by Tricia
Last month was not a good month in terms of keeping track of receipts. I have been trying to find them all, but I still ended up missing two. I decided to split the money spent on those receipts between groceries and household since they were Walmart purchases. I know we did spend some money getting some things for travel that I consider household because they are reusable.
Ok, here are some other things I saw to note about the report…
Groceries – They were under $300 this month. I like seeing that, but I do know that it is mostly due to being gone 6 days on our trip.
Toys – We spent a little bit more on toys than normal. All of the spending there was to purchase things for my son to keep him busy on the car ride. New toys work wonders when traveling with children 😉
Travel – Wow. I didn’t realize how much it really costs for us to take the trip to see our parents. This is the first time I have kept the receipts separate for trips like this. I don’t think we did too bad, with spending $513 to travel around 1,300 miles in 6 days. That amount includes lodging, gas, pet boarding and meals on the road. Yes, there were places we could have saved money (like the hotel rooms), but we made a decision to splurge a little there.
Overall, we are still spending less than we earn and our net income for the month was almost $1,300.
December will be the really challenging month with Christmas. We decided that we are going to create a budget and stick to it for Christmas this year. It is so easy to get caught up in gift-giving like I have done so many times in the past. Christmas has actually been one of the major contributors to our credit card debt. I like to give, and give big. I almost feel like Christmas will be the true test of how far I’ve come with trying to live within our means.
Back to discussing October, here’s the report. Feel free to comment and ask questions.
Hi Tricia,
I feel completely inept but I’ve got 2002 Quicken for Home & Business and have never used the budget feature. I’m working on that. Is that what you’re using to creat these nice reports? And you’ve got your cc listed out with the interest – is that Quicken too? I’ve been digging my head into the sand to avoid “knowing” just how in debt we are and I’m trying to get it all out on the table in clear view now. Any tips you can offer would be so appreciated!
Hi Loopy,
To create the reports, I am using Quicken. I’m not sure about the 2002 version, but there is probably a section for running reports and the one you would use to create a report like the above would be a “category report.”
Because I do not show a lot of my sub categories in my reports here, I export the report to Excel and then format it and hide the sub categories.
As for the credit cards, I add the information about the interest rate in Excel after I export the report. I also change the credit card names to CC#1, CC#2, etc. I might be changing this and adding this information right in the Account Name since I am now used to seeing the credit cards as numbers versus their name.
Believe me, it’s good to get a good view about your debt.
Thank you! I never thought about exporting them for ease of uploading. I think I can manage that.
That’s quite impressive that you were able to keep all but two receipts. I try keeping track of every expense but inevitably I loose some here and there; thankfully I keep a misc. section in the budget and this catches most items.
You’re doing an amazing job; keep up the great work and being a great inspiration