Track your living expenses???

Read? Retirement Income for Life??? (14) - How much is enough for retirement?


Uncle8888 is doing it simply and Excelly with one dedicated bank account for expenses : GIRO, ATM cash withdrawals, NETS, credit cards and ITR i.e. all cash out flow!


Just once a month of less than 15 - 25 mins of effort to download the monthly statement. Copy and paste into Excel worksheet. 

Add remark column and keying remarks for those non regular expenses that can be reduced or cut during bad times. 

The whole idea here is NOT to sweat the small stuffs in tracking expenses.



Later SMOL will come and call him Excel King. LOL!

Explanation to the above chart:





Monthly family expenses for five members (Me and housewife and 3 children)  is group into $500 different band on X-axis.


As an example only for the purpose of explaining this chart. The number used is not his monthly actual expenses.






Below $2,000 : 1 (It only happened once. Probably, in that month we ate most of the meals at home or caught many fish and crabs enough for that month)

$2,001 to $2,500 : 16 (There are 16 months of such expenses in this band since Jan 2001)


$2,501 to $3,000 : 34 (There are 34 months of such expenses in this band since Jan 2001)



$3,001 to $3,500 : 31 (There are 31 months of expenses in this band since Jan 2001)

.....



and so on