Over at My Two Dollars last week David wrote a post arguing against what he called “Watching Every Last Penny Syndrome.” Since I track every penny I spend and earn I have to disagree with that post. This is something I started doing after reading “Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence” and I’ve found it very helpful and pretty easy to do. Apparently Trent at The Simple Dollar keeps track of every penny too.
That being said I don’t budget every penny. I just keep track of what I spend and when my spending gets out of line in a certain category I adjust my spending accordingly. Stephanie at Poorer than You uses a similar system and Nick at Punny Money has his own variation of the system. This system works well for me but it won’t work for everybody. You need to determine what kind of budgeting system works best for you.
I track my money down to the penny too so I will have to read that post to see what he says. I agree with you in that there is nothing wrong with ‘tracking’ your money, even if you don’t budget every cent.
I track every penny so that I can see at the end of the month where I really wasted money and then find ways to cut down on that so I can snowflake that money to my debts.
Tracking my spending keeps me more accountable, since I post my finances on my blog and then when I see that I spent say $50 on pizza for the month I can take a step back and say ‘hey! what am I doing here?’ and take steps to fix the problem.
It looks like we use the same system. It works for me.