Financial Freedom Quick Tip #31: Write ‘em down
If you’ve never done this before, a great way to stun yourself is to go obsessive and write down every cent you spend, for a whole month. Record every chocolate bar, every skinny latte, every pack of cigarettes or gum.
Most people are blown away by the results of this simple exercise. Try it – you may just find yourself gawking at the realization that you habitually spend a huge amount of money, month after month, on something totally insignificant.
If you’d like to record your expense using a computer, you can download and use Liberta’s Expense Tracker Spreadsheet.
People are not very good at doing mental accounting. We all try to do keep track of where and how much we spend in our minds, but our brains just aren’t wired to do the job properly. Writing things down puts them into perspective.
Another quick tip on the same subject
If you decide to do this exercise, then make a point to record your expenses every day.
Once you get behind 4 or 5 days, it becomes difficult to remember what you paid for lunch two days ago, the credit-card slips start peeling out of all your pockets, and eventually the whole business just becomes too much effort to catch up on.
Write ‘em down – and prepare to be surprised!
This tip is part of the Financial Freedom Quick Tips series. If you want to receive a notice every time a new quick tip is published, you can subscribe to Liberta.
September 26th, 2008 at 02:23 pm
this totally worked for us, especially while getting out of debt. we recorded every penny that we received (gift cards, cash from grandma, etc) and then recorded every penny spent. i wanted to see where any trouble spots were, like if were still spending too much on eating out
October 13th, 2008 at 10:44 am
[...] find the message conveyed in a recent tip of writing down expenses at liberta extremely important. for several months in the past i had kept obsessive records of [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 06:16 pm
[...] at liberta tells us to write down our expenses and be amazed at how much we’re spending, [...]