I’ve always tracked spending by moving money around when necessary, but now that my partner and I are saving for a home and using a joint CC for expenses to build credit, I’m finding it harder to keep track. I pay off purchases immediately, but the posting/processing delay causes confusion, and I’m unsure who made certain purchases. I want to improve tracking, especially to boost savings for our home.
I record credit card expenses when I make the purchase, same as if it were a debit card. So instead of logging into your bank account and seeing you spent $30 at target yesterday, you would log into the credit card account and see that you spent $30 at target yesterday. Then record it in your budget the same way as usual.
You don’t need to clear the balance of each transaction as you make them, that’s just making it more complicated than it needs to be. Just pay the entire bill once a month before the due date.
So you make a separate note of your spending rather than looking at the records?
I look at the credit card records, then add it to my budget spreadsheet which totals up my monthly spending in each category
ok, that makes sense. So you add it directly when you spend it, so you know which ones are yours. it sounds like a lot of extra attention, but probably you get used to it after a while.
what do you use for your spreadsheet? google sheets/excel/something else?
My credit card (American Express) actually shows our names on each transaction, so even if I don’t add it right away it’s easy to identify who spent what.
I do try to add it right away though because otherwise they pile up at it take longer, or I forget what the charge was for and I have to look for the receipt. I use google sheets because it lets both of us add in expenses from our own devices.
Oh that’s really helpful. I wish ours did that! nice!
Yeah, it even gives us a summary of “spending by card member” so we can see the total we’ve each spent during the current billing cycle. The PDF statements also list out the charges in two lists, one for me and one for my partner. We also have individual credit cards for personal or “fun” spending; and we use the joint card for bills/shared expenses. Then we just each pay our own cards and half of the joint credit card bill.
I thought we didn’t have it at all, but I just realized I can ‘open’ each transaction and see the last 4 numbers (each physical card has a different number). And the PDF statements DO actually have this info too! Ah, great, ok - that makes a big difference haha.