Looking for Advice

[c9]

As I've complained already, houses are expensive, etc etc. I need to more carefully track my money than I have in the past, and I'm looking for suggestions on what tools / approaches you fantastically intelligent friends of mine use.

Basically, the spreadsheet method I use will demand too much effort for too little return. I'd like to track two accounts containing about 4-5 piles of money each. As we spend money on (for example) the electricity bill, I want to track how that pile of electricity bill money is changing.

I may just build an insane spreadsheet, but I figure there's gotta be a better way. Is there?

Comments

[sassy-red-head.livejournal.com]

We use the 'envelope' method. We have an envelope for each expense.
-mortgage
-groceries
-pet stuff
-insurance
-car
-hydro
-water
-gas
-household needs (toilet paper, cleaning supplies)
-emergency

etc.

Grab your latest bills and round them up to the nearest $10.

We split things up where I pay all the utilities and Brent pays all the car and insurance stuff.

The rest we split and put money into each envelope whenever we get paid. Since we rounded the bills up, there's a buffer for anything that is unaccounted for.


Any money that doesn't get put into an envelope is used to pay down existing debt (minus a reasonable amount of spending money).

This works for us.