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Larry: “But I’m not willing to keep a spending journal because I deal with numbers all day, and the last thing I want to do at night is scrutinize my spending.”

That’s a quote from the April 2007 Redbook Money Makeover section, from one half of the featured couple. Their big issue was that they didn’t know where their money was going, so when I read that quote, it sounded like an excuse to me. I wonder, is there some OTHER reason why he doesn’t want to track his spending? Could a reason be that he just plain doesn’t want to scrutinize his spending period?

I know that tracking spending is probably THE most highly recommended step to getting your finances under control, and it was by FAR the most beneficial step for me. So why the resistance in general to tracking? I thought about my own recent lack of tracking: I bought some donuts the other day from the vending machine, and I didn’t write them down at the time. (Although I just did now!) Why didn’t I write them down? Because I already know that I’m spending more than I wanted to on food this month in general, and writing it down forces me to acknowledge two things: My desire to not spend so much on food is still being outweighed by my desire to eat the food, and I’m not yet eating as healthily as I’d like.

At any rate, I’m singing the virtues of tracking. It really only takes a few seconds each day, and maybe 15 minutes at the end of every month. You probably spend more time brushing your teeth in a month than you would tracking your spending. Here’s what I do: Whenever I buy something that doesn’t have a receipt, I note it in my planner. (I carry my planner with me everywhere anyway — it acts as my purse.) When I buy somethinig that does have a receipt, I stuff the receipt into my planner. I then enter them every couple of days into Quicken. Then at the end of every month, I run an “itemized categories report” in Quicken. Finally, I flip through my planner to find the few days with notations on them, and then enter everything into a spreadsheet. It may sound like a lot of work, but I promise it isn’t. And it’s eye-opening.

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