> 0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode.
Yes and no. Late last year I did track everything to the cent (well, to the grosz, the fractional part of Polish złoty) and used ledger (the CLI double-entry accounting tool) to analyze it. My main discovery there was that most of our spending was so thoroughly distributed across every category that there was no easy wins to be had. Pretty much the only things we could do that weren't serious lifestyle changes involved garbage-collecting some subscriptions and instituting monthly limits on $favourite-foodstuffs. But before doing a high-granurality trace of expenses, I was sure there were trivial cuts to be made. Turns out, they weren't.
Doing this level of tracking is probably not sustainable in the long run (unless you're in emergency mode), but doing that for couple of months is a great opportunity to reevaluate all spending in your life.
I and wife have been tracking our expenses (and income) to a penny for more than 10 years now. It's easy when you don't have a lot of cash expenses and have a habit of entering them every night you make them. Dealing with card and other electronic transactions is even easier. Convenient software also helps a lot. We use KMyMoney, but there are many good choices.
Yes and no. Late last year I did track everything to the cent (well, to the grosz, the fractional part of Polish złoty) and used ledger (the CLI double-entry accounting tool) to analyze it. My main discovery there was that most of our spending was so thoroughly distributed across every category that there was no easy wins to be had. Pretty much the only things we could do that weren't serious lifestyle changes involved garbage-collecting some subscriptions and instituting monthly limits on $favourite-foodstuffs. But before doing a high-granurality trace of expenses, I was sure there were trivial cuts to be made. Turns out, they weren't.
Doing this level of tracking is probably not sustainable in the long run (unless you're in emergency mode), but doing that for couple of months is a great opportunity to reevaluate all spending in your life.