Spreadsheet

So, after years of keeping a haphazard composition notebook where I tracked expenses, I have decided to keep a spreadsheet of our expenses.

I've been working on this for the past week.  As of right now, it looks a lot like our composition notebook, and I've got much of the same details in the spreadsheet that I had in the composition book.

Here is a quick glance at some parts of my spreadsheet as it stands right now:

 This is the expenses portion of the spreadsheet.  I have listed the bills, in order down the side of the page.  The November expenses will go in this column.  We do have dairy delivered to our door weekly- hence the separate listings for milk by week.  Each week will be added in as a separate column.

But then, we get to the groceries column.  How do I do this?  I end up at the grocery store every few days.  Years ago, I used to go to the store once a month.  It's been a while since I've done that.  So, I have a column to track just the expenses by date.

That leads me to this:  one giant column of nothing but the grocery expenses by date and by the amount.  I will keep a running total as the month goes on, and hopefully, I'll be a little bit better able to track where the money is going out.

I've added a separate table just for our mortgage.  If you remember,  one of my goals this year was to get out of debt.  That included paying off our mortgage.  While we won't get the mortgage paid off this year- or next - I really enjoy watching the bottom line on the mortgage sink.  So, I've created a table with the balance, and deductions for the payments that we make.  (We pay our mortgage twice a month, on each of husbands' paydays.)


Finally, I am working on setting up the budget for our Christmas presents.  I have the initial table set up.  I'm still working out how much I am going to spend.  Those are some numbers that I really do need to run before I set up the budget - especially considering that I still will have some tuition and books that I will have to pay for come January!

I am beginning to work on the spreadsheet for tuition and books for each one of the kids.  I've got to figure out how to budget that and how much money I need to be setting aside in advance.  Again, I'm going to have to play a numbers game.  Time to drag out the calculator!

How do you keep track of your monthly expenses?