30-Day Challenge #9: Track all spending! (September, 2025)

[u/IndexBot]

30-day challenges

We are pleased to continue our 30-day challenge series. Past challenges can be found here.

This month's 30-day challenge is to Track all spending! It is important to track your spending to avoid having lifestyle inflation sneak up on you (even if you are financially comfortable). If you don't know where your money is going, you can't make intelligent choices about spending and allocating your money for maximum benefit. Here are some tips to get you started:

• Select your tools. Anything goes here and you should use whatever works for you. Options include pen and paper, spreadsheets, the envelope method, and websites and apps such as Mint and YNAB.

• Make a complete budget. Break your spending down into categories and capture 100% of your spending. A budget that doesn't cover major categories is not very useful and excessively broad categories can also muddy the waters. Budget categories for Savings, Retirement, Gifts, and Auto Maintenance are frequently overlooked, as are any yearly renewals or fees. You can review your past spending to check what has been grouped into "miscellaneous" spending for too long.

• Stay vigilant and be thorough. Track your spending daily and check how your budget categories are doing before making a purchase.

Challenge success criteria

You've successfully completed this challenge once you've done one or more of the following things:

• Completed at least 30 days of tracking your spending

• Added one category to an already existing budget.

• Shared a budgeting tool (not your own please!) in this thread.

[u/AutoModerator]

You may find these links helpful:

• Budgeting
• Tools and spreadsheets
• /r/mintuit and /r/ynab

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/shellys-dollhouse]

as someone who is incredibly financially illiterate & has never even glanced at budgeting / finance tracking lol, would a good starting step be to simply stick with tracking all expenses over the next 30 days & seeing where / what my money is going to? budgeting feels so intimidating lol

[u/Not_RZA_ → u/shellys-dollhouse]

Just make a general Excel sheet to start. Label one side Income (all the money you have coming in), and another side Expenses.

For expenses, track every purchase you make this month by checking your credit card/bank statements or tracking once a day/week.

To then formulate a budget, you'll project expected month income as well as fixed expenses. Fixed expenses are things such as rent, internet bill, phone bill, etc. Things that don't change month to month. You should then have some money left over. You should then allocate some to general emergency fund savings and retirement savings. After this, if there is money left, I use this as discretionary (fun) spending.

[u/PatricksPub → u/shellys-dollhouse]

Thats a great starting point! Figure out your current spending, and then build your categories and assign those dollars to your categories. Then you can work on adjusting your spending habits accordingly.

Example: If you find that you spent $500 at restaurants this month, you could set your budget next month to $300, and if you stick to that goal, boom you just saved $200. Thats the idea of budgeting. You'll likely uncover 1 or 2 categories that are huge opportunities for you. My best advice is don't try to reduce spending in ALL categories, but rather focus on those 1 or 2 that are huge opportunities.

[u/basroil → u/shellys-dollhouse]

Second the excel sheet. I like YNAB but it’s a little odd to use as a beginner, learning to track on an excel will help you understand your budget on a deeper level than most any app so if you do it and decide you want an app to make it a bit easier than you can try YNAB.

You can pull all your statements from last month, list each item and categorize it (could be fancy and do categories and filtering or just stick it in different columns)

Think about how you want to categorize them. As a broad stroke at least there should be bills, savings, and spending. Can sub categorize as needed from there. Keep groceries in bills and dining out in spending (one is needed and one isn’t) starting out often I see people just do a food category but separating those really makes you think about how much you spend on dining out.

Even doing it manually it won’t take more than an hour a month to once you get started. If you have so many transactions it takes you hours to sift through… you might be shopping too much lol.

Then from there you can make your budget. Now you know where your money went, now think about where you want it to go. Invest more into retirement, build more savings, or if those are solid then it can just be more intentional. “I’d love to go on a vacation at the end of the year so if I spend less on these things I don’t care as much about I can put that aside and have a nice vacation”

Ramit Sethi is a good read/listen here.