Love & Wisdom

How much do you spend?

6 techniques to help you manage and monitor cash flow

By Matt Camrud, CFP, Lead Advisor at Brighton Jones July 29, 2015

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This post is sponsored.

Sponsored by Brighton Jones Wealth Management & Financial Advisory

Have you ever tracked your workouts when working toward a fitness goal? Or written down everything you ate to embark on a weight-loss program?  Most experts agree that in order to improve, we must first track and measure whatever it is we’re trying to improve upon. The same is true when it comes to spending. Whether you’re retired and need to ensure you’re not outspending your portfolio, or still working and want to ramp up your savings, the ability to understand your cash flow is essential knowledge.

So how is one supposed to do this? There are many methods, all with varying levels of detail. For some, simply evaluating the total dollars spent in any given year is all they need, and that is where we usually begin with our clients. For others, understanding specific spending patterns sorted by multiple sub-categories is required.

“Portfolio Paycheck”
If you’re primarily interested in answering “How much do I spend?” versus “What do I spend my money on?” this is the best method. The graphic below illustrates the flow of this approach:

The beauty of this lies in its simplicity. At the end of the year, sum up the total withdrawals from the brokerage account, and you have your total spend for the year. As long as your brokerage account serves as the exclusive conduit for your cash needs, it’s foolproof. This method won’t give you the specifics of your spending but for many it’s enough to know what their total spend is.  If you want to better understand the specifics of your spend, try one of these applications:

Excel – Microsoft Excel has a number of free budget templates to help people better categorize income and expenses and track results.  Although this option requires a substantial time commitment, you’ll get a clear sense for where your money is going, which categories comprise the lion’s share of your spending, and what your net cash flow looks like at the end of the year.

Although Excel is a powerful tool (and used by this article’s author!), there are a whole host of desktop and web-based apps for those who want to leverage technology to track their spending. Here are just a handful of available options:

Quicken – This desktop-based solution has been around for many years and is still one of the best budgeting tools around. It helps you categorize your spending, track bills and set financial goals.

Mint.com – A free, web-based solution has many of the same features as Quicken (it’s actually owned by Intuit, Quicken’s parent company), but also aggregates all of your assets/liabilities into user-friendly reports and graphs. The downside of Mint.com is the same as most “free” services – they make revenue in other ways by providing targeted advertising and service offerings based on your data.

Level Money – A “spending meter” app that, on the first of each month loads your estimated income (based on your previous history) and then subtracts your fixed costs. What’s left shows up as money that can be spent. The founders wanted something “that was the digital equivalent of opening up your wallet and seeing how much you have left.” Currently available to iOS users, coming soon for Android.

You Need a Budget – Both a desktop application and a phone app with a “give every dollar a job” approach. This app is good for those who are OK with manual entry and don’t mind going over their spending every week.  Those who use it are almost evangelical in their praise. It’s free for 34 days and then costs $60.

These are just a handful of the many methods available to those who want to understand their cash flow. Whether you choose the “portfolio paycheck” method or embrace some of the technology outlined above, you will benefit from both the process and the results your diligence helps reveal.

 

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