Personal Finance Victory

[Joel W.]

Just wanted to share something that turned out to be very effective. Last month we moved to an all cash system for all household expenses. Although, we have saved a lot of money by being frugal and loosely budgeting our family finances I have grown sick of going over budget in certain areas. I simplified by breaking our family budget into 6 areas, and placed cash in a small accordion folder only what was budgeted for each area. Once we ran out of cash for something we stopped spending. It is amazing how aware my wife and I became about our spending.  After several months of going $50-$150 over our grocery budget every month for our family of 6 we finally met our budget goal. All in all it was fun, challenging, has built in discipline and accountability and we were able to meet our saving goal of 30% of our monthly W-2 pay.

[Account Closed]

Kind of an old post - sorry for the late comment bump!

My husband and I had a huge problem of saving -- every budget sheet that we create kind of just gets thrown out the window once we get to the middle of the month. Problem was we had so many bank accounts and credit cards (to maximize points) so it's so difficult to track how much we spent on what. He built a personal finances tracker app as a pet project for us (hellofin.app) and it sends me a text every time money goes in or out of our accounts, and we can add a tag to it (like "christmas gifts" rather than the generic bank terms "shopping"). It shows us how much we saved and spent every month and shows our net worth at one glance. 

I would recommend everyone to get some sort of system in place to clearly see your finances breakdown, whether it be excel, an app, maybe even good ol' fashioned pen and paper!