Friday, July 5, 2013

Expense Tracking - Knowing is Empowering

The first thing and the most important step in managing your money is to know your money. Kenali duit anda. Berapa banyak yang anda dapat hasil dari kerja anda atau sponsorship papa dan mama. Berapa banyak yang anda spend and on what.

Kesilapan terbesar yang aku buat sebelum ini adalah not knowing where or what have I spent my money on. I've been earning quite a lot from my work in the early days but the lack of knowledge on spending wisely and saving left me with an empty pocket pada masa yang memerlukan - masa dah tergedik-gedik nak kahwin. Hee.

That is why I started to track my expenses. Every cents of it, every single day. Sekarang dah 2 tahun lebih and I've already got quite a good data to analyze my spending pattern. From the analysis you can see where you money goes and actually do something about it - make better decision on how to spend your hard-earned money. You can control it only when you know it.

Aku rasa the best way to track where your money goes is by using Excel. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. There's a number of good templates you can get from the web. But after using a few of them, I'd say the one from Vertex42 is the best. You can visit their page here.

I've made some major tweaks to the template that I've downloaded and suit it for my own use. Yang aku suka is that the categories can be customized ikut suka hati jadi there's a lot of flexibility to suit to your needs.

They also have a lot of other good templates so please godek-godek sendiri. *I'm returning them a favor for the awesome template I stumbled upon 2 years ago.

I'm not going to suggest other tracking method since this is the only method that I've use thus far and it's super effective. Hahaa.

So, what's your favorite expense tracking method?

No comments:

Post a Comment