Where Do You Spend Your Money: Receipts

Tracking where you spend money is crucial to understanding your own finances. There are now a large number of great apps that categorize and analyze your spendings. I have downloaded them but I always ended up not using them. I don't know what it is but pressing the icon of the app in order to check how much and where I had spent my money was difficult for me. I mean, I don't even check my bank account everyday...(gotta fix this).

So in order to counter this problem, I am going back to the old school way. Receipts, a notebook, and a glue stick. I mean, I love arts and crafts so why not have fun gluing things on paper? I started yesterday and because I'm not used to it, I forgot to save my receipts from some places. In these cases, I decided to go back into my bank account and write those down (this will force me to check my bank account everyday).  There are some places that don't offer paper receipts and I am going to get a text receipt for these. I will be organizing my receipts at the end of the day every day and do a weekly and monthly summary. I am still debating where I will put these summaries, but it will most likely be saved onto my laptop as an excel spreadsheet. I will post pictures of my receipt book and the spreadsheet as I continue on!

Why am I doing this? What are the benefits of keeping track of your receipts at the end of the day?

First, it is going to help me realize how much I spend every day, every week, and every month. I still don't know how much I usually spend every month. If I check how much I spend every night, then the next day, I will be more conscious about how much I spend.

Second, this will help me to analyze where my spendings go to. This helps with decreasing the amount of money I spend on certain things. This will give me extra money!

Last, with extra money, I can start saving and investing (by the way, I don't have a savings account yet so I am going to research this)! At age 26 and after working for a while, I realized that I didn't want to spend my life working day after day at a job that I don't like. So investing would be something I need to start looking into. My goal at this time is to generate $300,000 without working (it sounds crazy but there is no harm in having a big goal, right?!).

For me, it's always a good feeling to look back and review yourself not only in your finances, but also in many other aspects (health, goals, etc.). With my receipt book, I will be able to see where I spend my money and where I have made improvements every day. I hope to see myself grow financially stable and independent (I hope you guys achieve your financial goals). Also I hope this financial independence can help me achieve my other goals.