' money or maybe we need another 'family' pot?

Sounds boring, but budgetting, budgetting, budgetting. Thats what I do, I budget (using YNAB) at the moment, but else using my own spredsheets.
I have a general budget and every month I copy paste that one in to a new month, add income and all known bills.
Then I add household money, pocket money for the family, OV cards money (bus,tram,train card company)ect.
When I started I used the first couple of month to readjust in according to our spend and now I roughly know what to add to each column.
Then I check every day our netbank and add every spend to their rightful column, so I can see how much we have spent and how much is left.
Yes I save every receipt, so does DP and gives them to me, so that I can track it. If I didnt do that, I would have a hole by the end of the month from money that we cant remember where gone.
I am currently pregnant with our first one, and she already have her own pocket money column so money we spent on her, goes to that column.
We also each have our own pocket money and we spent from their on own clothes, nights out ect.
What we spend as a family eg. dinners ect., comes out of household money, that column covers everything from groceries to dinners/movies ect.
We have different saving accounts, so we have one for holiday, one for house deposit (for buying own house) one for pension for each of us ect.
Hope it gives an idea :)

I think you should check out YNAB. You can have one budget but allocate yourselves each a category for personal spending. If you both have the iphone/android app on your phones then you can log transactions as you go and they'll sync with each other in real time - no need to worry about receipts then. Check category balances on your phone before spending and you can't go wrong, as long as OH commits to using it. It is £29.99 on Steam but does often come on sale - I paid full price (worth every penny) but some people have got it for as little as £7.50. I started mid-Feb. At the end of Jan I was £200 overdrawn in the bank and had £300ish on my credit card. Today I have £770 in the bank, nothing on the credit card and I get paid on Wednesday. This is 100% thanks to YNAB.

I do get the occasional surprise when DH has forgotten something biggish, but we both know roughly how much we have per week to spend (whatever left on payday after deducting all know payments due out then divide by 4.5 weeks) so checking it once a week is enough to keep tabs. When we were really strapped, I made sure we checked the receipts each day and deducted from the running total (then cross checked this at the end of the week to the online account). Now things are easier I just write them in the book as i check them off online each week. I have my books going back about 20 years! The days when my mortgage payment was £313 - now it's £1200!! And the scary times when interest rates were really high and you could see the mortgage payments going up every few months. Shudder.

I use a free Android app called expense manager. It syncs across my devices and I download it to a spreadsheet for my PC as well. I follow money in four accounts plus a 'cash' account and budget money in categories which I spread across the year. I put in all DDs and regular incomes manually so they're automatically updated every month, then manually enter every item spent (usually immediately after I've spent it, travelling home after shopping - that's why it's easier to use an app than a program/book that you can only enter at home). I find it really useful to keep track of DDs and income coming in at different times of the month, although I always have surplus in my main bank account so don't need the budgeting feature as such. I've always been good at following money I've spent in my head and never had the problem of suddenly finding myself in my overdraft, but it's good to have the exact dates as an easy reference.

My bank has an app where I could check my balance daily, but I've chosen not to install it as I'd be worried about security if it gets lost/stolen. I tend to check my banking daily on my PC which feels more secure, it's always the same balance on my expense manager app as I'm strict at logging every spend.

DH and I have our own personal spending accounts which means we never worry about whether the other person has taken money out/spent a bit more. But it's not strictly allocated, there is usually some in the main account where we can draw more money out if we needed (but actually hardly ever happens).

I get a text message from my bank every Monday morning detailing my balance and recent/upcoming transactions. I get paid weekly too, which helps enormously!

Oh, and I leave the portion of my weekly wage in the account to my direct debits etc, and then take out eg £100 to do the shopping and a bit of spending money. Anything left in the bank covers random purchases

We use You Need A Budget (YNAB), the initial cost and time to set it up has been well worth it! We got it cheaper in a Steam sale too.

We pay for as much as possible by card, which is supposedly a motal sin of budgeting but both DP and I find that it makes us look at what we're spending and where, which in turn helps us work out how to manage our money. It helps that we manually input each transaction into YNAB, you don't have to (can download the statement files) but it works for us.

Everything we spend with cash gets forgotten about and we can't work out where it's gone. Using a spending diary never worked well for either of us.

Yup, another YNAB user here. Revolutionised my spending habits. You can put your purchases into your iPhone/iPad and it syncs automatically to your PC/laptop via your Dropbox account. Easy peasy.

I am a bit old fashioned. I have all the bills on dd, dd's into three savings accounts, one for christmas, one for holiday, one for big bills (car insurance etc). I worked out what I would have left each month, split it weekly then draw out that much just before the weekly shop. Whatevers left after food is spending money for the rest of the week. When you feel your purse getting lighter boy do you question if you need to buy stuff.

It works for me.

My DH is the sole earner in our house & his wage goes in on the 24th of each month, a lump transfer across from that account into another current account on 26th of the month which covers all DD & then what we have left in the main current account is what we have to 'spend' that month.
We have an excel spreadsheet that lists every DD, how much they're for & what date they come out of the 'bills' account each month.
Underneath that on our spreadsheet we have a breakdown of the money that's in our savings account, i.e Christmas money, white goods save up, holiday money, food for the month money etc etc.
I transfer £350 on payday into our savings account & each time i do a food shop i just deduct off the 'Food' line & add it onto whichever credit card i put the shop on.

I don't understand how people are trying to save money & be frugal, but then i see them say they pay in cash for everything..credit cards earn you money back!!!
We pay for everything during the month on either our Tesco cc or American Express cc, just transfer the money from our current account to savings at the end of the day & add the amount onto the current total for the credit card line on the savings spreadsheet. Come statement date we have the amount there to clear the balance..does wonders for your credit too!

Jemster can i ask, is it worth perhaps thinking more along the line of if you have to 'justify' it, did you ever actually need it?
I know everyone's different but why do some people feel the need to give themselves a daily fixed amount to spend? Do you have to spend anything each & every day? Is it not possible to go a day without spending?
Would it not be better to try to change the way you think about money & spending, obvs your partner would have to be on the same wave length as you, to we just buy what we need when we need it & not have to have pocket money?

We do is what ive wrote above, then the money that's in our current account is what we know we've got left for the month. But we don't see it as we have all that to spend that month, we just buy what we need as & when.

I don't keep track at all. OH and I are frugal and only spend money when necessary.
Our earnings get paid into a joint account, direct debits are paid after pay day and I have to admit to hardly ever chscking the balance.
Every few months I skim off the excess from our current account and put it into our savings account.

The idea of having pocket money is dangerous- as it will just burn a hole in the pocket- having a fixed amount each would just encourage us to spend. We only buy what we need and discuss the rest.

deepinthewoods...that's exactly what i think & tried to convey in my essay lol. It's all in the head & thinking differently. You give yourself money to spend, you'll spend it. You buy what you need, not what you want. It's a way of life!

I use the expense reporting tool that keeps track of my every single expense and manage the same with respective trend to maximize the saving. The only thing I have to do is I will prepare a list of expenses which I have to figure out with. After that the all possible ways is being carried out by the tool to work out on that particular approaches. The software or apps which I have been using is from Replicon ( www.replicon.com/ ). Being introduced by one of my colleague. Its a quite intuitive tool to work with. Also the time and task management are the integral part of that tool.

I use an app called Toshl, which has a widget for quickly adding expenses. I tend to add the expense while I'm paying for it. You can tag things and see what you're spending where. You can add an income and each time you add an expense it calculates what you have left, which definitely curbs my spending. You could set up an account that both partners have access to so you could both add to it - if you can persuade your partner. Mine doesn't like technology, so we have separate accounts and a joint account for bills, so its easy for me to keep track of joint money as its pretty much the same debits each month.

I have a budget document, a savings doc, and a retirement doc. on laptop, which I update monthly.

From dh wage- all the direct debits go out at the beginning of the month, we also save a 3rd of dh wages every month mostly by dd ,
then pay off cc in full if there's anything on that.
We leave enough in for food, petrol, dcs stuff, and anything else we need/want,
then we take out a set amount of spending money to last the month(kids activities, drinks, meals, sport, cinema, shoes/clothes, days out etc).
We spend this quite freely as everything else is covered and you've got to enjoy life while you can.

there's always money left at the end of the month so we might do something or put more in the holiday account, as we feel we've saved enough and can put it toward a treat.
We aren't frugal, just try not to be wasteful.

I save most of my earnings, but I keep a float of around £200 (which I used to waste on (too many) clothes and other rubbish I didn't need, but I've stopped that now-so some months it just sits there)

we also have a separate account where the money from our rental house goes in- from that we pay insurance and any maintenance the rest goes into a savings account.

we save for future/retirement, holidays, Christmas/birthdays, house and car. dcs have savings too.

There are great software packages, online tools and apps now. But don't kid yourselves. If you have the motivation, ALL can be worked out on the back of an envelope. At most you need a calculator. My grandfather checked all of his bills this way, just to make sure the Utility Companies hadn't made a miskake!

foxdongle when you say you save for retirement is that in addition to your work pension? Just wondering if you're getting the tax relief you're entitled to?

Joint account, separate own accounts, and we also do multiple accounts for different purposes though a lot of people don't.

Our income goes into our own accounts. Child benefit goes into joint account.

Major budget spreadsheet is agreed by both of us and maintained at home as often as needed (we review it at least every six months, usually more often, as changes come up). It is recorded month by month and is forecast ahead up to a year depending on when we know changes are due.

I put a note on my phone (my current cheap Nokia will only let me do very short reminders, but I make it work) showing the balance left in my account, total spending still planned for the month, all the individual things that I know are either spent or going to be spent including cheques obviously, and then I adjust it almost every day - I usually phone my bank on the way in to work on the bus and edit the reminder to show how I'm doing. That way I can't get complacent when my pay goes in because I know that every penny is accounted for already!

As soon as my pay goes in to my account, standing orders go out to the joint account for household bills, holiday account, ds's savings account, car saver account, non-monthly spending account, and the contingency account. What's left in my account is for me to spend. The same for dh, we have an equal amount of spending money, but his income is much less, so his contribution to the joint account is small, and he pays into an ISA for a pension separately whereas mine is deducted from my pay. DH does the food shopping, so a weekly standing order from the joint account pays back into his account.

The non-monthly spending account covers ds's after school activities and clubs, school lunches, hair for all of us, clothes for me and ds, Christmas, all birthday presents and holiday childcare-type activities - it's quite substantial. Holiday account covers holidays including fuel costs to visit family. Contingency account we aim to build up towards 6 months slush fund against loss of job, but we haven't got there yet as we also use it to replace things that break.

Oh - my biggest budgeting tip is always to calculate your expenditure on 5-week months, so that you have a bit in hand on 4-week months. We had to stop doing this when we were more skint and calculating week by week moving money around to pay the bills, but if you can afford it, it makes life very relaxing as you always have a little elbow-room.