I am constantly hearing about how easy it is for my clients/readers to “fall behind” the tracking of their spending throughout their months.
It causes them to feel like a failure, like they aren’t “good at” budgeting, and like they can never get enough traction to make their budgeting efforts worthwhile.
THAT IS THE WORST!
It’s also, unfortunately, not surprising because it IS one of the most challenging things about budgeting.
Consistency.
It’s the cornerstone of making progress with your financial goals, but it’s also the one thing that is SO easy to fall to the wayside in the midst of your busy LIFE.
What’s the answer?
What I call Minimum Update Days. I teach this strategy in my digital course, The Sustainable Budget Blueprint, but I really want to go over this concept with you now because I see so many people struggling with it, and it just doesn’t have to keep tripping you up!
So, let’s do this!
Minimum Update Days are two days each week that you, at the VERY least, are committing to sitting down and tracking your spending.
The top fear I hear about when I mention tracking all purchases is the time required to do the tracking.
Is that what you were thinking? Something along the lines of, “I don’t even have time to fold the mountain of laundry in the other room. How am I supposed to find the time to track every single thing we pay for every week??”
Maybe I’ve heard it a time or two. Maybe I’ve THOUGHT it a time or two… but here’s the thing: IT IS POSSIBLE, AND IT DOES WORK.
By implementing my strategy of Minimum Update Days, it removes the constant feeling of guilt and failure I was sitting under EVERY SINGLE DAY that I didn’t get around to logging our spending in my tracker.
With my (Minimum Update Days) MUD strategy, I am only expected to track spending TWO days a week instead of SEVEN (already a win), PLUS, as long as I’m consistent in my efforts, the task never takes me longer than 10 minutes (and it only ever takes me longer than FIVE minutes because I’m often having to text my husband to ask if a handful of purchases were work/reimbursable expenses, or if they need to be tracked in our personal spending)!
How do you decide which two days will be the most effective Minimum Update Days to choose/set?
This will require just a few minutes of time to figure out:
- Consider your spending history (pull up your online transaction histories to help with this if necessary)
- Note your spending habits. On which days is most of your money spent each week?
- You will want to set your first Minimum Update Day to be the morning of (or 1 day before) your peak spending begins.
- Your second Minimum Update Day should be set as the evening of (or one day after) your peak spending days are over.
For example: Our Peak Spending happens over the weekends.
We typically go out for Happy Hour Tacos for dinner on Fridays, lunch out after church on Sundays, and I typically get our groceries at some point over the weekend, as well. Any weekday purchases for us are usually just fuel costs/random expenses/bills.
So our 1st MUD (Minimum Update Day) is Friday. I make sure that before dinner time on Friday (when we go out for our weekly taco happy hour dinner with our friends) I take the time needed to update our spending so that we know exactly how much money we have available in our “eating out” budget category.
This way, I also know exactly how much I should shoot to spend at the grocery store when I go (in case it is different than my original goal I set up at the beginning of the month).
PLUS by updating it on Friday, I’m able to know just how much we have in our “date nights” spending category (this includes “family dates”/”family entertainment” for our budget) so if we decide we would like to take the kids to a movie or to go bowling or something like that… we know if it’s realistic or if we should go to the park or take a bike ride (hello, free activities/fun) instead.
Our Second MUD is Monday. As I said, the majority of our spending happens Friday-Sunday. When Monday rolls around, I know it’s time for me to log all of the expenses that were accrued over the weekend so that we go into our new week knowing exactly where we stand in all of our different spending/saving categories.
Set an event in your calendar on each of your MUD days. Make it a recurring event. Twice a week, when you get that calendar reminder, you add “update budget” to your daily task list if you haven’t already done it at that point. You get it done.
No more excuses. Two times a week. You can handle that. I know you. You can.
Got it? Make sense?? 🙂
How does it take such little time to track my expenses?
Because all that is required of me to do so is this:
- Open my Sustainable Budget Blueprint spreadsheet (which my SBB students will all get their own download of along with their enrollment of the course! woohoo!!).
- Log into my checking account + our credit card account.
- Resize my computer windows so that on one half of the screen, I see the SBB tracker spreadsheet, and on the other side of my screen I see our bank/cc transactions: both pending and posted transactions.
- One line at a time, type in the total expense/income along with the description into my SBB tracker.
- Double check to make sure I got all of the new, untracked data entered.
- Done.
I kid you not. 5 Minutes. 10 Tops.
If you’d like to see a short video of exactly how I do this, I posted a 7 minute video on my Instagram IGTV back in November walking you through exactly how I do it.
Don’t expect high quality videography – if that’s your expectation, you’re in the wrong place. This video is just a quick visual so you can SEE what I’m talking about.
What do you think about the MUD strategy? Does it give you hope? Consider what your own Minimum Update Days should be, and tell me in the comments below! I’ll add mine, too 🙂
Remember: We don’t budget for the sake of having a budget. That’s a terrible motivation, and it’ll fizzle out REALLY quickly… We budget for bigger picture goals. We have several right now including a new home in the school district we have our eye on, paying off AP’s car, and a more short term goal is to get our iPad screen fixed (yes, we even save for purchases under $200 because lots of “little” surprise expenses are what get people into debt EVERY SINGLE DAY)… What are your reasons for budgeting??
Let me know what questions you have or if there are any topics you’d love for me to cover in a future post! I want to be sure to cover the topics you feel are most beneficial to you, so input is super appreciated!
