I used Mint for years when I was first starting out on my investing journey. I stopped using it couple of years ago before it shut down. Once I got married and kids, I had to realize I had to give up the reigns on spending a little bit more since kids added a level of complexity to spending and made it much more unpredictable than I was a bachelor.
I think you have to define why you want to track spending to find the right tool. Are you just looking to see how much you spent last year? That can be done at the end of the year by downloading all your transactions from your bank accounts and tallying them up. That is basically what I do at this point. Takes me an hour at most in January. I do this so I can get a sense of how close I am to early retirement. Once I have 25x expenses saved from the last 12 months spending, it means I can retire even though I wouldn't.
If you are trying to control spending, I think YNAB like tools are the best. You give a role to each dollar and try to spend within certain pre defined limit. I tried it for a few months few years back but realized that I spent what I spent and I could never stick to my pre-set limits. Again having a spouse that is not necessarily into budgeting like I am (my spouse is not a big spender in any means but at the same time I didn't want to tell her that we couldn't order pizza on a Friday because I had define some arbitrary eating out budget for the month was an argument I didn't really think was necessary).
Also the whole categorization thing is kind of a waste of time in my opinion. Do you really care that you spent 3K on fast food restaurants the last 12 months for example? How does that information improve you financial goals? I never used that information to change my spending behavior. So I stopped wasting my time going through it.
So why do you want to keep track of you spending?
I think you have to define why you want to track spending to find the right tool. Are you just looking to see how much you spent last year? That can be done at the end of the year by downloading all your transactions from your bank accounts and tallying them up. That is basically what I do at this point. Takes me an hour at most in January. I do this so I can get a sense of how close I am to early retirement. Once I have 25x expenses saved from the last 12 months spending, it means I can retire even though I wouldn't.
If you are trying to control spending, I think YNAB like tools are the best. You give a role to each dollar and try to spend within certain pre defined limit. I tried it for a few months few years back but realized that I spent what I spent and I could never stick to my pre-set limits. Again having a spouse that is not necessarily into budgeting like I am (my spouse is not a big spender in any means but at the same time I didn't want to tell her that we couldn't order pizza on a Friday because I had define some arbitrary eating out budget for the month was an argument I didn't really think was necessary).
Also the whole categorization thing is kind of a waste of time in my opinion. Do you really care that you spent 3K on fast food restaurants the last 12 months for example? How does that information improve you financial goals? I never used that information to change my spending behavior. So I stopped wasting my time going through it.
So why do you want to keep track of you spending?
Statistics: Posted by IndexAndExhale — Tue Dec 30, 2025 7:48 am — Replies 58 — Views 2764