Publishing My Expenses
July 2nd, 2009 No Comments » | POSTED BY ROB
I’ve decided that if it’s good enough for politicians and for BBC executives, then for the sake of transparency, I too should start publishing my expenses.
Why am I doing this? Well, for a start, it’s to help me keep an eye on where all my money is going. If I’ve got to publish my expenses, then I’ll have to keep track of every single penny that I spend.
Publishing my expenses will also prove to my wife see where all my money is going.
Now, don’t get me wrong, we don’t have a trust problem here (unlike politicians and their constituents, and the BBC fat cats and us licence fee payers). But for a while we’ve failed to save any money (blame the wedding?!), and given our incomings and outgoings, we feel we should have some left over at the end of each month to put aside for a rainy day.
So it’s the old problem – we need to know where our money is going before we can do anything about it. I’ll be using Expensr religiously once again to track my spending, and I’m already trying to have No Spend Day’s (NSDs) as often as possible.
Talking of which, I’m pretty strict when it comes to NSDs, as I count not only money spent from out of my pocket, but also if any Direct Debits go out of my current account, that’s spending and so that day isn’t a No Spend Day. Whether you choose the hardcore measure of an NSD like me, or the simpler method, it’s a good little test and target to get your spending down.
One of the nice things about Expensr is the graphs which it produces, which I can plonk in front of the wife at the end of the month to show where all the money’s gone:
It also allows me to drill down further into the individual items making up each category. Hopefully after a month or two of doing this we can identify where all the leaks are and do something about it.
