Keep track of your spending in a spreadsheet

 In 2018 when I had some credit card debt, I realized something very important:

The PURCHASES line on your credit card statement tells you all you need to know.

It's not always the most obvious line, but it tells you if you SPENT more than you MADE last month. If you want to save money and pay down debt, you need to predict what the PURCHASES line will be. If you want to keep track of how much you spend, it means getting your statement every month and recording the PURCHASES line.

That's my spending spreadsheet. It's really boring. I do not break my budget up into 50 categories. Once a year or so I might download all my credit card transactions as a CSV file for analysis, but most of the time  I don't. I just know that we can spend about $50/day on food and stay within our budget.

On the 1st day of each month I add a new line to my budget spreadsheet. 

Column 1: Date

Column 2: Total Purchases made on my "charity" credit card (they're all auto bills, so the balance stays the same)

Column 3: Total Purchases made on my "automatic bills" credit card (utilities, streaming services, etc... another balance that stays the same)

Column 4: Total Purchases made on my "spending" credit card that I carry around with me

Column 5: Total

And that column 5 has been less than my income since 2018 when I paid down all my debt. I haven't paid interest to a credit card company in five years. I didn't have TONS of debt, it was $8K or so, but it was enough to be very annoying and I was paying a lot in interest. I could write about that later.