keep track of each penny I spend

OK, The NaNoWriMo month’s slips have been captured, which is good progress. It took about 90 minutes.

Recently I had been negligent in writing up my small cash expenses. I felt as if I was a failure, my spending out of control. But when I looked at the paperwork I noticed that it was only the last week or two. No need to be despondent: a period of slightly slower growth of the habit.

It is very tempting to look the other way when the pennies are rolling too fast. But, like I discovered with weight loss, the cure starts when you look in the mirror and truthfully report what you see.

It’s bound to be an expensive month, and the task is to find out exactly how expensive.

My credit card account is now balanced. A significant adjustment was necessary, but from now on it should balance.

It is now that the real work starts. I have less money in my wallet than the account says I have. Got to figure out what happened to it, and prevent it from happening again.

I really enjoyed the first carrot cake that I had after I got my finances up to date.

I am still amazed that a piece of software can tell me how much cash I have in my wallet. Of course I have to give it input, but writing down how much I spend and then typing that and the till slips up seems to be fast becoming a habit.

My credit card account is not quite so up to date yet, so there’s still work to do.

It sneaked up on me, but here we are. I got all my financial paperwork up to date, and the software tells me exactly how much cash I have in my wallet.

I have started to look at the budgeting, and if there is room to start saving for an emergency fund.

I am now allowed to go and have my coffee shop cake. :-)

Another reason why I want to keep track of each penny I spend is so that I can make more conscious use of extra money that comes in. At the moment it just goes into the pot and disappears.

I now have a balanced bank account and know how much cash there is in my wallet. This is pretty much the basics of what I need day-to-day. More stuff to be done to keep track of investments and such, quite important for budgeting and so on, but getting those sorted should not be much of a problem because the volume of transactions on those accounts are quite small.

I have a problem with my credit card register: I am missing a statement, so some of the pennies will go unaccounted for. I can’t seem to get a statement copy from the bank’s website either.

On the other hand, my bank account transactions imported smoothly. I’ll still have to go through and create some accounts for the transactions that didn’t have a home, but that’s tomorrow’s work.

By the end of this month everything should be in and balanced, and I’ll be able to keep track of each pennie I spend.