Something I don’t ever do often enough is track my spending. I live within my means of course, and I’m pretty good with checking receipts for purchases made with plastic against my statements and my bank account, but do I actually know what percentage of my disposable income goes to (fast) food, clothing, beauty products and gifts?

The answer was no, so I decided to start tracking it, years after countless magazines and my father suggested I do so. “Better late than never” isn’t just a saying to me, it’s my way of life. My friend Rich provided a great spreadsheet; I should probably customize it a bit to match my own situation.

What I noticed last week as I have been tracking my spending, is that I actually tended to think longer and reject some purchases that I wouldn’t have thought about ordinarily because I knew I’d have to record it. Did I really need that $1.84 muffin when I could just eat a bowl of cereal for breakfast (and get some calcium too)? How about what was becoming a mid-afternoon habit of buying a Grande Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino at St@rbucks? And really, do I need to buy a lunch that threatens to enter the double digits price-wise? In the majority of those cases, the answer was a resounding no (though I did have my frappuccino with Amanda later in the week).

For now, I’m not shrieking in dismay at the proportion of my disposable income that goes to frivolous purchases; the goal for this month and the next is to record my spending. Then I’ll look into analyzing it.

Now, it doesn’t take much to extrapolate how this habit of recording things could affect my eating habits too. As an ex-weight watchers member, my downfall was my failure to consistently (read: ever) write down what I ate. I’d do it for one day, then get lazy at having to guesstimate or measure, and just eat what I wanted, screw the points system. Result: I am still obese.

I can now see where those studies indicating that people who weigh themselves regularly, and record what they eat tend to be slimmer are coming from.

And the perfect tool to keep track both at work and at home is the spreadsheets available through Google documents! Now I don’t have to write down what I ate on little slips of paper and hope I remember to add it to my spreadsheet, this will allow me to keep track a lot better.

Filed under: flab gab, Money by jummy