Track Your Spending

I just wrote a A Simple Guide to Financial Freedom based on my experiences with Financial Freedom. Consider giving it a read if you are interested in this topic.

I think a lot about money and how to spend it. Despite this I still struggle fighting my own consumer tendencies.

This is the lesson leaned after looking a bit more into my recent spending habits.

As part of my HomeLab experiment I’m trying out different open source self-hosted apps (quite interesting journey actually, but that is for another post).

A few days ago I tested some expense tracking/budget applications. I have wanted to get back into tracking my expenses a bit more carefully for a while but my own hand-rolled solution was too cumbersome to use.

The result?

My expenses in September were so high that I had to check and recheck a few times to make sure the numbers were correct.

Yikes.

Now, I did travel in September so I knew I had spent more than usual. But the spending wasn’t just travel. Over time small subscriptions and other bad habits have started to form. And they are burning through cash at an alarming rate.

I’ve been working/thinking/writing about my Financial Freedom project for almost four years now. I though I knew what I was doing. Clearly not.

Which means I’m back to tracking my expenses.

And I think you should be too.