Personal Finance; Tracking your income

Have you ever wondered what happen to the 60 dollars of cash you withdrew from bank two days ago. Where did all that money go? If you are careless about how much money you spend and 60 dollars is a drop in your paycheck then you probably don’t care about where those 60 dollars went. But for most Americans in this recession times, it is very important to save every penny you can and for them 60 dollars is a lot of money. As most research consumer report suggested, Americans are becoming more eager at saving money today and waiting for that big deal. The 70% off coupon for JC Pennys…

For an average American it is always a great thing to keep track of you spendings not only during troubled economies but all time. Take the initiative to balance your check books and stay on top of your money spendings. The key in learning personal finance is once you have a good track on expenditure, you can see in front of you what exactly caused the expense. Not only that, having the knowledge of expense will alert you where you need to cut down on spendings and where you need to control yourself. For example if you have a big portion of your spending allocated to eating out or paying for fast food restaurants and you want to reduce your spendings, this knowing of your spendings at fast food places will provide you the urge to avoid yourself from eating out and finding other alternatives such as cooking.

Analyzing the behavior of humans in finance, people tend to spend more and more on ‘not-necessary for survival’ items assuming they still have large portion of money left in their bank account. The fact that you still have lot of money left after you spend on that item is the motivation that kept humans from spending on such items. Remember you are assuming you will have more money left after you spend, but sooner or later people realize they were wrong. And the surprising discovery of very smaller amount of money left than they expected. Keeping track of personal spending will allow you to know your bank balances all time, and will tell you when to stop spending and when you need to stop spending.

To stay on top of your personal finance it is a must to keep track of your personal finances and organize your spending habits and have a good understanding of your finances. There are several personal finance products out there to assist you. Top of the list is quicken which is selling for $39.99 and up. Such programs are targeted at individuals new to personal finance and in a very generic program format to fit all. After reviewing quicken and finding out the rigid format and lack of customizable features, I have designed an excel based 100% customizable account balance spread sheet. I am planning on introducing my version of personal finance excel edition in the future along with next articles of personal finance educational blog posts. I hope you enjoyed todays insight of personal finance, please look forward to the next educational blog post.

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