Expense Tracking Paper and Spreadsheet

I did this for eight years and it totally changed my life. I used an app called AndroMoney and exported the csv to do Excel magic on it.

It was still a lot of work and the app left something to be desired, so in February I decided to start on a mobile app of my own to improve the experience (and hopefully make it more accessible to others as a pradtice by making it visually appeling). It's coming out later this month and I'd be happy grateful for feedbadk if you or anyone in this thread would be interested in taking a look at it.

Not many people in my life who understand the value of manual tracking…just found this community recently and figured there might be some sympathetic ears. You can see a preview here:

Carlo — A visual diary of your spending

A private, photo-first spending journal. No bank connections. End-to-end encrypted. Available August 2026.

Carlo

Hello all,

I'm new to the app but have been following Johnathan and Brad from nearly the first podcast. I think the back catalog was in the single digits when I started. I can remember the road I was driving on when they suggested a 50% savings rate.

Anyway, I began tracking my spending with a very simple method which I planned to make more complicated and accurate in the future. I figured if I start a adequate system I can modify and improve it later. After I few months of tracking my spending I realized I didn't need to complicate things. I was tracking what I needed, my spending over the month. No need to check if my eating meals outside of the house was growing vs meals in… That didn't matter to me. All that mattered was weather my income exceed my spending for that month.

Here was/is my guiding principles:

Track spending without categories or buckets. There is no good spending and no bad spending.

Using Vicky Robin's principal from her book Your Money or Your Life ask yourself was that worth it or not.

Ex: I spend $200 on a fancy meal was that worth the X number of hours to earn that money? If it was continue, if it wasn't either make the meal better (invite friends) or don't order that particular meal again and possibly have friends over and cook on the grill next time.

I further simplified the system my only tracking to the dollar. I round the cents down if an item is X.25 or under and up if the item is X.26 or over.

Because I automated my savings and always pay off the credit card each month I had no need to calculate interest payments. I simply record my purchase when made.

Ex: using my credit card I spend 30.26 in gas for my car. I record the purchase on my phone in the gas station parking lot:

Car gas. Date. $31.00

I use the pre loaded Google sheets which tallys the totals for income and spending. I use a different sheet per month and lable with and month and year.

After the first few weeks of tracking my spending I became aware of where my money was going. That is what allowed me to dramatically increase my savings rate without much hassle.

I look forward to reading opinions on my system. Thought or ways to improve it.

–Don

Q: Do you have any more formal process for discussing this with the family/kids?

I've adopted this monthly spreadsheet to support our family dialogue around money. We're not trying to decrease spend, I just want them to know what's happening invisibly with all the automatic bill pay. I print out my version (included image), put it on the fridge and occasionally pull it down to add expenses and discuss. I'd love to hear if anyone has a system/regular timing for talking about it with the fam.

I guess that since I'm more a tech guy that I'd prefer to use an automated software product to group and categorize all my credit card items, bills paid through checking account, etc. I'd rather not spend or waste time manually tracking it monthly on a calendar and then manually enter it into a spreadsheet each month. That sounds like torture to me but hey; you do what works for you ! You atleast have an idea where you money is going where I really don't have a clue yet because I haven't implemented an expense tracking system yet. It is on my 2026 list of goals to accomplish. I did a quick ChatGPT search and it came up with a few different automated options. I know Ginger or Brad or somebody on the Podcast mentioned Monarch for expense tracking but that didn’t show up in my ChstGPT search. I will have to research Monarch. For $79 a year, ChatGPT is leaning towards using or trying out Tiller Money as I don't mind using Excel to customize my budgeting and expense tracking. Below is my ChatGPT links showing my search and the results I received. I also found the Empower website and they offer a free online account linking, expense tracking and net worth calculator. I might try that one first since it is free. See my 2nd ChatGPT link for links and comparison of various expense/budget tracking options out there.

ChatGPT - Expense Tracking Tools ChooseFI

Shared via ChatGPT

ChatGPT

chatgpt.com

We do a hand written pull from credit card statements and there is something pretty powerful about actually having to write it out instead of typing it. A surprising benefit was having my kids help do the adding up of the totals for categories. Some math by hand and the big numbers with an actual physical calculator. They feel important and likely are picking up some ideas about using the tool of money. Planning on updating spreadsheets to include some more of the paper info.Thank you for sharing!

Appreciate the support for hand-done budgets. My partner and I also did budgets and expense tracking in paper or modified excel for a decade or so. It gives you such a feeling of power and control (if you have the patience for this kind of thing).

We also used the cash envelope approach when we really needed to cut costs, though I don't know how feasible that is now.

Smaller categories that everyone understands helps so much for year over year comparisons. Bigger buckets makes staying in top of monthly data entry much easier to do, and you still get plenty of detail. Nice work on this, you two!