Ok, I know, nobody likes to do it, and you really can’t do anything about your expenses until you know what they are. How did I finally conquer this dragon? I signed up for Mint.com. It’s a free, online banking aggregator (i.e. dashboard) for your money. It downloaded 90 days worth of transactions on all of my bank accounts and put them in one place. Egads! $115.85 spent in 90 days on my cat? Are you kidding me? You can see my earlier post about Mint here and how it works, but I’m telling you, this may have saved this family’s bacon! While we consider ourselves to be fairly frugal people, what we learned is that we simply aren’t extravagant… but we’re definitely aren’t frugal. At least we weren’t. Mint doesn’t keep your personal info, it is just shown to you through their site, so don’t fret, they won’t Twitter your Visa balance.
Bottom line: The thing I love about Mint.com is that I didn’t have to track my expenses for a month and loose four weeks of time. It took a retrospective look at what we’ve spent in the past few months and categorized it, saving time and allowing me to start slashing our expenses while I had the gumption. Result? A viable household budget on our new income in hours, not weeks.