Expenses – Katty’s Wallet

Budget in plain English (…and in pictures)

January 17, 2021March 21, 2021 Naked Soul1 Comment

For some the budgeting looks intimidating. It looked so for me before I started. To tell the truth, it was so intimidating, that I postponed my decision to start a budget for almost 20 years.

Now I face a new challenge: I am trying to bring my knowledge to my 12-years old daughter. I literally have a 5-10 minutes span of attention to bring all the wisdom I acquired. That is how I created the explanation. Hopefully, it will be useful for others, too.

All things are difficult before they are easy.
Thomas Fuller

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I’m tracking expenses… now what? Step by step plan to optimize spending

January 4, 2021March 21, 2021 Naked SoulLeave a comment

Tracking expenses is the first stepstone to budgeting, building wealth, and all other fancy financial applications. But for some reason, it is not an easy transition.

I clearly remember my frustration about 3 months after I started to track my expenses. I was staring at the computer monitor on the neat rows of numbers. The number themselves don’t tell me what to do, where to move. Do I save enough? How can I see the progress? What do I need to work on in terms of money behavior?

In this post, I provide the strategy I eventually follow. It was not a straight path, and I had a lot of tries and fails, but looking back, here is what I would have suggested myself in the very beginning.

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Tracking Expenses

December 20, 2020March 21, 2021 Naked Soul2 Comments

Trying to be smart with my credit cards I discovered, that I don’t have a credit card that covers “gas” nicely: all my cards don’t provide good cashback for the gas. A quick search revealed, that all the cards with substantial gas cashback have annual payment. To understand if it’s worth paid for the card, I needed to know how much I payed for the gas last year.

What is the problem?

Sounds easy? Well, it’s not.

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Subscriptions: taking the hidden spending under control

February 19, 2020March 21, 2021 Naked SoulLeave a comment

I guess you, as I wonder where the money went. When such a question pops up we naturally start budgeting and recall big categories: dining out, groceries, gas, rent/mortgage…

But there are also a lot of small expenses we usually don’t pay attention to subscriptions. And these small payments are the main reason why direct budgeting doesn’t work: they sum up too quickly ruining any planning.

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