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Comment by moises_silva | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this and overall I still want to engage in better financial tracking. However, the obvious flip side of the coin is that if I need several hours a month to keep proper track of the budget to save a few hundred more a month it might not be worth it, as I value more what I do with that time and not worry about a budget. The problem of course is that once I start tracking in detail I may find out we're wasting much more than that :(

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I'm on the same page as you. I want to make sure my wife and I are not overspending (still happens on occasion), but I also don't want to waste time on it.

So I have a simple metric: Is my money (cash + investments) increasing each week?

If it is, then once every ~6 months, I take a look at my family's spending and see if there is anything we would be happy getting rid of.

I allocate items by credit cards, eg. "meals out" on one credit card, "food" on another, "fuel" on another. That's only 3 lines on a spreadsheet showing the budget.

If at the end of the month, the spend on each card is higher than those figures I've failed.

With modern apps for card balances, seeing if you're near your budget helps.

The alternative is to get money physically out of the bank and put it into separate envelopes and spend out of the envelopes. You'll be amazed at how your spending habits change when you have to physically hand over cash.

If you are finding that looking down a list of 50 purchases at the end of the month "takes up too much time", I would wonder how much time you spend watching TV and compare the time values. One is surely more important than the other.

Takes me about 20 minutes once a month to compare my bank's monthly PDF with my own records, and update anything I missed. One reason not mentioned so far is to identify payments I don't recognize, just in case someone got access to my account or a monthly charge suddenly tripled.

So far nothing big (some things on Amazon change price by a few dollars up or down after putting in the order), but I always wince a little when I see someone not bothering at all.

Not sure if we're talking about the same thing. I do look (more than once a month probably) to cc statements for unexpected charges. I do not keep track however of how much I spent on categories such as subscriptions, clothing, groceries, take in, dining out, toys and then trying to come up with a budget for each and stick to it. That's more work than 20 min a month.

You probably only need a few months of data to make conclusions.

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