How to Track Your Expenses
1,253 views · Published 4 March 2016 · 2:39 · Indexed 1 November 2026
Channel: Utah State University Extension · 2016 · Howto & Style
Tracking your expenses can benefit you as you find where you can cut back, or spend more. ....... Hello it’s Amanda Christensen with Utah State University Extension, here with another quick financial tip. Today’s quick financial tip is all about tracking your expenses. Tracking your expenses really helps you get a clear financial picture of where your money is going every month. You won’t know what’s extra or leftover in your budget, or you won’t know how much you’re really spending on things like eating out, or entertainment until you do track your expenses for a period of time. To begin tracking your expenses, I recommend you start with one week. Just one week of documenting each time you spend your money, each time you use cash, or each time you swipe your card, whether it’s debit or credit, however you spend your money, record that. You could record that on a cell phone, there are financial apps you could find that help you do that, or even just in a voice memo or in the notes section of your cell phone, whatever works for you. You could also carry around a small pad of paper and a pencil or pen and do it old school, which might help you remember. Either way you choose, track those expenses for even starting out, just a week. It’s recommended that you really track for about a month or even longer, but if you’ve never done this before, it can be tedious, so I recommend starting with just a week’s worth of your expenses. My husband and I tried this recently. We tracked our expenses for about a month, and we found out we are spending a bit of our money every month eating out. And eating out is one of my absolute favorite things to do; going to dinner or lunch with girlfriends or friends. Good conversations, good food, and good company are one of the things that I love to spend my money on. We did decide however that we were spending a bit more money than we would like on eating out, so we were able to reallocate some of that money and put it in that money and put it in our 1% fund that we’re saving for a vacation later this summer. This is just one example of how tracking your expenses might help you reallocate some of the expenses in your budget. Today I’ve just shared a quick tip about how to use tracking your expenses to help you better reallocate the spending in your budget month to month. I hope this tip is helpful to you. Leave a comment and let me know if you’ve tracked your expenses and how that helped you. You can reach out to me on social media as well which you can find information about in the description box below. Thanks again for stopping by. I’m Amanda Christensen with Utah State University Extension. We’ll see you next time, bye. .............. Connect with USU Extension! Facebook - http://facebook.com/usuextension Twitter - http://twitter.com/usuextension Pinterest - http://pinterest.com/usuextension LinkedIn - http://linkedin.com/company/usuextension Google+ - https://plus.google.com/+usuextension
