Manage Rising Prices with a Monthly Spending Tracker
Inflation affects us all, driving up costs and complicating our finances. Discover how a monthly spending tracker can simplify managing expenses and help you take control of your budget in the face of rising prices.
Every one of us has felt the effects of inflation in our homes and bank accounts. It’s relentless, and nothing seems unaffected. Even my favorite local honey went up a random $2 a jar. Why? Did the bees demand raises? Was it the tablespoon of gas needed to drive the honey down their driveway to the farm stand? We’re all caught in a spiraling domino-effect of rising prices. While frustrating, it’s not a problem that is solved quickly. So what can we do about it today?
If one thing is clear, we love to overcomplicate simple things. Who needs those old-fashioned light switches when you can install “smart” lights that are button controlled and randomly blast you awake at 2am with a shot of the brightest photons known to man straight through your eyelids? Or maybe a “smart” transmission in your trusty station wagon that attempts to learn how you drive in the name of efficiency, but ends up preventing you from speeding up in order to successfully merge onto the highway? All of these delightfully masochistic products cost much more than the sticker price, but that’s not why I brought them up.
In the spirit of overcomplicating, we often apply the same contortionist reasoning to our finances. Buying a latte, eating out, a 10pm online purchase; none of them seem like much money at the time. It’s only when you add them all up that you realize how much it’s all actually costing you. Trouble is, most of us never take the time to keep track of all those “little” purchases we continually make.
It comes down to a very simple equation: Money in > Money out. At least it would be simple, if we saw our numbers right in front of us that clearly. It can feel like a daunting task to account for every dollar you earn and spend, and so it never happens. It’s the same with diet. We all know what to do, we just don’t do it. Or saying “Irish wristwatch” really fast.
The first time we went through our bank and credit card statement to figure out how we truly spent our money, it was a long, manual task. The only reason we continued to do it was because of how valuable that information was to our lives and our bottom line. We instantly learned exactly what we were doing wrong, the numbers didn’t lie. We were frivolously spending the equivalent of a private school tuition each month. Once you see it in black and white, change can happen overnight.
Crunching the numbers by hand got old pretty quick, so I created a digital monthly/yearly spending tracker that automatically calculated everything for me. The opposite of overcomplicated, it makes tracking easy so I have no excuse not to do it.
When you start regularly tracking and managing your monthly income vs expenditures, and your finances gain more breathing room, you might daydream that your kids will notice and be instantly curious and beg you to explain in great detail what you’re doing and why. In reality, they’ll only come over to ask if they can have that $50 toy, and when you say no, then they’ll read over your shoulder and ask “What’s a budget?” Then their sponge-like brains will absorb everything you say and they will become financial geniuses and live happily ever after! Right? Well, we can hope.
