Personal finance on paper
Every modern person thought that it would be nice to keep records of their finances, the goal is obvious: you can confidently say where the money goes and assess your strength before making a large purchase. As soon as this thought settles in my head, the decision immediately comes - to keep home-based accounting on a computer. A person enters a search engine, finds a bunch of links, reads reviews of programs and online services. He compares the capabilities of the systems and finally makes the decision. Hooray, the choice is made, it's time to start the daily filling of all their purchases!
The first week of fixing costs is spent on the wave of positive - a new user-friendly interface, viewing beautiful reports, a pleasant awareness that you are doing the right thing. But it takes several days and all these vivid impressions are replaced by a sad reality: every day you have to devote 10 minutes of your precious time to this activity. And even worse, one day when a person forgets to pay his expenses and the next day (or days) he vigorously remembers what he spent there. Or the thought comes to him: “I will do it better tomorrow - in two days at once”, comes tomorrow, but there is no inspiration. And so a week passed, he has a bunch of checks from his purchases on his desk, he looks at them and realizes that there is no strength or desire to put all this in his “home accounting”.
My experience developed exactly in such a scenario.
')
The main reason why I was “lazy” to record my expenses was that it took too much time for this, as it seemed to me earlier, a simple process. And I thought, how can you simplify the recording of expenses? After all, the main thing for me is to understand what money is spent on and at the same time I do not want to spend a lot of time on recording expenses.
The paper solution is a simple solution.
When there were no computers, everyone who wanted recorded their expenses with a ballpoint pen in a paper notebook. And I decided to do the same!
The first thing to do is to break all your expenses into categories. Each category is kept on a separate notebook page. I have the following categories:
1. Products
2. Services
3. Mobile communication, Internet
4. Transportation
5. Entertainment, gifts
6. Medicine
7. House, furniture
8. Household goods
9. Clothing
10. Technique
11. Sports
Every day in each category of the current month you need to enter the spent amount of money. The result is such a thing:
Products
March 2009
57 + 95 + 544 + 44 + 300 + 313 + 20 + 30 + 307 + 1638 + 260 + 90 + ...
At the end of the month, it remains to add all the numbers and find out how much and, most importantly, where it was spent. In order to put it all together and to visually present a computer to help me, a computer came to me, well, where now without them :-)
In MS Excel I created several sheets for each category, plus a separate sheet “Total”. In each sheet horizontally placed the names of the months under which I contribute the cost of purchases.
It turns out like this:
On the final sheet, set up links to previous sheets, as a result, the sheet “Total” is generated fully automatically. Based on this data, you can see your monthly expenses, build charts, plan a budget.
The main differences:
1. Fixed expenses in general for the month, and not by day.
2. There is no detail of categories.
3. A preliminary record in the notebook.
It may seem strange, but this most intermediate fixation of expenses in a notebook with a minimum set of categories of expenses allows you to keep your personal bookkeeping regularly and very quickly. Now it takes very little time, and most importantly it became interesting to me to do it. Now it does not seem routine and tedious, now it is very easy to do :)
PS The author of the article is my friend Max, who is not on Habré.
The first week of fixing costs is spent on the wave of positive - a new user-friendly interface, viewing beautiful reports, a pleasant awareness that you are doing the right thing. But it takes several days and all these vivid impressions are replaced by a sad reality: every day you have to devote 10 minutes of your precious time to this activity. And even worse, one day when a person forgets to pay his expenses and the next day (or days) he vigorously remembers what he spent there. Or the thought comes to him: “I will do it better tomorrow - in two days at once”, comes tomorrow, but there is no inspiration. And so a week passed, he has a bunch of checks from his purchases on his desk, he looks at them and realizes that there is no strength or desire to put all this in his “home accounting”.
My experience developed exactly in such a scenario.
')
The main reason why I was “lazy” to record my expenses was that it took too much time for this, as it seemed to me earlier, a simple process. And I thought, how can you simplify the recording of expenses? After all, the main thing for me is to understand what money is spent on and at the same time I do not want to spend a lot of time on recording expenses.
The paper solution is a simple solution.
When there were no computers, everyone who wanted recorded their expenses with a ballpoint pen in a paper notebook. And I decided to do the same!
The first thing to do is to break all your expenses into categories. Each category is kept on a separate notebook page. I have the following categories:
1. Products
2. Services
3. Mobile communication, Internet
4. Transportation
5. Entertainment, gifts
6. Medicine
7. House, furniture
8. Household goods
9. Clothing
10. Technique
11. Sports
Every day in each category of the current month you need to enter the spent amount of money. The result is such a thing:
Products
March 2009
57 + 95 + 544 + 44 + 300 + 313 + 20 + 30 + 307 + 1638 + 260 + 90 + ...
At the end of the month, it remains to add all the numbers and find out how much and, most importantly, where it was spent. In order to put it all together and to visually present a computer to help me, a computer came to me, well, where now without them :-)
In MS Excel I created several sheets for each category, plus a separate sheet “Total”. In each sheet horizontally placed the names of the months under which I contribute the cost of purchases.
It turns out like this:
On the final sheet, set up links to previous sheets, as a result, the sheet “Total” is generated fully automatically. Based on this data, you can see your monthly expenses, build charts, plan a budget.
The main differences:
1. Fixed expenses in general for the month, and not by day.
2. There is no detail of categories.
3. A preliminary record in the notebook.
It may seem strange, but this most intermediate fixation of expenses in a notebook with a minimum set of categories of expenses allows you to keep your personal bookkeeping regularly and very quickly. Now it takes very little time, and most importantly it became interesting to me to do it. Now it does not seem routine and tedious, now it is very easy to do :)
PS The author of the article is my friend Max, who is not on Habré.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/92703/
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