How One Spreadsheet Saved My Finances
Blowing through your budget can be discouraging, but there are better ways to curb spending
Last year was expensive. In May, I received my bachelor’s degree. In August, I moved 2,000 miles across the country to start a graduate program. In October, I got married, in a wedding my wife and I financed ourselves.
Between the chaos of simultaneously getting acquainted with a new city, beginning my graduate career (where I also began teaching for the first time in my life), and putting together a wedding we’d been planning for the last 18 months, I no longer felt like the financially savvy person I’d once been. Our money was flying out the window. Whatever budgets we’d created before were no longer as relevant with all our lifestyle changes, and they were now being completely ignored each time we made a purchase.
Something had to be done. I decided to start tracking our expenses, one by one — not for the sake of ensuring they didn’t exceed some arbitrary number we’d set in our old life, but just to know exactly where our money was going. In an Excel spreadsheet, I organized our entire lives into 17 categories, made a note of each transaction, and instructed the spreadsheet to automatically organize the data into easily graspable pie graphs and bar charts.
