me and receipts

[onehair]

I spend a fair amount of time dealing with receipts of my own thanks to Ibotta and Receipt Hog.  I have observed from my own some of my spending habits I could stand to break.  The good news: I am learning to cut down on my book and magazine purchases and use the Food Lion specials and instore coupons to save a fair amount of money there. I also limit myself to $20 at the farmers market most of the time.  I rarely indulge in eating out if I can help it.

The bad news: I do tend to forget I have purchased something and tend to end up with a lot of extra items such as canned goods and my morning drinks.  I will try to monitor my stocks so as not to overbuy.

Since I am used to dealing with small pieces of paper my main point of interest on Amazon HITS is entering items from receipts or classifying them for bits of cash.  I haven't cashed them in in about 3-4 weeks so I must be learning to save more.  Having said that from what I put in it is amazing what Americans (me included on occasion) waste money on.  I can always tell the official and unofficial Mustachians from the large amounts of discounts and or coupons I have to enter lol...

From the not so enlightened's grocery receipts I see a lot of processed goodies such as Kool Aid Jammers, Lunchables, frozen convenience meals etc...From their restaurant receipts a tendency to order expensive items and lots of drinks.

[forummm]

We just use the same credit card account to pay for everything (except 3 places than don't take CC but do use ACH or debit). It all shows up on the same CC statement or checking statement. At the end of the month I put a label on each expense (groceries, utilities, etc) and tally things up in each category. Done. I immediately throw away most receipts.

[benjenn]

We just use the same credit card account to pay for everything (except 3 places than don't take CC but do use ACH or debit). It all shows up on the same CC statement or checking statement. At the end of the month I put a label on each expense (groceries, utilities, etc) and tally things up in each category. Done. I immediately throw away most receipts.

I do the same thing and at month's end, I transfer all that info into our budget that keeps a running year-to-date and monthly total for each category.  My spreadsheet has four income categories and 29 expense categories.  I have columns for each month of the year and can see that whole year at once.  I have each year projected out on worksheets going out to 2027.

I never keep receipts.

[onehair]

I keep a receipt as long as it takes me to get reimbursed off it.  I do pitch them after I take a picture of it for Receipt Hog for coins, if it is Walmart enter the 16 digit number or let the phone snap the QC code so it can price check then take a picture of it for Ibotta depending on the rebate on offered items and for Receipt Hog, and any receipt Receipt Hog doesn't like gets thrown away anyway.  It's actually more trouble to scan the items with my Nielsen scanner to get points for that than to do the receipts.  But they generally don't live past 48 hrs in my house....Sometimes even Checkout 51 offers something I actually plan to use in the future.