Money Obedience

My wife wrote a post recently “Our family budget should not have to cover work-related expenses” in which she discusses the challenges of keeping her work-related receipts for reimbursement. A similar problem arises generally when you want to keep track of your household expenses. Even if you use a free budget planner, which tracks some of your expenses automatically, you still need to record your cash expenses. There is no system around yet that scans your wallet for cash you spend and matches that money to your purchases. You’ll have to record all your cash expenses manually. There are no “ifs, ands, or buts” about that.

In previous posts my wife and I have talked about how important it is to keep track of expenses, but for many of us (my wife included) this is a real challenge. The good news is that even my wife can keep track of our expenses when we are on a dollar for dollar personal accounting system. One of the reasons we could do it successfully and relatively easy was because we used an internet based free budget planner. This allowed us access to our budget any time we had access to a computer. My wife and I could enter our expenses during the day on the work computer, we could also enter them in the evenings and on weekends at home, and we could even enter them on hand-held devices, since all our spending information was stored online. We really did not have much of an excuse not to enter our household expenses! And I have to say that my wife was excellent keeping track of the dollars and cents she spent! (From that post, you might thing that she wants you to believe that she is totally disorganized, but there’s no way. That internet based budget planner seems to have helped her, because she did an excellent job keeping track of her spending.)

I must admit it makes me a little nervous to give some company other than my bank access to my financial data. Even large and very safe companies have lost data or give unauthorized people access to it. So I must tell you that we did not use one of these budget planners that automatically record your expenses if you allow the service to access your bank accounts, credit cards, etc. I just could not feel comfortable with that. And I didn’t see any obvious benefits in letting a financial institution (like a bank or credit card company) with vested interests in getting access to my cash have access to my spending history.

We used a service disconnected from such financial institutions. (You probably can guess we used vilkri.com to get this done!) It was easy enough to keep track of everything without giving access to a planner from a less-than-partial agent offering a service that was supposedly automatic. But how automatic could it be? There’s no way a service could record everything – all cash, credit card, debit card, and check transactions? No way. So, my wife, who claims that she has problems keeping receipts and recording her expenses properly, would have to figure out which of her expenses are recorded automatically, and which she would have to record herself. Can you imagine how confusing it would be for her to remember yet another thing about her expenses?

For us it made sense to say heck with these semi-automatic and supposedly convenient budget planners. We may as well go all out and make sure that we record everything we spend, whether we spend it in cash, with a credit card or check, or by any other means. That way we are at least consistent and clear about what expenses we have to record manually – all of them. It is as simple as that. And this has worked very well for my wife and me (regardless of what she says about her ability to keep receipts)!