anyone stop tracking their budget?

[GuitarStv]

We haven't budgeted for more than 15 years.  Spending is pretty constant.

[Bateaux]

Never really had a budget.  Always had a minimum amount of desired savings and spent past there.  If too much cash would build up, would just sweep more into savings.  We've probably over saved/worked too long.  With about 16 months till retirement, maybe a budget is in order.

[TacheTastic]

For a long time budgeting wasn't a thing I could make work. There was a watershed moment where I went onto envelope budgeting, literal physical envelopes with cash, which worked for me when I was on a very limited income. Following that I started using YNAB in 2017, which has also been fantastic and has helped me to transform my finances.

I am now stopping the budgeting as an experiment. My YNAB subscription ends in March, so I am seeing what happens now if I just tally up my account balances at the end of the month. I wonder if my natural anxiety will mean I am more cautious without the tracking, or if I will just lose all control and decide that the new more expensive YNAB is worth it.

[Greystache]

I started tracking my spending and budgeting when I retired 7 years ago. We knew that our spending habits would change quite a bit in retirement and we did our best to estimate our retirement spending. We tracked our spending monthly and updated and refined our budget annually for the first couple years. After a while it became clear that we had a good handle on our spending and budget. Now we only check at the end of the year to see what our total pend is. Our budget at the start of retirement was $60K. Over 7 years our spend has never never exceeded $60K . It has always come in within a couple thousand of that target except for 2020 when we under spent due to lack of travel.  I just checked our 2021 annual spending and it was a few dollars short of $58K.  I can't really say why we have never had to increase our spend due to inflation. Part of it is getting better at using credit card points for free travel and hotels. Part of it is learning what works and doing more of that.

[Fomerly known as something]

Never really had a budget.  Always had a minimum amount of desired savings and spent past there.  If too much cash would build up, would just sweep more into savings.  We've probably over saved/worked too long.  With about 16 months till retirement, maybe a budget is in order.

@Bateaux my current budget is more about how much I can spend as I approach retirement in 2025, as in having also likely saved too much, I’m working on where I can spend more.  I’m naturally frugal but there have been wants I didn’t follow because they were too much.  I’m trying to figure out what wants are worth the money to me.

[YK-Phil]

I never had a budget or tracked my spending when I had a consistently high income but a couple of years before retirement, I did some very detailed pre- and post-retirement budgets and started tracking all my expenses to have a better grasp of where my money was going and how much I would need in retirement. Now in my second year of full retirement, I still track all our expenses mainly to have a good idea of how much money I will need to withdraw in the following year. Most of our expenses are fixed except for travel so my spreadsheet serves mainly as a reminder of what large bill is coming up.

[AMandM]

To me the chief benefit of budgeting is to make sure that we have enough set aside for nonroutine expenses, both the big, infrequent ones like reroofing the house or replacing the car and the smaller, more frequent ones like replacing an appliance or the tires on the car. I don't want the money earmarked for that to go into investments, so budgeting tells me how much to put into the savings account for those items.

[Sandi_k]

We do well with the month-to-month costs, and we do have a written "spending plan" that captures most of our irregular spending - such as 2x yearly property tax payments, or AAA/Costco renewals, car tags, or 2x yearly palm tree pruning.

We have not yet nailed down vacation saving/spending to my satisfaction. Same with holidays - we typically host a houseful of guests for Christmas week, which means a huge spike in heating and food costs. Our anniversary is in November, and it's the one time I just...say yes to whatever comes across the transom. I don't want to penny pinch on our anniversary trip.

Our major tools are automating deductions from paychecks, and setting up "cash flow" savings accounts that are named: for escrow deposits, for car maintenance and registration, for vacations, and for emergency funds.

Another important habit: I estimate our federal and state tax burdens on January 1 (when premiums for insurance change) and August 1 (when my income changes due to the annual merit increase) and adjust withholding appropriately. Since we've been on the Roth conversion journey with DH's SEP-IRA, those estimates and W-2 withholding has been even more critical.

So - do we budget? I will never be a YNAB user, as DH just won't log spending. And I don't want to be the money nag. So I am much happier being the "spending plan" maven instead, and adjusting as needed through reductions in some spending, and pre-saving via automation.

[Tempname23]

Married 40 years, we never had a budget. I tried to get a ballpark of spending before we retired. We both are just frugal and that allowed us to FIRE without having to decide exactly where our money flowed while getting there.

[BoonDogle]

Have budgeted and tracked spending as long as I can remember.  Probably will do it for life, doesn't take much time and I enjoy it.  Plus it is interesting to see how much spending levels have changed over the years with 4 kids (newborns, then toddlers, then teenagers, then college students).  Now trying to project what it will look like as empty nesters at some point.

I use excel and have most everything tied to our checkbook register, which we update in excel.  Pivot table summarizes by category and month and updates the budget/spending tab.  Time commitment is probably 10 minutes updating the checkbook register each month.  Everything else is automated.

[Retire-Canada]

Did anyone ever "stop" tracking or budgeting?

I never tracked my spending. I tracked my savings. As long as I was on track for my annual savings goals I didn't care what I specifically was spending my $$ on.

If things got off track I would have tracked my spending long enough to identify the issue and correct it, but so far that has not happened.

[CoffeeR]

We used to track spending. Cash expenditures, balanced credit cards, etc. All purchases into categories, and so on. Pretty comprehensive and detailed. Now we no longer do. Bottom line, it informed our spending, but it did not change our spending. Not frugal, but always less than income.

I still do track (what I call) our cash flow. What $$$ amount is going out month to month. I track these expenses on a spreadsheet to give me an overview of what we need to live our life. My major cash flow "expenses" currently tracked month-to-month are 1) ATM cash withdrawals, 2) CC balances paid, 3) taxes of all sort, 4) insurance costs (auto, home, health) and 5) utilities. These are (almost all of) the expenses flowing out of my bank checking account. Some of these are "lumpy" like yearly property taxes, but over the course of a year I get a good sense of what our life costs. We do have other expenses like charity and college, but those have dedicated accounts (DAF & ESA).

[Affable Bear]

I am exactly the same!

 

We used to track spending. Cash expenditures, balanced credit cards, etc. All purchases into categories, and so on. Pretty comprehensive and detailed. Now we no longer do. Bottom line, it informed our spending, but it did not change our spending. Not frugal, but always less than income.

I still do track (what I call) our cash flow. What $$$ amount is going out month to month. I track these expenses on a spreadsheet to give me an overview of what we need to live our life. My major cash flow "expenses" currently tracked month-to-month are 1) ATM cash withdrawals, 2) CC balances paid, 3) taxes of all sort, 4) insurance costs (auto, home, health) and 5) utilities. These are (almost all of) the expenses flowing out of my bank checking account. Some of these are "lumpy" like yearly property taxes, but over the course of a year I get a good sense of what our life costs. We do have other expenses like charity and college, but those have dedicated accounts (DAF & ESA).

I have a spreadsheet listing the core regular expenses and out of that I budget a set amount into 3 categories and bank accounts. I have one account for incoming money and outgoing regular bills, one for luxury spending & food shop and one for emergency fund/large one off purchases (I top back up from investments).

This way I see all the individual regular outgoings (and try to get better deals) and work within the budget of the other categories without having to complete a detailed budget every month. I tend to consider my luxury account as my real take home money and everything else separate and I find this helps me fight temptation for making large or impulsive purchases, especially as I have to reduce my investments to rebuild my emergency fund and psychologically it’s a big barrier for me.

[LightStache]

Nope! Even after following MMM for seven years I still tend to overspend.

Travel and restaurants tend to be my budget killers so I have to keep an eye on them to feel the pain.

In my HCOL I feel like I'm really scrimping at $72K/yr spend so I often wonder if I'm just not cut out for Mustachian life.

[sam123]

I've been using Quicken to track savings and expenditures for decades, but I've never mastered budgeting.  The parts that are key for me:
- automatic DAILY downloads from all credit card accounts
- automatic DAILY downloads from all bank accounts
- automatic DAILY downloads from all investment accounts

I honestly cannot remember where I spend all my money if I wait a month or even a week.  Even when I download transactions daily, I sometimes think "Did I go to Trader Joe's today?"  So it helps a lot with fraud prevention and making sure I am conscious of spending.

Bluehouse, I was wondering if you could explain how you do this?

I also don't always keep up to date with financial news.  One day last year my net worth jumped up by 100K overnight.  Turns out that TSLA stock split, and I had no idea that was coming!  Of course, it went back down the next day when the price caught up with my holdings, but it was a good exercise for me. 

Quicken has also greatly improved their reports over the past 5 years, and they now have crosstab reports that can show categories by month, which is practically a budget...just after the fact. 

So basically, I just push a button every day or every few days, review all new transactions, then I'm done for the day and comfortable that i'm on top of my spending, my financial security, and my future goals.

[BlueHouse]

I've been using Quicken to track savings and expenditures for decades, but I've never mastered budgeting.  The parts that are key for me:
- automatic DAILY downloads from all credit card accounts
- automatic DAILY downloads from all bank accounts
- automatic DAILY downloads from all investment accounts

I honestly cannot remember where I spend all my money if I wait a month or even a week.  Even when I download transactions daily, I sometimes think "Did I go to Trader Joe's today?"  So it helps a lot with fraud prevention and making sure I am conscious of spending.

Bluehouse, I was wondering if you could explain how you do this?

Sure.   I have Quicken installed on my computer (I use the Mac version, and I used to use the Windows version, so I know they both work).
I set up accounts (bank accounts, credit card accounts, investment accounts) and set them for  Quicken Direct Connect - meaning I enter my logon info for each bank account, credit account, etc during set up once, and it's stored in a Quicken passcode box so when I open quicken each day, I only have to enter my Quicken password.  Then each of my accounts can download directly into Quicken. 
Accounts are set up similar to T-accounts, so when my Amex card has a payment applied, the amex account shows a credit of $500 and my checking account shows a debit of $500.  Then when I download, each of those accounts downloads the transactions and automatically matches each of the entries and sets the status to "match". 
I don't bother hand-entering each credit card transaction, I allow the direct connect feature to download them all.  The status is "downloaded" because there's nothing to match.  But I review each entry and mark it as "reviewed".  When a new transaction is downloaded, it has a blue dot next to it until you mark it as "reviewed". 
I think Mint might be similar, but I like doing it on my computer. 
It's been a lifesaver for me.